Thursday, September 17, 2009

Global univs: Sibal eyes UK help

New Delhi: With the HRD ministry having already mooted the idea of setting up 14 world-class innovation universities through public-private partnership, Kapil Sibal on Tuesday told Lord Mervyn Davies, British minister for trade, investment and business, about possible collaboration on the score.


Davies said his government is keen for cooperation with India in the education sector and said that in two areas of teacher training and certification, the UK could offer its expertise through collaboration. He emphasized that the mood for India in the UK is very positive.

He hoped that India would open up its university sector for British universities soon. Sibal said the education sector could see massive growth in the coming years to cater to the rising demand both in India and abroad. He underlined that while framing regulations, the focus would be to keep out fly-by-night operators from the education sector.

The 14 proposed innovation universities aiming at world-class standards will set new benchmarks in higher education, be it in academics or autonomy.

Admission to the universities will be done through a two-stage testing process: a screening process involving a standardized aptitude test in broad areas of higher learning such as physical sciences, social sciences, humanities, languages and life sciences where tests would gauge the cognitive and analytic abilities. In the second stage, candidates will have to go through an examination that measures knowledge through essay type questions.

In post-graduate level, a standardized aptitude test would be conducted. For doctorate programmes, references from eminent academicians would supplement the results obtained at the PG level. TNN

HRD minister Kapil Sibal with British minister Lord Mervyn Davies in Delhi

These kids shoot some great sights

Anahita Mukherji I TNN


Mumbai: Camera in hand, Mohammad Mustakim, a municipal school student from Govandi, on Tuesday captured the patterns made by the sun’s rays—which filtered through a canopy of leaves—on a man taking a nap at the Horniman Circle Garden. Gayatri Shinde, another civic school student from Powai, was busy taking pictures of butterflies and birds at the garden. Rahul Kshirsagar, the son of a painter who lives in a Bandra slum, said he thoroughly enjoyed shooting the ducks in the garden pond.

They were part of a group of civic school students who received lessons in photography from noted city photographer Shreekant Malushte. The initiative was taken by the Sangeet Kala Academy, an organisation set up by the BMC education department to encourage underprivileged students. Malushte taught photography to 15 students on Tuesday and will teach another batch on Wednesday. He has been conducting such classes on a regular basis.

“Photography is a skill that can help these children earn some money,’’ said Malushte, retired head of the physics department at Maharashtra College. The children also aimed their cameras at the urban landscape around the Asiatic Library. Some of the civic school teachers even posed on the library steps for the kids.

SAY CHEESE: A teacher poses as BMC school students get photography lessons

Edu dept seeks bribes to clear salary hikes

Anahita Mukherji | TNN


Mumbai: The secretary of the Archdiocesan Board of Education (ABE), Fr Gregory Lobo, has gone on record on the bribes that are being charged by education department officials in Mumbai. The Catholic church runs 150 schools across the city.

“With the new Sixth Pay Commission salaries in place for teachers, the clerical staff at our schools have worked overtime to get all the necessary paper work in place so that teachers get the revised salaries.However, they needed to get the papers stamped and signed by the education department, for which the department auditor for South Mumbai asked for a bribe of Rs 300 per teacher, which works out to around Rs 30,000 a school,’’ Fr Lobo said, adding he had got many such complaints.

He said the schools had shouldered the entire administrative load. The education department only had to stamp the documents.

Education dept auditor refutes bribe charges
Mumbai: Accusing education department officials of demanding bribes from schools to clear pay hike papers, Fr Gregory Lobo said, “The staff at our schools are afraid to go on record about this as they feel they will be harassed. But I have no problem doing so.
I will bear the consequences.’’ Fr Lobo, a 70-year-old priest, has headed the Archdiocesan Board of Education (ABE) for 10 years. Previously, he has been the principal of ABE schools for 20 years.

V K Wankhede, Mumbai’s deputy director of education, acknowledged he had just received a couple of letters from schools complaining about the issue.

