Sometimes I wish my life had a erase/rewind button

Thursday, April 01, 2010

Schooling Kids

Historic day today with the Right to Education becoming a fundamental Right. Its a beginning that will fructify when that right also translated into quality eduction.
Why don't we begin by setting up 2 schools 1 exclusively for Schedule Tribes and 2nd exclusively for scheduled castes. Not more than 2 to begin with for reasons of funding and also as a proof of concept. Doing it for scheduled tribes and castes will also serve an additional cause of 1 blunting the invariable reservation clamor etc that is bound to ensure in any public funded scheme and more importantly will also serve to prove that the reason for backwardness is that of access to opportunities (reservations started to blunt that) And access to preparatory training (why reservations still fail and attempts to fix that by creamy layer criteria that was effectively politically neutered).
Assign 1000 crore each to these 2 schools (if that seems excessive, remember UP government spends more money on monuments - not infrastructure items named for itself but statues and concrete parks). Have the best of Global faculty - many will come to it to be a part of social cause - do not reserve faculty positions, 100% student reservation should be enough and besides foreign faculty will have no caste and hence crowd out Indian faculty should reservation in faculty be allowed.
Have a common course till at least class 8, preferably till class 10.
In place of courses like SUPW have classes in forestry, crafts etc - I assume most students at least in tribal school will come from tribal areas and we want them to go back to their families and success story and uplift the living standards back home - not become an urban migrant looking for non existent jobs.
Based on candidates aptitude and interest, allow for students to choose a vocational +2 course or continue traditional maths/science/bio/commerce/humanity courses after 8th or 10th as the case maybe. Those who do well in traditional courses can than compete for admission in top institutes and given the excellent training should be able to make it through easily.
In order to make it worthwhile for family to send kids to school which must be residential since we are talking of a single, well funded and monitored school instead of attending local school with questionable quality and then work at home/fields, give them decent scholarships - say a 1000 bucks a month which the students can send back home - in effect a scholarship for family of kids attending school. We can make this scholarship effective for only 2 kids/family if need be. This will also make it worthwhile for students and families to actually compete to stay in school.
Once we monitor this scheme for like 10 years so that we can see that a student from the most disadvantaged of family can be as good as rest we can setup more such schools. Students not very keen on traditional courses can be trained and government can then recruit them as forestry officers/guards. Those good in traditional arts can be given outlets like Delhi Haats and trade fairs to commercialize traditional arts.
Others can train as health workers and work in rural areas. In short a win all.

1 comment:

Ajaa said...

Access is not the only reason for backwardness…it is also our social mindset, our systemic failures, our one size fits all attitude, our copy-paste attitude from other countries and models etc etc.
Global Faculty…??? Are u talking about schooling kids?? There are some real good teachers around.. real good principals..can we build the system itself instead of erecting another one…??
And why do we want to define what a child should learn (no SUPW etc etc..) let the child learn whatever and then decide it for themselves. Only if we don’t feed them ideas but let them be. Let them tread on their imagination.
Top Institutes? Again that competition, stress to be at the top…and those who don’t?? Then what?
Scholarships are already available under many government schemes. There is a whole publication of it by Aga Khan Foundation. You might like to study the impact.
Common course … not a great idea..one size doesn’t fit all !
And why should SC/ST/OBC have a separate school. Let them be with the world...why teach them segregation at the very basic level to begin with. There has already been a history of separatism.
Oh...what a nice win at the end! I wish it was like that.
In the end I would say, by this u might be thinking about ‘Schooling kids’ but not ‘Educating them’. India is so varied from state to state that each state needs a different type of attention and planning. Many are doing so and have been successful. We-who think; need to overcome our own notions of what is good for kids, what is good for poor. We need to have a bottom-up approach to planning and consider that education is not an issue in isolation. It is like a Venn diagram joining edges with various factors.