Indian education system and corruption: UNESCO

India’s education system is mired in corruption and a high rate of teacher absenteeism in the country was a key factor for it according to the new global study. The UNESCO’s International Institute of Educational Planning study on corruption in education released recently says that 25% teacher absenteeism in India is among the highest in the world, second only after Uganda that has a higher rate. The global average of teacher absenteeism is about 20%.

 Teacher absenteeism does not just affect quality of education; it is also a huge drain on resources resulting in the wastage of 22.5% of education funds in India the study said. Politics in teacher appointments and transfers is a major reason for teacher absenteeism according to a professor at National University for Education Planning and Administration.

The study identifies the absence of well established criteria for teacher recruitment a uniform policy on promotion, remuneration and deployment as some of the main reasons identified for teacher absenteeism. However the report found married teachers to be more regular at job than unmarried teachers.

In Bihar two of every five teachers were reported absent the figure in UP was reported to be one-third of the total teachers. However in states like Gujarat and Kerala the figure was lower than 15% the report based on several small studies.

Teachers also believe highly in private tutoring a practice identified by UNESCO as unethical. It does not complement learning at school and leads to corruption the report said. The practice of ghost teachers and involvement of teachers in mismanagement of schools were other gray areas identified in the Indian education system.

Another indictment of the sorry state of Indian education was the view held by students that cheating in examinations is their traditional right. In India universities cheating is now well-established. The fees for manipulating entrance tests ranges between $ 80 to $ 20,000 for popular programmes such as computer science, medicine and engineering the report said...!!!

Noted scientist and educationist Prof Yash Pal has said that there is maximum corruption in the education sector of the country. He expressed concern over the state of education in the country too. He was speaking at a ceremony where he was conferred with Shri Hari Om Ahsram Prerit Dr Vikram Sarabhai Senior Scientist Award - 2010 at the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad recently.

"Large-scale corruption is prevalent in the education system. Coaching classes are hell, as they are killing the creativity of students," said Prof Pal.

While expressing his opinion on higher education, he said, " Due respect has not been given to the universities in the country. We should be creating good universities but have not done so. IITs should be given total autonomy and given university status and raised to the level of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I think regulatory agencies like UGC and AICTE should be abolished." 

Apart from this, the Buti Foundation Award in Plasma Science and Technology for the year 2011 was also conferred on Banibrata Mukhopadhyay of the department of physics, at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

Prof UR Rao, veteran scientist and chairman of council of management, PRL, was the chief guest at the function.

In his address Rao expressed, "We are still working with the space technology, which we have already developed. Now we should explore and develop new technologies. There is need for more research in space as we have barely been able to explore five percent of the universe, we still don't know where the energy of the universe originates from," he said.

How to teach our Teachers..???

An integrated course after Class 12 makes sense.

The country needs to appoint 2.5 million teachers to comply with the Right to Education Act.

On every Children's Day, a lot is said on children's right to have a joyful, creative education, and the need for a better future for under-served children, including girl children, among other things.

From November 15, it is “business as usual”. In a Government school a bright young child would be asked to read a particular lesson loudly, after which the whole class would repeat. Not many children would understand the content of the lesson – even less number of children would think about what it means. Caning of children by unscrupulous teachers would continue.

Individual learning needs of the children would not be identified and the gap in statistics between the forward class and backward class, or between the girls and the boys would continue to be twenty percentage points.

It is not that issues and solutions are unknown. Vital issues – such as radically reforming pre-service teacher education, revamping underperforming institutions such as the District Institute of Education Training, developing top class teacher educators, ensuring much higher and meaningful participation of parents in their children's education – are discussed from time to time. However, the biggest bottleneck is translating these concepts into practice.

TEACHER EDUCATION

Let us take the example of Teacher Education. Everyone accepts that “teacher” is the most critical component in making quality education happen. The way teacher education is currently positioned is untenable and does not result in top quality professional teachers. In order that to happen, we need to completely professionalise pre-service teacher education.

A study of some of the developed nations – including the Scandinavian countries -- reveals that they have immensely benefited by making it compulsory for every teacher to have a Master's degree in teaching.

It addresses three critical aspects of a teacher – content knowledge (subject matter), pedagogy and a social perspective of the process of education. Thus, a proposal of a five-year integrated course after 12{+t}{+h} standard for every teacher makes enormous sense. In our complex socio-economic situation, we need teachers who are experimenters, scientists and researchers, besides being top-notch content experts.

There is a fair amount of agreement on the fact that the teacher eligibility test (TET) suggested under the Right to Education Act is an excellent way to ensure that everyone entering the teaching profession is of a certain quality – this of course, is provided the TET is of a fairly high standard.

During the next five years, the country needs to appoint and certify almost 2.5 million teachers to comply with the RTE Act. This is an unprecedented opportunity to ensure that high quality teachers enter the teacher stream.

Everyone involved is convinced that these ideas, if implemented right, have a high potential to change the quality of education in India.

RESISTANCE TO CHANGE

However, after arriving at this understanding, most discussions turn to ensuring that we don't ruffle too many feathers.

The strategies that emerge seriously compromise the original ideas. Under the garb of democratic and participatory methods, we dilute the actions so much that they are likely to lead to only incremental changes without addressing fundamental issues.

Even those who are convinced of the merit of bringing about changes in teacher education propose to retain the training period at four years (same as current), rather than agree to an integrated five year professional programme, since they “don't want to rock the boat”. Bureaucrats want to see concrete changes in their brief tenure of one year or so, and therefore reject any long term solutions. The administration prefers short-term programmes over fundamental changes to “show” some kind of change, rather than actually creating one. Nobody wants to bell the cat in convincing the teacher unions of the merits of the change required. In my opinion, the teacher unions would be quite reasonable in seeing the benefit to future generations.

We need to surely involve the stakeholders in deciding the best recourse in implementing policy decisions. But we cannot waste inordinate time in democratizing the process beyond a point.

The author is CEO, Azim Premji Foundation