And for a Friday, as Parents, Teachers and Educationalists grapple with school reopening, some thoughts..… some musings…..
All India numbers will be staggering.
One of the biggest casualties of the lingering pandemic is the education sector and its long term implications on India’s future into the next decades. A full year already lost and almost halfway into the next year, it’s now an emergency needing immediate attention. Politicians are finding easy Vote-catching, immediately popular ad-hoc solutions without any consideration of the long term grave harm to the future generations. Most States have enforced the No-Fail policy at the SSC (10th standard – most crucial cut off point in current school education). In Karnataka alone, 8.7 lakhs of students have been declared passed and are now looking for admission to PU colleges. The state has 5551 PU Colleges of which about 1200 are Govt. and 3500 unaided private colleges. The available colleges will be much smaller in other states. The real tragedy is parents are going to be swindled, particularly the lower middle class and poor, with huge admission fees and all sorts of nefarious agents and sleaze agents offering admissions in unknown colleges for currently the most popular course steam across the Country – Commerce with Computer Science.
The complex problems need immediate solutions at the school level. The raging controversy of opening and if so when and under what circumstances, we need to heed the advise of Experts like Anurag Behar CEO of Azim Premji Foundation and VC Azim Premji University who in the last few days has met more than 2000 teachers and Educationalists across India. His analysis and solutions are incisive, erudite and practical. The problem is huge. About 240 million school going children in India, of whom leaving about 15 mn very privileged students in the top schools of the cities with computer/ Digital support and well to do Parental guidance, may at best have had Digital on line education last year. Most of the rest particularly in Rural India and Govt and Corporation schools have suffered huge Learning Regression. A child promoted to 6th grade this year has not done 5th and may have forgotten most skills learnt in 4th class, particularly language and arithmetic. According to Anurag, systemic changes and coordinated planning is critical. Developing special teaching tools for Teachers, creating an enabling environment and training for Educationalists and recalibrating syllabus leading from primary to 10th class is crucial. Experts must be involved in Policy making.
Each one of us is a Parent, Grand Parent, Uncle or Aunt to a school going kid. Let us all participate in finding a solution for our future generations, the involved way, the transparent way, the SEEGOS way.