एनुअल स्टेटस ऑफ एजुकेशन रिपोर्ट 2017 (ASER/एएसईआर) जारी की गयी:
'द सर्वे फॉर एनुअल स्टेटस ऑफ एजुकेशन रिपोर्ट फॉर रूरल इंडिया' की ये सर्वे रिपोर्ट काफी चौकाने वाली है। बच्चों से बहुत ही सिंपल सवाल किए गए थे। जैसे- पैसे की गिनती, वजन और समय की जानकारी वगैरह। एक चौथाई बच्चे पैसों की गिनती नहीं बता पाए।
रिपोर्ट के अनुसार, वर्तमान में लगभग 12 करोड़ युवा 14-18 वर्ष की उम्र के हैं। यह सर्वेक्षण 24 राज्यों के 26 ग्रामीण जिलों में 28,000 से अधिक युवाओं पर कराया गया था। एएसईआर सर्वे का यह 13वां वर्ष था, जो देश में शिक्षा के स्तर की जमीनी हकीकत से रूबरू कराता है। लेकिन इस सर्वे में पहली बार बच्चों के बजाय 14-18 वर्ष के युवाओं पर यह सर्वे कराया गया।
रिपोर्ट से जुड़े प्रमुख तथ्य:
1. देश में 14 से 16 साल के बच्चों में करीब-करीब एक चौथाई बच्चे अपनी भाषा को धाराप्रवाह (फ्लुएंटली) नहीं पढ़ सकते हैं।
2. 57 फीसदी बच्चे को आसान गुण-भाग भी नहीं आता।
3. 14 फीसदी बच्चों को जब भारत का नक्शा दिखाया गया तो उन्हें नक्शे के बारे में कुछ पता ही नहीं है।
4. 36 फीसदी बच्चों को अपने देश की राजधानी का नाम नहीं पता।
5. 21 फीसदी बच्चों को अपने राज्य के बारे में कुछ भी नहीं पता है।
6. 40 फीसदी बच्चों को घंटा और मिनट के बारे में नहीं पता।
7. 44 फीसदी बच्चे किलोग्राम को वजन में नहीं बता पाए।
इस रिपोर्ट पर मुख्य आर्थिक सलाहकार अरविंद सुब्रमण्यम ने चिंता जताते हुए कहा- 'ये रिपोर्ट बताता है कि वाकई में ग्रामीण शिक्षा की स्थिति क्या है और हमें इसमें और क्या करने की जरूरत है।' इसके अलावा उन्होंने बताया कि 14 की आयु तक लड़का और लड़की के एडमिशन में किसी तरह का कोई अंतर नहीं है लेकिन 18 वर्ष तक आते ही 32 फीसदी लड़कियां आगे की पढ़ाई छोड़ रही हैं जबकि उसकी तुलना में 28 फीसदी लड़के आगे की पढ़ाई नहीं कर रहे।
On his recent visit to India, Bill Gates described Indian education as one of the disappointing features of this country. And the ASER report released last week indicates that secondary education fails to impart basic skills to Indian students. Indian gurus have gone global but our gurukuls have remained wrapped in the cobwebs of time. Indian doctors are considered among the best in the world, yet Ayurveda occupies a small niche in global healthcare in the category of alternative medicines.
If the Greeks had their gymnasiums, India had her ashrams. Why have the gyms far outnumbered ashrams in the modern world? Ustad Zakir Hussain is teaching students to play the tabla at Stanford. Yet, the tabla has not attained the global popularity of the modern drum as a percussion instrument. In the land of Nalanda and Takshashila, in a nation touted as vishwa-guru, foreign students coming to India’s higher education centres have come down from the projected 5 million to a trickle of less than 40,000 students in the last 3 years.
India’s extraordinary knowledge systems and institutions of learning can be on the global stage if only we were better organised to adapt to the 4.0 world where learning has moved from hardware to software and is finally everywhere. Education 4.0 is about flexpertise – teaching expertise that is flexible enough to adapt to different learning styles and needs of the contemporary world.
Blended learning that uses both technology and face time between teacher and students will come into play as the dominant pedagogy. Learning will move from painful data dumping to the quest for creativity, collaboration, problem solving ability, higher order thinking and the sheer joy of discovery. Learning 4.0 is no longer just about cognition in a classroom, it is about total immersion of the learner in real life situations. Ananda or delight, which is the Eureka moment or touchstone of all peak learning experiences, will have to be created in our learning spaces.
Two stubborn assumptions about education have been seriously challenged in the 4.0 world of digitised, open source, globalised and personalised learning. The first assumption is that learning is a function of place (building) rather than space (psychological). The second assumption is that learning is a function of time (period) rather than attention. Education 4.0 is about asynchronous (anytime) and digitally dispersed (anywhere) learning. Yet, our universities and schools are stuck in the designs of the past. They perpetuate factory like classrooms, rows and rows of chairs, the ubiquitous clocks and bells – all of which remind us of Industrial Age learning behaviour.
Universities in India are more territorial than universal. It is difficult for students from one Indian state to get admission in a university of another state. The affiliation system of universities have killed autonomy of institutions. The education regulators UGC and AICTE still continue to be fixated on land size, laboratories, library buildings and lecture hours.
