Critical mass in Indian education

– J.S. Rajput is a former director of NCERT and NCTE A NEW GOVERNMENT will be sworn into office in New Delhi by mid-May after an aggregate sum of Rs.30,000 crore will have been spent — according to a study of the Centre for Media Studies, Delhi — by an estimated 10,000 candidates in the electoral fray for 543 seats in the Lok Sabha. And with a general consensus having emerged that mending and upgrading the early childhood primary, secondary and higher education systems is a top national priority, one hopes the new government at the Centre will provide urgently needed additional resources in terms of teachers, money and materials to take India’s schools, colleges and universities to globally comparable levels. One of the root causes of the dysfunctionality of the K-12 education system in India is that teacher recruitment is a total mess, especially in government schools. Most state governments prefer to appoint ‘para teachers’, paying pittances as honoraria. This malady has spread to higher education where even Central government institutions suffer 40-60 percent faculty shortages and make do with guest lecturers paid on a per lecture basis. This is happening because the Sixth Pay Commission has decreed sky-high remuneration which is becoming increasingly unaffordable for government schools and higher education institutions.  In my considered opinion, India’s cognitive capital could multiply four-fold if our schools attain globally comparable learning outcomes. It’s shocking how a nation of 1.27 billion continues to ignore the education of 75 percent of its youth and stoically suffers huge annual GDP losses. Clearly, this situation is untenable. The new government must urgently bring out a document like Challenges in Education prepared in 1985, and paint an honest picture of Indian education highlighting lacunae and deficiencies. It should be followed by a pragmatic, visionary and futuristic New Policy on Education (NPE) 2014. NPE 2014 must focus on meeting the manpower requirements of the industry, agriculture and service sectors in close collaboration with the corporate sector. However, such transformation of the economic profile of the nation necessitates a drastic change in the school education system. Its structure, content and processes will have to become flexible and skills education — vocational education and training (VET) — will need to be given equal priority with textbook learning. Academic education supplemented with skills acquisition could also be utilised for inculcating moral, ethical and humanistic values in school students — currently a grave lacuna. In China and Korea, rigorous academic education supplemented with VET on a massive scale, has ramped up their annual rates of GDP growth. It’s a myth that skills acquisition is inimical to intellectual growth. On the contrary, VET stimulates it. Against this background, the first challenge is to restore the credibility of the country’s 1.20 million government schools. This will relieve the pressure on private schools, which although number less than 10 percent, cater to around 33 percent of all K-12 students. Two significant policy initiatives are required in this context. First, the promise made by every…