A Lost Opportunity to Reform the Educational System

Synopsis- Pandemic provided a vital opportunity to initiate sustainable reforms in the Educational System in India. But bureaucrats and administrators failed to take advantage of it.

Introduction-

• The pandemic offered an opportunity for bureaucrats and administrators to re-examine the education system, but nothing has changed.
• As a result of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, students in schools and higher education institutions have once again been affected, as they were last year.
• Instead of assisting institutions, faculty, and students in overcoming uncertainty, administrators focused on excessive bureaucratic centralization.

The phenomenon exposed the administrative inadequacies of the past year.

Why it is a lost opportunity for bureaucrats and administrators?

The pandemic provided the bureaucrats and administrators an opportunity to initiate sustainable reforms in the educational system in the following ways-

• Collaborate with teachers to discuss their concerns –
• Could consider promoting better student-teacher relationships.
• The exam system could have been reformed. They could create a better system for determining the qualifying grade for students to progress to the next level of study.

However, administrators lost this opportunity because-

• Rigid emphasis on rote learning.
• Failure to acknowledge that test results are not the only indicators of a student’s skills.
• Unwillingness to collaborate with teachers.
• They ignored plans to evaluate the mental health of teachers, non-teaching staff, and students.

What needs to be done?

Decision-makers need to learn from previous mistakes and take the following steps to find a sustainable solution.

1. Bureaucratic administrators should consult with Academic stakeholders before any decisions.
2. Institutions need to reconsider their approach –
   • Schools and higher educational institutes need to find alternative forms of assessment for promoting students.
   • Need to come up with new ways to assess the teaching and learning process.
   • Make academic evaluation more rigorous and sustainable encouraging students to write creatively. The concept of open-book exams must be considered.
3. The bureaucracy must acknowledge that ‘one order fits all’ approach to improving educational system is not feasible.

   Read Also- :-The recent National Education Policy document

Way forward-

Administrators need to concentrate on assisting institutions, faculty, and students in overcoming uncertainty. Thus, they should decentralize decision-making.

• It is important to avoid responses such as canceling and/or postponing exams and remaining fixated with the completion of the academic term.

Source- The Hindu