DISRUPTION OF EDUCATION IN THE WORLD
YOUTH OF THIS GENERATION CAUGHT IN A WEB
ALL ARE QUESTIONS! NO EASY ANSWERS!
The unending lockdowns keep everyone, the kids, and parents indoors, and there doesn’t seem to be an early end to this continuing disruption and no light at the end of the tunnel.
Even the best of medical experts have no clear and definite answers to the many questions that pop up almost every day that dawns in so much tension and many anticipations.When will this bizarre state of affairs end and a way forward will dawn upon us?
Especially for India and the Indians of this generation, young and the not so young, who are kept out of the school gates and the University corridors for no fault of their own would again find their own way?
India has a very peculiar history, the British raj had given us, we the Indians who had lived through the long history of the Moghuls and the various other invaders and we have too long such brutal history. Though this is not the time to dwell on these past brutalities, violence and bloodshed.
The latest technologies and technical tools like computers and i-pad and other devices give us many visual pictures to see how India had come through the invasions and occupations and the famines and the brutal occupations, not the least by the last invaders, the very British occupation history has to be seen visually, the many well-preserved and well-arranged albums and archives are now luckily available and our children have to be exposed to this old India of poverty and famines and also the old remnants of the British Empire time photos would give us much more live scenarios.
These archives material must be extensively used to construct a more close and appealing or revolting sense of very actual scenes that constitute Indian history and of our own such miserable past.
Now, coming to the current miseries of Corona blight, we have to do many things, besides staying behind doors for the sake of driving out the current phenomenon of the deadly virus.
Now, there is one option of e-learning and the current experiments in e-learning alternatives. How many of us know that even today that every year Indians, students go to higher education to the UK, they are about 2lakhs and eleven thousand and 605 students, as per the latest available statistics.They pay about 2 billion pounds as fees, in the US the average the US fees is Rs. 50 plus dollars, for the UK it is about the same or even more.
We in India at the moment have a New Education Policy (NEP) which is not yet put out for implementation.The new government of the BJP or even such regional state governments like West Bengal or Tamil Nadu are unlikely to co-operate with the Centre. India is an old British colonial entity, there doesn’t seem to be another education reformer amongst us and also please remember that India, today is the largest.
Already the British educationists have devised new e-learning skills. Already, there are some new chains that run e-learningschools.One or two names are enough here. One is the famous Harrow School which is running an e-learning school, and of course there are many other schools, including the one run by the Pearson Group- PearsonOnline, Pearson has a share of 17 percent global market and hopes to tap the US market alone, a market worth 1.5 billion pounds in the US alone.
What we like to say for Indian education-entrepreneurs is that we should not fall into the trap of foreign education providers.
Indian educators must learn to innovate and also not forget the core values of pure and non-exploitative education. We have to raise the education quality of the Indian education market still further to make our entry into international rankings. Our educational thinking and policy-making are very poor.
The new education minister in Delhi is not speaking in English. This is a pity. There’s a dire need to build up such consensus shared policy.
There are very serious issues in upgrading the Indian universities. Let the HRD ministry constitute national-level experts, scientists, and thinkers. Let the new ideas flower.As one expert says for a world-class university is that there must be sustainable original thinking and innovations coming out of any big university. And the big test we have to apply and we have to interact with the best universities.