Well-intentioned regulations end up becoming like mouse traps or thief catching devices. They choke, as it were, the life out of quality education processes. Regulators end up being strangulators. Academic bodies obsessed with fixing the curriculum rarely pay attention to the informal curriculum consisting of spontaneous conversations and learning outside the classrooms.
Let us look for solutions. Quality rather than just qualified educators have to be identified from a large cross-section of Indian society. Education, like healthcare, should be seen as a vocation rather than a career. The salary of quality primary teachers should be equal to if not more than clerks and plumbers in our society.
A vast majority of Indian teachers are not exposed to new age learning and teaching methods. We need globally networked learning hubs rather than anachronistic BEd colleges that churn out these teachers. Education 4.0 is about accelerated and personalised learning rather than high handed teaching. Teachers have to evolve from being ring masters to Zen masters who would enlarge the horizons of knowing. Know-ability will have to displace knowledge reproduced from memory banks. Incumbent university structures will have to yield space and legitimacy to insurgent Khan Academies and Super 50s.
Branding of Indian education is also about imbibing the consistency of our perennial human values in an inconsistent world. The values of truth (satyam), sustainaibilty (nityam) and wholeness (purnam) have deep connects with the modern world. Education 4.0 will cease to promote narrow competitive instinct through marks and remarks. This is the same instinct inculcated in the colonial education culture for years that have bred parochial and self-seeking leaders of today’s India. We have to transcreate rather than translate our sacred texts for a new generation of learners.
Our gurukuls have to be laboratories of living questions rather than ossified fortresses of answers. The classical Upanishads and the Bhagwad Gita were nothing but insightful, open-ended conversations and questions about reality and our place in the universe. Education 4.0 will be an experiential continuum between our expanding self and the larger universe: between jivatma and jagat. Our educators have to be rooted in the conviction that they can shape the future of the world through their students. Teachers will begin to see the linkage between inner transformation of students and the broader societal change taking place in India.
These may look like the stuff of dreams in the present Indian educational context. Yet, one cannot but wonder: where have our great dreamers gone?
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The twelfth Annual Status of Education Report (Aser 2017: Beyond Basics) focuses on 14-18 year olds across rural India, and finds disturbing shortfalls in their ability to do even simple tasks like counting money and telling time.
Aser 2017 exposes a gender gap in adolescence, including higher dropout rates for girls after Standard VIII -
There are more girls in school today. They are studying more years. You can see it when you travel to rural India. Young women are just more visible, out and about, and clearly that is a good thing.
But also clearly that is not enough. Because it seems to be only a very superficial level of change. Skill levels and real confidence in their own abilities remain low.
Girls have a higher ‘no response’ rate in simple tasks like pointing to their own state on a map of India-
Girls are just so much more hesitant than boys. In 18 year old Rita from Gujarat, other girls that I have met and I am sure you have met, there’s this assumption that they do not know, that they cannot, and it’s tragic. To me that’s a fundamental part of what schools should do, build confidence, curiosity, the sense that there is a lot to learn and I can learn it.
The other thing is that there is now more than 50 years of research showing that expectations really affect learning. If teachers think that a group of students can’t learn it’s quite likely that they will internalise that expectation and they won’t learn.
Unfortunately teachers’ attitude especially in government schools is that it’s the dregs who remain in their classrooms because everyone who can afford it has abandoned government schools. Law is not going to change these attitudes but the right kind of training can.
Why are schools failing to teach basic skills?
It’s not just rural India – our schools everywhere seem to have abandoned the idea that they should do teaching beyond rote memorisation. You ask a middle class parent in a metro. Homework, tuition, parents are supposed to provide the learning.
Part of it is the law that says that the teacher’s job is to complete the curriculum. It is in the RTE Act. Your job is to finish the textbook, it is not to make sure that every child in your classroom understands what the textbook says. So at the beginning of the year teachers will divide the number of weeks by the number of chapters in the textbook.
On top of this in every classroom there are many classrooms, especially in rural India. Some children cannot read at all and some are at grade level and some in between. There is this wide range of abilities. But we don’t expect our teachers to adapt their teaching to this situation. We don’t give them the tools to do that.
If you look at the teacher training curriculum they learn to teach in an ideal classroom, with all children being at grade level, and in that situation of course you can teach the textbook.
Can these issues be fixed at the RTE level?
I don’t think teaching and learning processes can be fixed through a law. The main problem as we see it is grouping children by age. The pedagogy that Pratham has evolved, called Teaching at the Right Level, is based on the common sense that you group children based on what they can do. Different states are trying this now. You can see fairly rapid progress. In 50 days they can bring lagging children of Standards III-V to Standard II of reading, that’s two months. It just means organising the classroom differently and it also means breaking away from the curriculum.
If you view schools as institutions that are supposed to help break all the traditional gaps, like the gender gap, they are not playing that role right now. They are just reinforcing many of the traditional attitudes, stereotypes and inequality.
What do you expect when India participates in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) again?
PISA looks at 15 year olds, who are in school. By that age India has lost a lot of students already, they’ve dropped out or fallen behind. Maybe PISA results will put pressure on the government but I don’t think the main point is to compare ourselves to other countries. At this point we are so far behind.
Plus this country is like 29 different countries, in size and complexity. I think
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