Subhuman plays with words wihtout sense

The absurdly article that I read in the recent past is written by Sreelatha Menon in the Business Standard on March 23, 2008, New Delhi. But I think these writers are wounded by the socialist and dogmatic communist ideas that prevent them to accept the liberal ideas. I can not recommend anyone to read her article but you can just observe that how stupid quoting are added!

(link via-Jayakamal)

Sreelatha Menon: Sop opera in schools
EAR TO THE GROUND

State governments are launching populist schemes like free education vouchers to students. But the caste system and poverty barriers have been undoing a lot of such schemes.

An STD booth approach towards multiplying and universalising services seems to be infecting all spheres.

Whether it is providing rural connectivity, insurance cover, credit , health care and even education, social franchising is the name of the game.

The Rajasthan Government has in its latest budget announced education vouchers to students, echoing the 11th Plan objective of promoting this system.

These vouchers would be valid only in schools that are set up by unemployed trained teachers.

The government would help the teachers with free land or hand them an existing government school, envisaging a network of schools run by these teachers privately.

What the teacher would have to contribute is not clear.

This scheme anticipates teachers to get entrepreneurial and prove their capacity to make a school run and the students to attend.

The more students he or she manages to attract, the more money comes in his hands. That should goad him to use his imagination to make education attractive to children, who are otherwise put off by the poor or no teaching, and worse treatment meted out to them in government schools. All that would be fine if only schools were like STD booths.

Schools are not about spending two minutes but the most formative period of an individual’s life. It is about building a being and not just delivering a mercenary service.

And caste system and poverty are barriers which the vouchers may not help cross for thousands of children..says educationist Vimala Ramachandran. .

In Delhi despite mandatory court orders to keep 25 per cent seats for poor, how many schools do it? Asks Ramachandran.

She finds the vouchers a big shame unless there are built-in conditions about the kind of children the schools admit.

And what about teachers training which the government institutions like DIET deliver and the expenses for uniform, books, etc which only deep pockets can afford? The vouchers in any case meet only partial expenses for a child’s education, she points out.

Poverty, lack of access and poor teaching drive away children from public schools, says Neelima Khaitan executive director of Seva Mandir the Udaipur based NGO which runs its own 200 special primary schools.

It would be like laboriously reinventing the wheel Rajasthan has witnessed a revolutionary programme involving the community in education earlier called the Lok Jumbish.

It was not replicated. Instead the Government got in the centralised Sarva Siksha Abhiyan.

Now there is competition to government schools run under SSA in the form of the STD schools.

And an unequal competition at that. The government schools get nothing if they work well and attract students.

Of course they will run the risk of closure if they lose existing children to a private school.

Is slow death the only remedy for public schools?

The Rajasthan government has also announced a programme called Gyanodaya to incentivize private and charitable institutions to establish senior secondary and secondary schools at panchayat headquarters. On the other hand it has been raining sops for public schools like regularising all para teachers, workers of Lok Jumbish and so on.

Seva Mandir had success in getting kids to school but they drop out as soon as they confront government apathy at the secondary level, says Priyanka Singh who heads the NGO’s education programme.

Pradeep Ghosh who runs another model of education in Bhopal which totally does away with infrastructure and textbooks could benefit if such vouchers were to be given to children in his state. But he says quantity is never an issue. Will the vouchers make the quality and methodology change? He asks.

Besides a 12th grade pass student of the village will remain neither of the village nor city. Choice of subjects should be there from the beginning and that needs a personal attention to students that is missing in schooling.

The only way ahead as Ramachandran says is to improve the existing schools than to strangulate them.