Mushtaq Bhat
Education is not a commodity, but both a public right and a social process. Education means to discover new things about which we don’t know and increase our knowledge. An educated person has the ability to differentiate between right and wrong or good and evil.
A sound education system is the foundation of sustained growth of a country. The knowledge that is attained through education helps open doors to a lot of opportunities. It is the foremost duty of a society to educate the citizens. However, qualitative development of education in India is deteriorating with each passing day.
The lack of attention by our political class towards quality education is an important factor and a matter of grave concern and on the other hand the common people must demand for it.
Creating more schools is not going to solve the crisis of education in India. Education system of India is failing because of more intrinsic reasons. It has been observed and practiced in whole India where students are given only choice of succeeding in exams irrespective of their personal abilities, interests.
The problem that our children are taught in class are the ones that they will never actually face in the real world. Thus, the formal system of education gives absolutely no training about life, but does give us a lot of knowledge about things that we will never have to deal with. Educationists who have to play a vital role in uplifting the standard of quality education are greatly responsible for its deterioration.
Infact we are lacking quality educationists, what will a person with poor educational background, having least knowledge and experience do while imparting an education in the classroom. Most of the teachers nowadays are more interested in making money than imparting knowledge.
Teachers are claiming that they are producing scientists, doctors etc. and on its contrary they are forgetting that a hair dresser, shoemaker is also their product. It is impossible to provide quality education to the students until and unless teachers will not get awareness of their role and responsibilities.
Another reason for deterioration is curriculum in our schools which should be designed keeping in mind the development of the minds of the kids with latest technology and a lot can be done to revolutionize formal education.
However, there should be a more limited core curriculum which includes knowledge, skills, practices and values of the associated capabilities and competencies which will enable our students to lead meaningful and productive lives and will enhance their learning levels.
The national policy on education 1986 and the programmed Action of 1992 emphasized that minimum level of learning should be laid down and children’s learning should periodically be assessed. All this is possible with a smart and limited core curriculum.
Pertinently, another major reason for deterioration of quality education is due to incompetent and lack of integrity of management by most of our administrators. Funds provided were not being used optimally or misappropriation of public funds does happen. Lack of accountability and monitoring system from their part is also a main reason in deterioration of education system in India. Ironically, to impress Bill Clinton during his visit to Luknow a convent school student was reportedly made to sit in a Government Primary School.
We couldn’t deny the fact that there is a great role of our parents in this deterioration. The moment a child born in India, his/her fate is decided and sealed. There is a joke that is doing the rounds about Indian fathers, who tell their sons that: “Beta, you can study any field that you want as long as it’s engineering”.
Parents nowadays don’t want children but mechanized robots that are good at nothing.
Hence to re position the fallen quality educational system in our schools requires stringent implementation of lesson’s learnt being embedded from the planning stage of restructure.
“Let’s stand and change this system for us”
The author is a Social Activist: Mushtaqbhat1312@gmail.com
