Coaching: Boon or Bane???

The mushrooming of coaching centers all over the cities big or small, metros or districts highlight the growing trend of students opting for coaching classes apart from the regular curriculum. Once upon a time coaching was a rare phenomenon, generally unheard of and only taken by those who were weak in their studies. But now it is a way of life for students, aggressively promoted by the teachers and too some extent by the parents also. But does coaching really help in scoring good marks in school or in competitive examinations? Is it advisable for the school students to opt for coaching? When is the right time to join coaching? Does it take away time of self-study and make student dependent on coaching centre? Or does it give your career the right boost and direction? These are some of the questions which every student and their parents face. The craze for coaching has led to opening of coaching centre in every bylane of Delhi selling dreams of guaranteed success. One can see the newspapers, magazines or roads filled with advertisements like you can 'learn English in 30 days' or 'score 90% in Boards with our guidence' or 'clear PMT/IIT with our two year package'. More and more students are flocking these centers as an alternative or supplement to school teaching. Many experts believe that education is a natural process of learning. For the regular and attentive students coaching is not really required till class twelth.

Mushrooming coaching centers,However for professional courses like entrance examinations of CPMT and IIT professional guidance is required in today's competitive world. A student has no background and idea of the examination he is appearing for. He or she needs proper study material and guidelines on the important topics, exam patterns, and short-cut methods of solving numerical and analytical questions. It is here when the coaching centers play an important role in helping students. They plan each topic methodically and time schedules to complete the modules. The students feel that the tutors know what the important and less important topics are. The minute details like the sections of question paper that need to be solved first are explained by these teachers. The coaching classes also help students prepare for interviews and face group discussions. For those who cannot attend regular classes, correspondence coaching is helpful. They are relatively cheaper also as they charge one fifth of the regular courses. The students can benefit from the study material and model papers that are sent to them regularly. There are a number of factors that need to be taken into consideration before selecting a coaching centre. The quality, experience and expertise of the teachers should be the top priority. One should also talk to other students before taking admission. The standard of coaching can best be analyzed by the success rate and academic performance of the students studying there. Whether to join a coaching or not is an individual's decision. If a student is sincere and hardworking with good grasping power he or she can prepare for competitive exams even at home. But if professional help is required then select the coaching centre which offers the best options.

India has exam system, not education system...!!!

In the thick of the entrance exam season, a furious dispatch to the Prime Minister from his own scientific adviser has termed such tests as one big menace.

Strongly recommending an immediate halt to the system of sitting for a pile of exams, C N R Rao, who heads the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (SACPM), said in a letter sent last week that the American method of holding one national exam before joining university is the way.

Putting it bluntly, Rao told the PM that India is said to "have an examination system but not an education system... When will young people stop taking exams and do something worthwhile?"

Referring to the exam overdrive, Rao briefed Manmohan Singh on the various flavours of examinations that dot a student's life: "It is important to relook the entire examination system including the system of final examinations, entrance examinations, qualifying examinations, selection examinations, and so on. Now one hears of a proposal to have a qualifying or accreditation examination for medical graduates and post-graduates."

Students who groan under the pressure of multiple entrance exams will cheer this advice. Citing the example of Joint Entrance Examination conducted by IIT, he said: "IIT entrance exams have the reputation of being difficult and purposeful, but they have also had a negative effect on young minds. Young people suffer so much to succeed in these entrance exams, and in the process lose excitement in education itself."

The lakhs who don't make it across the IIT gates, Rao told the PM, get exhausted and can't perform as well as young people with fresh minds.

Talking about the agony that the Indian higher education sector is in, the SACPM, in a brief document sent to the PM recently — accessed by TOI — noted, "Today there is not a single educational institution in India which is equal to the best institution in the advanced countries".

In view of the growing number of aspirants for higher education, the SACPM has readied a 10-point checklist of key problems and challenges. It has asked the human resources development ministry to set up a taskforce to come up with an action-oriented document within a year.