Wankhede then called the education department auditor for South Mumbai, Prabhakar Sawant, to inquire into the matter. Sawant swore that no such incident had occurred. “Mein kasam khata hoon ki aisa kuchh nahin hua (I swear nothing like that has happened),’’ he told TOI.

Monday, September 14, 2009

HOPE FOR YOUNG

Sharp decline in out-of-school kid count

From 1.3 Cr In ’05, Numbers Drop To 80 Lakh This Year

Akshaya Mukul | TNN


New Delhi: In another feather to the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan’s cap, the number of out-of-school (OOS) children in the 6-14 age group has come down dramatically from 1.34 crore in 2005 to 80.4 lakh in 2009.

In percentage terms, 4.22% of the total children in this age group are not going to school as per the latest figures. The first survey of 2005 had showed that 6.94% children in this age group were OOS.

This has been revealed in the comprehensive survey by Social Research Institute of Indian Market Research Bureau of OOS children in the country. The survey, done for HRD ministry, corroborates the prestigious private survey by Pratham. In early 2009, Pratham had put OOS children at 4.3%.

The big news is Bihar’s success story and Rajasthan and UP’s poor performance. The north-south divide is also clear. Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra and TN have OOS children ranging between just 0.38% in Kerala to 1.4% in AP.

Right now the basic figures of the survey, conducted in January, have come out and more facts will surface once the report is finalized. But sources said there has been a significant decline in OOS Muslims, STs and girl students. However, the decline is not significant in case of SC children. Decline in OOS girl students is a testimony to the success of Kasturba Gandhi Ballika Vidyalaya.

In 2005, when the first survey was carried out, Bihar was the second worst performer in terms of OOS children — 31.7 lakh constituting 17% of children in the state in the 6-14 age group. Now, only 13.15 lakh are OOS. In percentage terms, this is just 7%. On the oth
er hand, in Rajasthan, OOS children’s number has gone up. In 2005, 6.9% or 7.95 lakh children were OOS. Now it is 10 lakh taking the OOS children to 8.21%. Sources said the state’s poor performance can be attributed to lack of proper SSA monitoring. UP showed negligible decline in OOS children—from 8.15% in 2005 to 7.58% now. Numerically, it declined from 29.95 lakh during the first survey to 27.64 lakh. Bengal and MP, among the bad performers in 2005, have also done well. While Bengal has brought down its OOS children to 5% from 8.67% in 2005, MP figure is down from 8.63% to 2.45%.

CITY CITY BANG BANG

The other side of education

Santosh Desai


Perhaps, nothing in the world receives as much unanimous endorsement as the idea of education. We see it as a fundamental human need, nay right, and strive to ensure that our children get the best education our circumstances permit. And yet, for something that is seen as such a natural and intrinsic part of our lives, education is an extraordinary institutional intervention in an individual’s life. Think about it—we voluntarily turn over our children to this sector for indoctrination. We give them our children and get in return, socially productive resources 20-odd years later. Education turns people into professions, for the purposes of society. People become their profession; every other source of identity recedes in the background.

The role of education in society is so central because it converts the individual into the collective without appearing to do so. In some ways its most important role is to make us realize what we cannot be and what we cannot do. Education, particularly schooling, teaches us about the need for obedience, the desirability of order, the importance of rules and the power of hierarchy. It judges us and tests us, it observes our actions and shapes our thoughts. It creates a framework of arbitrary rules in the form of attire, time and order. We wear uniforms, stand in straight lines, put fingers on our lips, stand to attention, clap dutifully when told, keep quiet so that we can hear a pin drop, crease our trousers, comb our well-trimmed hair, polish our shoes and clip our nails.

