We welcome the educators and friends from far and wide!
Readers would have found in the last few months once again we are reaching out to friends and educators from far and wide.
There are now more features and more coverage of schools and education from across the country as well from across the seas from the shores of other countries.
New ideas and new insights we can get by reaching out to such newer destinations.
Education is now becoming more and more international in character; there are more comparisons and international assessments.
This would do much good for Indian education, both the secondary education as well as the higher education. The CBSE, it is reported, is introducing the open-book exam system and this is most welcome. To a large extent this would discourage the current formula of mugging up the texts and also reproducing prepared texts by a variety of means.
In some regions in various states, there is this exam culture that kills students, literally. In the South, in a town called Namakkal, there are reports just recently a series of mishaps, suicides by young students who couldn’t stand the pressure mounted by over-zealous school owners who had made a reputation for producing what is called centum results.
The disease had reached such a stage that in the small town of Namakkal there is rush of parents, often grandparents who come and stay with the students for the time they finish the final school exams. The town becomes empty once the schools declare holidays!
The formula is that the schools promise success in the various exams, be it exams to enter the medical colleges, engineering colleges or whatever the parents want.
So, the fees are so high, one admission could fetch the schools something like a few lakhs of rupees. So, the students for the most time don’t have any relaxation, they are pushed to the extremes and some of the below “average” students are even said to have been withdrawn from the regular classes so that the school always gets the centum results.
The whole system is so corrupt from the bottom to the top. It is alleged that in the various corrupt practices there is of course the mass copying and even it is said the school dept’s functionaries are “investors” in these schools!
The tragedy is that the schools, the parents, the offficialdom, the very educator community are all silent spectators and no one has any urge to burst this bad history of the mugging up syndrome in imparting education to the young minds.
Education in India is what is given officially by the government of the day.
There are no innovations, no experiments, no experimental schools, and no new innovative educational practices.
This is a sign f any underdeveloped country and society. After all education are all creativity and imagination and a quest for the ideals and ideas.
Where are the bold educators?
We need every educator to contribute to the enrichment of education practices. In Europe we had visited so many such experimental schools and innovative schools. The great Public Schools of England are justly famous. Of course it was once. We don’t know the present status.
We had visited so many famed French Lycees, Lycees in Switzerland also some of the experimental schools in these countries. Each great European country, including Germany has a distinctive flavour so to say to its education system.
Seen in this perspective, that is India’s contribution to the education system now we are practising?
We don’t have many old style Pathasalas. We have all become lately just initaitve, mechanical what the British had handed over to us as schools and education systems. The new innovations are very few and far between.
We are of course now getting some of the well-endowed good secondary schools, some famous innovative experiments, some International Baccaulearte schools. Let us hope that in the midst of economic prosperity we see in these high-fee charging schools some genuine flowering of new ideas and a humane and refined culture of the country are brought to the fore.
The point is that we have to have also some of the progressive features. The latest schools report from the HRD ministry shows that in expansion of education facilities, access to education, we have been doing well. Lakshadweep, Puducherry and after these two tiny enclaves, comes Tamil Nadu as the most educationally well-developed in terms of all the indicators in the education development index.
This is very heartening. Karnataka comes fifth and so on. We want to invite more schools from across the country to come and join us in making the education debate an on-going affair. We wish the readers, the school authorities, our very generous patrons and supporters a happy new year.
Jai Hind.