Quality Education

Quality Education 

     The character of education in India assumes interesting dimensions when we take into account quality rather than quantity alone. The results of the recent National Achievement Surveys of the NCERT (National Council for Educational Research & Training) conducted in 2010 show that learning abilities of children at the primary level leave a lot to be desired. Results show that about 31.5% of children surveyed scored less than 40% in language, 35.8% failed in mathematics and 35.1% failed in environmental studies or EVS. Even in Kerala, a state with otherwise creditable educational achievements, 39.6% of students scored less than 40% in Mathematics and 29.7% did the same in EVS. Interestingly, only 2.7% in Mathematics and 2.9% in EVS respectively scored more than 80% (which is about one-sixth of the National average at the same score which itself is poor)! It is clear that when the quality at the foundational levels is average or poor, quality at higher levels is likely to be abysmal. Data also shows great diversity among different regions and States in India, both in terms of access and quality. In general, both the Southern and North-Eastern States have performed better, whereas Northern India has lagged behind. This diversity is nothing new, but government policies during the past quarter century has done nothing to change the pattern, which shows that the malady lies deep in the economic and socio-cultural structures in these regions rather than in the education process alone. In fact, the performance of Uttar Pradesh, where only 15% of students scored   less than 40% marks overall, in the National Achievement Survey illustrates this point. Such diverse performances also beings up the question of the overall centralization of curricula, management, and policy directions visible in recent policy documents, as they tend to ignore such economic and socio-cultural variations in different regions and often tend to underplay regional initiatives in favour of central policies or programmes. Whether such policies have themselves contributed to continuation of disparities needs to be examined. Unfortunately, this element never finds itself seriously considered either in the educational literature or in the documents of policy makers. Diversity of our national economic and cultural forms finds expression in the use of language, environmental knowledge and even in computation. Other elements of social knowledge have been ignored in the educational system even by NCERT. It appears that policy makers do not care whether children know the history of their own land, understand their living conditions or know their Government. This means that the great diversity of Indian population can be safely ignored by the policy makers, educational institutions and even teachers and students. From such a position, “quality education” can be enjoyed only by a privileged few termed as “meritorious” students, and even the present set of documents call the real problems of Indian education mere “gaps.”