"We should seriously consider a possible scenario wherein the young India advantage enables India to emerge as the provider of trained manpower for the entire world in the next 20-30 years. This could be a worthwhile national objective," he told the PM.

Rao's checklist for higher education include:

Raising the bar: Provide all required support to 10 educational institutions to enable them to compete with the best in advanced countries

Look ahead: There's a manpower mismatch in many countries with too many professionals in some subjects. Prepare a vision document which foresees the problems 20 years hence

Inclusivity: Increase the number of fully residential schools up to higher secondary level in rural India to nurture rural talent.

what ails India's education system...!!!

Amartya Sen is man of many parts -- Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, honorary doctorates from major universities across the world, and author of books including The Argumentative Indian (2005), and Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2006) besides research in philosophy, welfare economics and the economics of peace and war.

He is the recipient of many awards including "Bharat Ratna" and Nobel Prize in economics. He will be speaking at the Nasscom Summit 2007 in Mumbai  on February 7. In an email interview with Leslie D'monte, he explains why he's not satisfied with the current state of India  education. Here are the excerpts:
What positives do you see in today's Indian education system?
Positives? First, our higher education system is widespread, and while the quality of it is very mixed, there are still a lot of people getting reasonable higher education.
Second, in some fields, especially in technical education, the quality of what is offered is indeed fairly high. Against these "positives" stand the huge neglect of primary education and also secondary education, and of course - as already mentioned - the highly variable
quality of university education (some of it not worthy of that name).
What are the major pitfalls?
The pitfalls of illiteracy include functional handicap, intellectual deprivation, and social disadvantage. When large groups are systematically neglected, like girls, especially from economic and social underdog families, the social penalties are gigantic.
Is technology is gradually helping in taking education to the masses?
The main causes of our uneven and highly unequal educational system are not technological underdevelopment but political and social neglect.
It is, of course, important for those who are masters of contemporary technology to take deep interest in removing the educational neglects that plague the country, but they have to look for the diverse ways and means of helping, rather than sticking only to their identities as "high technologists"!
Any sector that become as rapidly - and as convincingly - prosperous owes something to the rest of the society as well, but that is not the same thing as looking only to technology to solve all problems.
Technology can certainly help the spreading of education, for example in making the schooling of maths easier and faster, and even in monitoring the attendance and accountability of teachers and of school officials (I remember Ramadorai of Tata Consultancy Services explaining to me the possibility of using smarter technology in that work), or in making communication of elementary maths easier, but it is not the lack of a
"technological magic bullet" that is holding everything up.
We need IIMs and IITs and we simultaneously need to provide for primary and secondary education. What steps should the government take to ensure that neither one is promoted at the expense of the other?
The main "step" to take is to get on with it! The government has to speed things up. However, the government is not the only agency involved. Not only more money is needed in schooling - not just through raising salaries of teachers and officials - but also better organisation of teaching and better practices (not minimal schooling with maximal private tuition!).
For this we need cooperation between many agencies: governments (at different levels), teachers' unions, parent-teacher committees, civil society in general.
We have gone into some of these issues in a few small reports of the Pratichi Trust - a small Trust that I was privileged to set up in 1999 with the help of my Nobel money, one in India and one in Bangladesh.
The Indian Trust is particularly involved in elementary schooling and elementary health care (the Bangladesh Pratichi Trust has tended to concentrate especially on gender equity, including the training of young women journalists from rural background).

Education System In India: Make A Living or Make A Life?

By Pallavi Murthy:
Yet again a teacher sent to jail for having slapped a child and yet again a student at IIT attempted a suicide! On one hand is a teacher who threw acid on a girl’s face because she rejected his marriage proposal while on the other hand is a student who falls in love with his teacher because he finds her ‘hot’. On one hand is a student who finds it hard to take the pressure of clearing the examinations while on the other hand a student fails in all his exams but still gets promoted and gets a first class degree because of donation and bribery. These have become an everyday news headline now. So who is to be blamed for all this- the Education system, the teachers, the parents or the children?
First let’s start with the basic meaning of education and its purpose. Education is the process of imparting knowledge. In simple words it involves two main processes i.e. teaching and learning. The main purpose of education is to develop knowledge, skill and the character of a person. It is process of passing information from one person (teacher) to the other (student). We know the basic law of heat transfer. It states that ‘in a system, heat always flows from hot body to the cold body’ to maintain an equilibrium in the system. The same thing goes with education, where the ‘system’  is the ‘society’ we live in, ‘heat’ is ‘knowledge’  and the ‘hot body’ is a person with ‘more knowledge’  and the ‘cold body’ is the person with ‘lesser knowledge’. The need for education is to maintain a balance or equilibrium in the society.