A school moulds people into becoming usable later in life. Our individuality is a cumbersome thing—it carries sharp edges and harbours enormous self-love, it is restless, self-indulgent, untamed. Without education, we fear the outbreak of anarchy for we would not learn anything about living in a world full of others. At its heart, education recognizes that human beings are inter-dependent and need to find a way to fit into a larger template that accommodates all of us and more importantly, allows this otherwise chaotic collective to move forward with a degree of coherence.

The subjects we learn at school are important, but eventually they merely define which specific slot we fall into as we grow up and become something. The more important function of schooling is a structural one—it makes us of a predictable shape so that we can fit into one of the many available pre-designated slots.

The important thing to note is that schools are not structured around students and their needs but around those of society. To be sure, the needs of students are accommodated within this larger framework, but the idea of education does not rest on making individual students realize their full potential, no matter how good a school. Every sign emitted by the schooling system, every institution cherished by it, carries within it a trace of a larger societal intention.

Ask yourself why schoolchildren need to wear uniforms, for instance. One reason is that it equalizes everyone and blinds them to the social differences that lie outside in the world. There is some truth in this, but only some, for in most cases, school fees do a good job of ensuring a minimum amount of homogeneity in terms of who can afford to be in which school. Schools need uniforms because they need to teach children that they are a collective, part of a defined social group that follows a set of rules and observes certain hierarchies. They are grouped together constantly, addressed often with their roll number rather than name, and even when the name is used, the surname rather than the first is often preferred.

The fact that education is society’s way of making us useful to it, is borne out by the way we are taught things. The idea of subjects is an interesting one. The universe is not divided into subjects, neat boxes that come labelled for our use. We experience the world in its totality; our consciousness does not fragment it into capsules. In order to comprehend the world, we needed to reduce it for otherwise the world was too overwhelming. But nothing operates in isolation. The blacksmith must have an understanding of the physics of temperature, the chemistry of metals, the anatomy of horses for whom he made the horse-shoes, the marketability of his produce while being mindful of his responsibility towards his family, community, religion and ruler.

Specialization is what society needs; for individuals it creates a spurious sense of division. The scientist does not see the social consequences of her invention as a part of her legitimate concerns, just as a businessman believes his role is to maximize profits without worrying too much about the environment. It is not his subject; let the environmentalists worry about it. In India, this division is even more rigid. We study science or commerce or arts as if these three broad heads cannot co-exist for any single individual. We cannot choose combinations of subjects to our liking, because they are not offered together. For we must become one thing or another, and that menu of choices has been made for us by someone else for their own needs.

In the years to come, it would be important for us to take a deeper look at this institution and ask if we need to redesign it in order for it to serve our needs better given today’s circumstances. Of course, education will continue to meet the needs of society but it also needs to work more consciously towards enabling individuals to use their individuality to more telling effect. We need a more dynamic and fluid view of education. Kapil Sibal’s efforts are a good place to start, but there is a long way to go yet.
santoshdesai1963@indiatimes.com

Rural schools, colleges to get broadband connectivity

CHENNAI - The government has decided to provide broadband connectivity to 5,000 schools and 20,000 colleges in rural and semi-urban areas to promote e-learning, Minister of State for Communications and IT Sachin Pilot said here Saturday.

“We are holding discussions with the finance ministry to work out the modalities and the funding required for this project,” Pilot told reporters on the sidelines of an IT conference, jointly organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the Tamil Nadu government.

“With this connectivity, students of these institutions can have access to quality lectures as and when they need.”

Earlier, speaking at the conference, the minister urged the IT industry to diversify its export market as a strategy to tide over the economic crisis in the advanced economies.

Citing the growing demand for IT services in the domestic market, Pilot said IT-driven government services could make the life of the common man much easier.

“There are around 650,000 villages in the country and through IT the lives of villages could be bettered. The government is working on broadband connectivity for villages to deliver various services using IT,” he said.

Tamil Nadu Information Minister Poongothai Aladi Aruna, who was present at the conference, said there was a need for separate funds for the state governments to develop softwares to offer e-governance services.