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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Quality primary education

Quality primary education

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published Published on Nov 3, 2009   modified Modified on Nov 3, 2009

Privatisation is no panacea when it comes to education. Nor can high-cost intervention at the tertiary stage produce quality talent. The back-bone of quality education is primary schooling. And improving that is not just a question of funding, even if the government does muster courage to raise expenditure on education from the present about 3% of GDP to the promised 6% of GDP. Granted, the UPA did raise this ratio from the level of 2.74% in 2003-04.

And it did take significant steps to strengthen elementary education through the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and also made elementary education a fundamental right of every child. But it has done precious little to increase the efficacy of public spending in education. For, that is a political and administrative task, rather than an exercise in budgetary allocation that can be managed in a Union ministry. Teachers who do not turn up to teach at rural schools (absenteeism is about 30%, according to one estimate) and teachers who are not equipped or motivated to teach but continue in service without challenge are part of India’s socio-political reality. This needs to change.

But such a change calls for decentralisation of administration, empowerment of people at every level and, as some expert committees have recommended, abolition of state-wide teaching cadres in favour of direct appointment to individual schools from which no transfer is possible. But that calls for political courage not just to take on powerful teachers’ unions but to reform the entire system of centralised bureaucracy, of which teachers are an integral part.

Socio-economic status has a huge bearing on how much of nutrition and mental stimulation a child receives in its most important growth phase of up to two years of age. Intervention at this stage is key to ensure that by the time children from deprived backgrounds make it to school, they are not already at a disadvantage vis-a-vis children from privileged homes. Girls drop out en masse post-puberty when schools don’t have toilet facilities. Children perform poorly in tests when made aware of their caste inferiority. Reforming education is as much a cultural and political challenge as one of finding the needed material and human resources.


The Economic Times, 3 NOvember, 2009, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/editorial/Quality-primary-education/articleshow/5191140.cms
 

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