The systemic problems that have kept Indian schooling ineffective

News: The article talks about the causes behind why children are not able to learn what they should at their school.

What are the causes?

Design of schooling system: The design like having a primary school within 1km has creates difficulties. Every primary school only has a small number of children between classes 1 to 5. Thus there is only one teacher or two. This has meant a greater teaching load for children.

Inadequate investment in public education: It results in inadequate or poor-quality resources. With roughly 3% of GDP as our public expenditure on education, India has been short of its commitment of 6%. This underlies many of the problems like a) an inadequate number of teachers, b) Inadequate staffing, c) lack of basic facilities in schools, d) deteriorating nutritional standards of the mid-day meal.

All of this affects the motivation and efficacy of teachers and the school atmosphere and children’s engagement.

Dysfunctional teacher education system: The National Education Policy 2020 talks about the issue of corrupt teacher education systems in India. 9 million teachers have undergone a B.Ed or D.Ed program of very poor quality. Many colleges sell degrees, without students even attending classes.

Design and culture of the education system: Indian education system is rigid and centralized. Many problems impact the education quality like a) uniform norms across the state, b) cookie-cutter training (training which lacks any distinguishable characteristics) for teachers irrespective of their actual needs, c) an ‘inspectorial’ regime rather than a problem-solving one.

All these make the teacher unsupported, demotivated, and disempowered.

Administrative leadership and management: Administration often assigned teachers to other duties like election duty, anti-malaria campaigns, etc. Their priorities are continually and rapidly changed, thus disorienting and distracting them from their main role. Further, policies related to education are typically not implemented effectively.

Weak capacity of key institutions: Flaws in Indian higher education system

Source: This post is based on the article “The systemic problems that have kept Indian schooling ineffective” published in the Livemint on 3rd Mar 2022.