“The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his
Mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e.,
Conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to
be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be
Equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.”
-Ayn Rand

'Putting a Price Tag on the ‘Right to Education'

By Tripti Lahiri

According to a new estimate put out by a government spending accountability group, getting existing Indian government schools to meet education rules that came into effect last year could cost 152 billion rupees, or about $3.4 billion dollars.

And getting India to fully meet what that law mandates—free and compulsory education for all children between the ages six to 14—could cost well over triple that amount, or about $11 billion.

According to a report only 11% of government schools have the infrastructure they’re supposed to have under the new Right to Education Act.

Presently only 11% of government schools have the infrastructure they’re supposed to have under the new Right to Education Act, according to Accountability Initiative, which put out a report last week tracking a portion of educational spending that contained the estimate of complying with the law.

“We thought it was important to get to grips with what the implications of the Right to Education would be. If you just look at the norms, the [law] is quite focused on different infrastructure, facilities and other requirements in schools,” said Yamini Aiyar, director of the Accountability Initiative, in a recent interview.

The law, which was passed in 2009, sets standards for schools on teacher salaries, classroom size and facilities, which should include a head teacher’s room, a playground and a boundary wall, among other things.

The public spending audit group arrived at the 152-billion-rupee figure by working from answers to a questionnaire on whether schools were Right-to-Education compliant. This was part of a larger survey carried out in about 13,000 schools last year with Pratham, a child-focused nonprofit group that assesses children’s learning levels on an annual basis.

The group estimated the cost in each state for adding more teachers, or a playground, among other things, and multiplied that by the number of schools in each state that would need that work done.

The expense of adding a headmaster’s office (which doubles as a storage room) made for the largest share of the $3.4 billion cost. That was just over a third of the total, or about $1.2 billion dollars.

Teacher salaries (which would be a recurring expense, however) for additional staff to meet pupil-teacher ratios came to a quarter of the total, while walls and fencing would cost a little over fifth of the total.

However that costing exercise only took into account existing schools and existing enrollment. Absorbing about 2.2 million out-of-school students between the ages of 6 and 14 into new schools, could cost another 335 billion rupees ($7.4 billion).

The government hasn’t yet said how much it expects to have to shell out to properly implement the law, said Ms. Aiyar, but the group will be watching for that.

“It’s a good thing to have citizen-led costing,” said Ms. Aiyar, saying they could then compare actual government budgeting to these estimates, and see “whether they’re going to make the allocations to live up to the promise they themselves have made.”

Education Up For Sale???

India does not have an exemplary higher education system. Apart from a handful of (less than 12) colleges, there is no international recognition of Indian universities.

In 1997, the Government of India’s discussion paper on Government Subsidies in India had deemed higher and secondary education in India a “non-merit good”, while classifying elementary education as a “merit good”. As such, Government expenditure on higher education was to drop. This paved way for an unprecedented rise in the number of private colleges and universities. Jandhyala Tilak in his essay on privatization of education India points out that in 2001 the state of Andhra Pradesh had 95 private self-financing engineering colleges, compared to 11 government engineering colleges; and 303 self-financing medical colleges, compared to 25 government medical colleges. The situation in 2008 is very much the same and in some ways, worse.

