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Deteriorating quality education in schools

Deteriorating quality education in schools
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In many schools, where there are so many students of different talents from a range of backgrounds seeking to be cookie-cut into what is called social standards

Shahid Amin

Quality of education has been a major cause of concern for some years now. One root for this instability is the findings of numerous recurring researches which showed that reading and writing abilities of school children are slipping to unprecedented levels. If you take emotions and personal experiences out of the equation systems, schools and teachers are accomplishing things in 21st century that are leaps and bounds ahead of what they were doing five decades back.

Improving education in my view seems to be a huge task but one that needs to be done. Training should be genuinely student-oriented to help students become the best they can be, helping them learn critical thinking skills, exploring their talents and abilities and not censoring them because for frivolous reasons they cannot pass arbitrary exams.

As examinations have become more prominent and are used to evaluate both schools and teachers, the teachers are required to teach the students to face examinations which don’t afford a lot of thought-divergence. Students must assimilate more knowledge, but that does not mean learning. It is one thing to have knowledge and another to know how to apply it in a variety of situations.

In many schools, where there are so many students of different talents from a range of backgrounds seeking to be cookie-cut into what is called social standards, the innate curiosity of talented students is not promoted. The aim of education would be to contribute to self-discipline, so people can empower themselves to continue moving regardless of the situation. Education system should not break down into so many substandard units, which can create a plethora of issues.

In earlier times, Education was a passion but today it has become a profession only. Passion and Profession can live together only if they strengthen each other but when preference and priority are given to profession only then passion can leave forever and only calamitous profession remains.

Only professionalism cannot give what passion can give, particularly in education because education is not only a profession but indeed a responsibility that has to be fulfilled accordingly to boost the moral and technical immune of generation otherwise drastic consequences in future, can be imagined easily.

Before going to future, lousy outcomes are apparent in the present as well wherein we can see more papers, more schools but less education. Well, emphasis is put on increasing this business with quantity not consistency. To put it another way, you see more and more schools but less and less education.

The inability of schooling system to improve infrastructure despite the massive increase in enrolment rates has become a major issue which government has been unable to tackle. Critics have heaped scorn on government policies pointing out the liberal funding for innovative programs like the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (SSA) have not helped matters.

Some blame the deteriorating standards on new education policies like unhindered move of children from one class to another with no fear of detention of lousy academic performance. Second, the fact that communities and economies are so quickly evolving may be the case that what the schools are accomplishing is not keeping up with increasing standards. The rate at which we wish schools to improve is outstripping the pace at which they are progressing.

Another contributor to lack of access to quality education is the scarcity of wholesome learning opportunities within educational institutions. A wholesome learning environment consists of learning tools and amenities which could include libraries, playgrounds, well-lit classrooms, study halls, internet-enabled computers, provision of clean drinking water and hygienic toilets, proper ventilation and cooling, and noise-free, filth-free settings. Most educational institutions including higher education institutions, compromise in one way or the other on at least one of these factors.

Over the decades, teachers’ abilities and competence have also declined. Teachers today are not selected from the top ranks of the most ranked university graduates, but from the lower parts of distribution. The institutional strength of teacher education is also abysmally poor because governments increasingly rely on para-teachers and contract teachers to the detriment of institutional change and learning by state education departments and the enhancement of teacher cadres’ competences.

Because of these realities, teaching is mostly a one-way process dictated by the teacher who is incentivized to make sure that the student does well in examinations designed to measure a very narrow bandwidth of learning. Teaching is not open-ended and discursive, but linear and instructive.

Shortage of subject teachers is also one of the key reasons for poor quality of education there is not only a need for teachers, but particularly for subject specific teachers with a certain level of command over their respective subject areas. As per the RTE norm, every upper primary school should have at least one teacher each for science and mathematics, social studies, and language.

However, data on subject-specific teachers presents a picture of imbalances within an overall shortage. There is constant criticism of teachers’ performance in government schools. The grouse is that, despite paying high salaries to teachers, students are not performing well in examinations since a majority of teachers are not competent enough to teach effectively.

Indeed, teaching is a demanding and constantly evolving profession. The skill building of teachers is also crucial for professional teaching at frequent intervals. Both Union and State governments established teacher training schemes, but the effectiveness of these schemes is still not meeting the expectations as CRCs (Cluster Resource Centers), BRCs (Block Resource Centers) and DIET( District Institutes of Educational Training) have not effectively equipped educators with instrumental instructions to allow teachers to follow a student-centered teaching style.

In the last few years, an increase in enrolments at the elementary level has resulted in considerable expansion in the number of secondary schools, as well as enrolments at the secondary level. This has created a demand for a strong cadre of teachers. But, the problem of teacher shortage has also been observed more acute at the secondary level.

Nonetheless, there are also other limitations in this quality education, especially with regard to the methodology, data, and there are many other factors are thought to affect the quality of education for the public junior secondary schools level. For example, the parent’s education level, gender of students, location of home to school distance, geographic and other dimensions

We will have to change our education system urgently to meet the new generation’s aspirational needs, to ensure that demographic dividends remain their asset. We will also need to ensure that a proper learning ecosystem is available across the length and breadth for desired learning outcomes to be achieved.

It is important to take up the challenge of improving teaching quality by training teachers and supporting them with modern teaching aids, resources and methodologies like smart classrooms and digital course material, so that teachers take pride in their work.


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