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Although the national education
budget is over Rs 30,000 crores, government schools have
come to be known as poor or even bad schools, specially
in the urban areas of this country. And because they cater
to the poor, quality of education, it is assumed, can take
a back seat.
Government teachers, the best
paid school teachers in the country, are usually a law unto
themselves and officials of the state education departments,
barring in exceptional areas and states, make no bones about
their mission to make whatever money they can. There was
a time though when government schools, at least some of
them, were acknowledged to be the best.
These schools invariably had a
large campus, playground, and funds for extra curricular
activities. It is tragic to find the same schools, specially
at the district headquarters, now languishing. A turn-around
is, however, evident in many parts of the country. In Nagaland,
they have successfully experimented with involving the community.
Even the salary of teachers is being disbursed there by
members of the community, whose wards are studying in the
same schools. By one stroke this has solved the problem
of absenteeism and teachers, who rarely visited classrooms,
have fallen in line.
A similar experiment is being
done in Bihar, where the elected sarpanch of the
panchayats have been entrusted the task of checking the
attendance of teachers. Teachers, who visited schools for
a brief period after lunch, have become more visible now.
It is said that the Bihar government, in turn, has empowered
the teachers to keep an eye on the activities of the sarpanch
and report on them.
The complaint is that the government
spends little on education. But in absolute terms, it runs
into several thousand crores in the country. Unless systems
are improved, more investment is going to yield nothing.
Government must classify its schools into two or three categories
on the basis of education given and its infrastructure.
The best category should be able to compete with the best
private or “public” schools catering to the rich. There
cannot be two standards of education, one for the poor and
another for the rich.
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