Post economic liberalization, the country has also seen international universities setting up franchise centres across the country. Most of these centres offer market oriented courses, some of which are not even recognised in these colleges’ parent countries. Certain certificate and diploma courses offered in fashion and design etc. are just money-making mechanisms to lure Indian students, who already have an affinity toward the West, into taking these courses. Full-page advertisements in the newspapers; claiming to offer a free laptop and a trip to a foreign country are again amazing marketing strategies. And it is mostly second and third rate private institutions who are involved in this quick money making scheme, because the quality of education imparted isn’t exactly laudable.

The state governments have been lethargic in their attitude to impart quality education. Their only interest now seems to be to produce technically sound manpower for export. The rapid growth of private Engineering and Medical colleges has failed to produce high-quality scientific manpower; instead they have produced IT-masons, who in Chicago and California are referred to as ‘skilled laborers’ (implying specifically the Indian IT technician). In 1995, a Private Universities Bill was introduced in the Rajya Sabha; but remained unimplemented, simply because the private investors were unhappy with certain clauses in the Bill, the most significant ones requiring the formation of a permanent endowment fund of Rs.10 crores (about U.S.$2 million), provision of full scholarships to 30 percent of the students, and Government monitoring. The Government has since then, taken steps against the direction of privatization of higher education in the country. The title of a ‘ Deemed University ‘ given to certain private institutions is an example.

The desirability of privatization of higher education is apparent in the same arguments as that of liberalization of an economy. Funding of education is taken care of. Competition improves quality. Foreign investment is a necessity for the Indian economy in 2008. We know the arguments.

Now here is the catch.

Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), to which India is a signatory, provides that higher education shall be made equally accessible to every student on the basis of merit. Agreed, it is not possible for everyone to have access to higher education; but it should be available to every meritorious student. Now, India being a signatory to the UDHR, it is in the State’s interest to ensure that a meritorious student is not denied admission to a university, due to other considerations.

Has the state been able to ensure that? No, it hasn’t. Even the admission procedure of the IITs has been questioned under the Right to Information Act and failed to provide a credible answer earlier this year. That every year, students with enough money pay their way through the admissions into Government and Private Colleges is a known fact. Some private colleges are also quite open about it. In the light of such facts, is it constitutionally permissible to have a large sector of the higher education privatized?

The government colleges lack the facilities that private institutions have to offer. For more money, private institutions offer a global exposure. Both these things are essential in our age, without which a student’s higher education is well near being worthless. So is higher education only for a student who gets 67% in Class 12 board exams, but has 35 lakh Rupees to pay to the admission office of a private Medical college? Is it not in State’s interest to ensure some sort of quality control over all its universities? One sad fact is that the syllabus for the same subject and same course sometimes differs from state to state. The quality of teachers and the quality of education found in various universities differ drastically, even among different colleges within the same university. Over the years, library and laboratory grants given to colleges have not increased, even though the necessity for better lab equipments grows every year. Maintenance grants are inadequate; hostel facilities in Government colleges are non-existent. The colleges are left to raise their own funds. As such, after a certain number of meritorious students have been admitted, it becomes entirely in the college’s interest to ask for large sums of money from people who can pay.

The obvious legal implication of such limitation is a hike in fees. This in itself makes higher education that much more inaccessible to the common man. One argument that has been repeated time and time again is this: most people come to places of higher education regardless of their interest in studies; they do not attend classes; they are not interested, as education is almost free anyway; so, it does not make sense for the public exchequer to pay for these upper-middle and upper class students. The administration easily forgets the common man in all this: if there is an opportunity to make more profit, it should not be let to pass unexamined.

Privatization has brought in a lot more: interaction with the market and market oriented courses: a one-year diploma in Set/ Interior Design is more sought after today than a PhD in Sociology. This coupled with a reduced interest in modern Indian languages, in my opinion, defeats the purpose of the kind of education we have traditionally praised.

I have just pointed out a few of the pros and cons of the issue of privatization of higher education in India . It is just the tip of the iceberg. Is equality for those who can afford it? Recent ventures, like the much talked about, Times of India Teach India initiative look like steps into a brighter future for the education environment of our country. Much can be speculated now, much more remains to be seen.

Vipul Ralph Shah