Victims of the system

From this academic year, Kaliyuva Mane is conducting entrance test for the teachers.   Test paper contains questions on Kannada, English, Mathematics, Science and General knowledge.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8t7d9R2HGUJeTM0RXZZZ1ZGcGs/edit
Her qualification is M.A., B.Ed.  Can we select her?    Till now more than 60 aspirants have taken the test.   Unfortunately till now,  none of them have passed the test.

From this year onwards, the Government has revised the 5th std., 8th std. and 1st PU text books.  The whole idea is to raise the standard of State Board education and bring it on par with CBSE standard.   It is a welcome move!  So policy makers have revised the curriculum and revised the text books, but have not thought about the implementers.   I'm teaching 5th standard English to our trainee teachers.  Now they can read and understand 5th standard text books.   Still they cannot answer the questions at the end of the lesson.  Proper formation of sentences is a big problem.

When do the policy makers learn to think holistically?  When are they going to change teacher training programmes?  How long our D.Ed. and B.Ed. colleges keep on producing unemployables?  Some brain storming is required.  We should stop victimizing  innocent rural candidates.

Most of the urban elite children pursue lucrative courses like engineering, medicine, business management and very few aspire to become primary school teachers.  The salary package does not attract them to choose teaching as a career.  Most of the rural children who have studied in Kannada Medium in high school continue to study PUC (higher secondary) also in Kannada medium taking ‘History, sociology and economics’ as electives.  Then they study D.Ed.  Generally this does not equip them to teach English, Hindi, Mathematics, Science and Social Science even for 5^th standard children.  Hence this obsolete teacher training course on one hand is creating plenty of rural jobless/underpaid candidates with graduate and post graduate degrees and on the other hand has created a scarcity of competent teachers to teach English, Mathematics and Science in rural areas. Very few teachers realize that teaching is a time based activity, whereas learning is a process based activity.   

The summary of the findings of the Karnataka Jnana Aayoga, a high powered commission constituted in September 2008 by then chief minister of Karnataka under the chairmanship of renowned space scientist Dr K. Kasturirangan  about D.Ed. colleges is given below

“The colleges where the study was undertaken had adequate infrastructure; 65% of students  opted this course were females; 47% belonged to OBC category; 26% belonged to SC category; 71.4% belonged to low income group with an annual income of Rs.6000-Rs.12000; most of the students belonged to social science stream. Majority of the teachers were males (63%), average age was 37 years and very few (15%) had teaching experience in primary schools. They had attended an average of 2.5 training programmes in their entire career and showed poor readiness to implement reforms in school education. In all the colleges lectures were dominant with more stress on written work. It was a common feeling that curriculum was too heavy. Most of the educators felt that the time available for content enrichment was very less”.   Details are available at the following website :http://jnanaayoga.in/index.php/resources/research-studies

Kaliyuva Mane’s biggest hurdle is the non-availability of persons with knowledge, skill, passion and commitment to teach.   The impact of Kaliyuva Mane on children would have been 200% more if we had had such man makers.   The role of teachers in nation building is grossly under-estimated in India.  So it is a challenge to discover service minded persons with requisite knowledge, competency to transmit knowledge in rural areas. 

A doctor’s blunder kills a patient; An engineer’s blunder spoils a monument; A teacher’s mistake spoils generations - Dr. Radhakrishnan  ( heard )