Supreme Court’s recent nod for the RTE act, that 25% seats should be reserved in unaided private schools for the underprivileged children, has added a dimension to recent educational reforms. There has been a social euphoria created over the same, no doubt the government gets a pat on its back, but I am still skeptical about the road ahead with the system. According to a recent survey, 70% of children still attend government schools in India, where the quality of education is still a concern. As they still lack qualified teachers, innovation in classroom structure and student investments.
The education system in all high performing nations has a proper sensitized training program for teachers. In those countries, a teaching job comes with a high profile and dignity; moreover there has been a constant system of new concepts and design for monitoring the growth, success and investment of each individual child. These factors contribute a lot to the outcome of schooling and in attaining excellent results and values.
In contrast, most classrooms in India, still follow a routine structure of syllabus and examination that exhibit rote learning processes and biased thinking on socio cultural issues. Reservations won’t change the vast educational inequity that exists, until a systemic check is given on the quality of education, until new dimensions of innovation and creative concepts are introduced for monitoring individual growth of kids and a proper teacher training program is introduced.
Recently Teachforindia, a social organization has taken the initiative of revolutionizing the methods of education to create educational parity in the country. The Teach for India classrooms in both government schools and private schools in Delhi, Pune and Mumbai have shown tremendous growth and innovations with excellent academic results of the kids. The fellows work relentlessly in designing creative plans and structures to monitor growth, result and investment strategies for each individual child apart from providing excellent academic guidance. For example, one very creative innovation idea of investment strategy for targeting high academic expectation was seen in a TFI classroom in Pune.The face book concept was given a new outlook and dimensions in the real classroom environment for targeting investment and academic growth of the students. Designed by a TFI fellow himself, Ikpreet Singh, this concept has shown tremendous success, resulting in high academic excellence of the students. There are numerous examples of innovation in these classrooms by fellows as they show unwavering commitment to bring educational parity in the country.
These models have shown authentic success results, proving that quality education needs creativity training, ideas and high commitment rather than reservations of seats and rigid structure. If every teacher finds out their own classroom problems and creates own classroom innovation, there could be no limitation to their success stories. Both government and private schools need to implement systemic change to meet the educational demands. With the RTE being implemented from this academic year, there should be formal remedial programs to meet the educational demands that this Act will bring.
Priyanka Choudhary
