Time for urgent action

Updated on: Monday, December 07, 2009

Is school education too boring and the curriculum obsolete? Are we educating children via the straightjacket approach of rote learning? These and many such questions may sound uncomfortable to principals and educationists, but at some level most acknowledge these unfortunate facts though many pay lip service to ‘politically correct’ replies.

After all, India has the world’s largest population of illiterate citizens - some 59 million children in the age group of six-14 are out of school, and the ones that come out into the working world are mostly unemployable because of the obsolete education system.
For Shyama Chona, former principal, DPS RK Puram, New Delhi, the challenge of putting education on the right track is staring us in the face and needs an urgent solution. “The drop-out rate of students in Indian schools shows that we as a system are failing, despite having important, well-balanced mega programmes like Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in place. Not always is the economic condition of a student (and the family) responsible for this. Each school student is made to read two to three books more than what is required of them at their age. This not just takes away the fun from education, but also makes students incapable of coping with the system,” she says.

India has almost a million schools, 90 per cent of them in the government sector. What the government should ideally do is to strengthen the existing infrastructure and upgrade faculty capacity — at the same time expanding the network.

Most educationists are now calling for a more practical approach to be taken on an urgent basis. “Today’s children want to know how a mobile phone works rather than what led to the origin of fire. The education of today must make kids capable of taking up challenges 20 years down the line. We are required to make students global citizens, and this will only happen when we take them out into the real world,” says Divya Punjabi, Head Education, Kangaroo Kids Education.

While the solutions to the existing quality gaps include application-based learning; better and humane examinations that help find a student’s real potential; moving away from unnecessary competition and giving children the freedom to be expressive and be what they are — the onus of the quality education revolution lies with teachers. “The first step towards this is when a teacher moves from the teaching mould to being a facilitator,” says Punjabi.
For Nitya Ramaswami, Head - Child Development & Academics, Zee Schools, the New Age requires a new paradigm, where facilitators need to study young brains and deliver to their needs (read life skills, value education, etc) the student way. “This will bring in a shift from children being mere receivers of knowledge to them being able to construct their own knowledge. Children are innately inquisitive and creative. The teaching in the classroom must harness this creativity and make them construct their own knowledge base,” Ramaswami says.

Education is an important investment in the nation’s future and educators, principals as well as the government must move -now!

Time for urgent action

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