[Reader-list] Rethinking Rural Education by Sudheendra Kulkarni

[Rahul Asthana]

Brilliant article.Thanks Chintan. I have made this point elsewhere before.
Our education system, which is a colonial legacy, is still geared towards making civil servants, doctors, engineers out of us.The reality of India is that more than 80% of people are self employed. Even after completing their education they are ill equipped to face the harsh existential  realities of life.Even in urban areas the content needs to have more entrepreneurial focus.
In rural areas one of the reasons of population increase is that the incremental cost of bringing up a child is negligible compared to the wages brought in by the child. Since the primary and the secondary education is completely irrelevant in the day to day lives, the families choose to beget more children to use as unskilled labor. If the education in customized to help them in their primary requirement, how to bring food to the table, they might have an interest in investing in education.
It should also be pointed out that reservation does not do anything for those living in abject poverty. They do not have the means to compete for the meager % of jobs.For them the primary purpose of education should be survival- this should be pretty much like stating the obvious.

Thanks
Rahul


----- Original Message ----
From: Kshmendra Kaul <kshmendra2005 at yahoo.com>
To: sarai list <reader-list at sarai.net>; Chintan <chintangirishmodi at gmail.com>
Sent: Sun, April 4, 2010 4:32:16 AM
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Rethinking Rural Education by SudheendraKulkarni

Dear Chintan
 
Thanks for posting this.
 
Kulkarni makes two points that I am taking the liberty of highlighting:
 
1. " ..... children who come out of primary schools find their path blocked to further schooling because there simply aren’t enough secondary schools in the country—a reality that has prompted many educationists to comment that these children are not “dropouts” but “pushouts”. The Central government’s RashtriyaMadhyamikShikshaAbhiyan remains a woefully inadequate response to remove the bottleneck in secondary education"
 
2. " .....  isn’t it astounding that agriculture is not a subject in secondary schools in rural areas, although most students studying in these schools come from kisan families? Similarly, the school curriculum completely bypasses the native skills, traditionally acquired learnings, and the rich artistic-literary heritage of our various “backward” castes and tribes in rural India. No wonder, children belonging to these communities perform poorly in the formal school system and end up swelling the ranks of the “uneducated” and “semi-educated”.    "
 
 
Kshmendra


--- On Sun, 4/4/10, Chintan <chintangirishmodi at gmail.com> wrote:


From: Chintan <chintangirishmodi at gmail.com>
Subject: [Reader-list] Rethinking Rural Education by SudheendraKulkarni
To: "sarai list" <reader-list at sarai.net>, learningnet-india at yahoogroups.com
Date: Sunday, April 4, 2010, 10:08 AM


*Rethinking Rural Education*

By SudheendraKulkarni

From http://www.indianexpress.com/news/rethinkingruraleducation/599729/

AvinashSheshare, a class VII student at a small boarding school in
Yamgarwadi village near Solapur in southern Maharashtra, explained to me the
concept of convex and concave lenses more innovatively than I had learnt
even at IIT. He took the sole of a worn-out rubber slipper, which had 5-6
equidistant holes punched in lengthwise, put a soft drink straw in each of
them, and was ready for the demonstration. “Imagine the sole to be a lens
and the straws to be sun rays,” he said in Marathi. “I bend the sole to make
the straws point inwards. This is how a convex lens works. When I bend it
the other way to make the straws point outwards, it becomes a concave lens.”


The school where Avinash studies is meant for the children of Paradhi and
other nomadic tribes, many of which the British had branded “criminal
tribes” because they were the most militant in the anti-colonial struggle.
Even today, people belonging to these tribes suffer from extreme poverty and
social exclusion, and rank lowest in formal school education. However, it
would be naïve to think their minds are uneducated. As I discovered during
my recent visit to Yamgarwadi, their children have amazing knowledge of the
environment around them. These boys and girls knew the medicinal properties
of the locally grown “weeds”. They could identify different birds with their
sounds. They could name the stars in the night sky. In a little room that
served as the “science laboratory” in the school, all the various types of
snakes, crabs and scorpions kept in specimen jars had been caught by the
children themselves. And how incredibly talented they all were in singing,
dancing, playing local sports, and using their magical hands to create
things of beauty in wood, mud and grass!

Avinash and his friends are lucky because they found a place in this
RSS-inspired school founded by GirishPrabhune, a social activist and author
whose lifelong and widely acclaimed work for the social uplift of the
nomadic tribes in Maharashtra deserves far greater governmental support than
he has got so far. But I doubt if the formal primary and secondary school
education system, rigidly and unimaginatively structured as it is today, can
either open its doors to, or meaningfully benefit, all the children
belonging to the diverse communities in rural India.

My thoughts on this subject are provoked by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan
Singh’s address to the nation on Thursday on the historic occasion of
enshrining education as a fundamental right of every child between the ages
of six and 14. He made a fervent appeal for the fulfillment of this
“national commitment to the future of India”. Noble and well-intentioned
words. However, it must be said that our governments, Central as well as
state, have not got their act right on either of the two crucial aspects of
the Right to Education in rural India—access and content.

The SarvaShikshaAbhiyan has no doubt succeeded in enlarging access to
primary education. However, as many as eight crore children who come out of
primary schools find their path blocked to further schooling because there
simply aren’t enough secondary schools in the country—a reality that has
prompted many educationists to comment that these children are not
“dropouts” but “pushouts”. The Central government’s RashtriyaMadhyamik
ShikshaAbhiyan remains a woefully inadequate response to remove the
bottleneck in secondary education.

But a far more debilitating shortcoming is the quality and content of the
education imparted in our village schools. Apart from the well-recognised
fact that the system demands rote learning that impairs children’s
creativity, it also attaches little importance to either the local knowledge
resources or the specific development needs of India’s diverse communities.
It functions under the premise that education is only that which is rammed
into young minds by text books and guidebooks. By corollary, those who are
out of the school system or have underperformed are deemed uneducated, with
all the negative sociological and psychological consequences. The relevance
of much of what is taught in schools does not become apparent to rural
children. Conversely, what is relevant to them and their communities is not
taught to them. For example, isn’t it astounding that agriculture is not a
subject in secondary schools in rural areas, although most students studying
in these schools come from kisan families? Similarly, the school curriculum
completely bypasses the native skills, traditionally acquired learnings, and
the rich artistic-literary heritage of our various “backward” castes and
tribes in rural India. No wonder, children belonging to these communities
perform poorly in the formal school system and end up swelling the ranks of
the “uneducated” and “semi-educated”.

For RTE to become meaningful to these communities, and for it to make its
fullest contribution to the realisation of a progressive vision for the
“Future of India”, big and innovative changes are needed in the school
education system, especially in our rural schools. Smart kids like Avinash
abound in India’s villages. What they need is not just the right to
education, but also the right education.

*sudheenkulkarni at gmail.com*
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