Primary education in Orissa: an op-ed in Samaja
May 12th, 2008
The op-ed writer, a retired school teacher, analyzes the problems and suggests the following steps to be taken immediately:
- Require that teachers in govt. primary school have a qualification of a Bachelors degree rather than the current requirement of a Matric + CT.
- Establish a model primary school (similar to Novodaya Vidyalayas) in each block.
- Teach English from the first grade.
- Have kindergarden class in each primary school and integrate playing with studying in this class and have attractive text books.
Entry Filed under: K-12
1 Writeup
1. R. K. Ghosh | May 13th, 2008 at 11:01 am
It is a good article. I agree with the author that primary education seems to be nobody’s baby. The basic reason seem to be there is no scope of political manoeuvres. Perhaps having ill-educated mass suits the political brinkmanship. The allocation of govt fund for primary education is abysmal. The teachers are not paid well, Their salaries are not even comparable to the clerks in govt offices. There is no regulatory body like UGC or AICTE, etc to primary education. Of course it a different matter that UGC and AICTE had not been entirely successful. In fact, sometime back, the knowledge commission recommended scrapping of AICTE. But the point is: at least there is some amount of thinking about standardization of technical and higher education, whereas there is none about primary education. The points raised by the author of the article indeed require urgent attention to prepare a foundation for global competitiveness in education system. China has realized this long back. From the visuals which we get from China even in a devastated Sichuan province, I believe India has already lost out to China in terms of capabilities of its knowledge bank.