Education for All? That's not enough!

“Sarva Shiksha Abhyan (SSA) is Government of India's flagship programme for achievement of Universalization of Elementary Education (UEE) in a time bound ...” (Source: ssa.nic.in)

SSA is primarily aimed for the kids belonging from poor and under privileged backgrounds. There is a similar state funded program in the US called KIPP and this too is intended for kids from poor and under privileged backgrounds.

Apart from the kind of kids these schools target there is hardly anything common between them. Look at the names again.

Sarva Shiksha Abhyan literally translates to- The Education for All Movement.
KIPP is an acronym for- Knowledge Is Power Program.

Note the difference in intentions. One is concerned about numbers, other is concerned about knowledge.

Our efforts are concentrated at opening maximum schools and admitting maximum students. And in a country like India, that makes sense.

But are we concerned about quality, at all? About methodology for teaching?

KIPP schools are considered among the best public schools in the US. At KIPP, students are taught Maths, science, social studies and language. As well as problem solving, structured thinking, communication skills and music. The students are made to work hard, throughout the year, almost without any summer vacation (more on that later).

We all are aware about the state of government funded schools in India. Many of you must have seen it first hand, others must have read about it. But that entire situation is just one of the problems.

One of the other reasons of failure, or ineffectiveness, of the state funded schools is  their intention. A school for the penniless. Our current system makes schools for the poor, makes the content suitable for kids belonging to such families. This results in making those kids incompetent against the ones in private schools.
What should they do instead is make schools of  excellence- accessible even to the poor. Make the content superior and have best teachers to teach them. Make the students to work hard, provide them with incentives to work harder. We need to build schools that can provide quality education to the maximum.

Doing that on as massive scale as India’s, would be a daunting task. It would be a risk, with disastrous outcomes should it fail. Here again we can learn something from KIPP, we can start this as a pilot program, open only a few schools in the beginning. Improvise, update and expand them with time.

I want to talk more about on KIPP, but I'm more concerned about our education system. What our present education is doing- producing what I call employees (which some point out, are not even employable) . Instead it needs to produce more employers, original thinkers, innovators. The education structure has hardly changed in decades. Most of the entrance exams consider school reports and performances irrelevant. There are not enough incentives for the students to work hard and excel at schools.

We need a mix of both- people who are employable as well people who can think and create. As many scholars and concerned people have been saying- Our entire education system needs an overhaul. But I think, and most would agree, we should work on the grass root level first. And government schools would probably be the best place to start with. Not just the quantity of people we educate, but the quality should matter too. It should matter more. Bringing in Akash would not help anyone. Students would watch the lectures on their tablets, only if those lectures are worth watching live, only when there are incentives to watch those lectures at all.

For curious minds:

Click here to read about the state of our education.

About Summer vacations  |  A fantastic report on Summer loss  | What is summer loss?

Or, read Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

Why people do what they do

If you google the title of this post, you'll find links to several pages providing answers with psychological explanations. But that's not what I want to talk about. Often we come across people who work all day and all night, thriving for one dear thing. I ask to myself, what drives these people?. Is it fame, money, power or dominance, the attention from the opposite or[and] same sex, that governs the statics and dynamics of their world. ( The last one especially about little, vague things going around)
If you read about successful people, especially the unbiased versions, or even better, the crtical versions, you'll notice that the things that drove them were not always fancy, perfect-world qualities like high values, quest for knowledge or ambition. Not even money. But sillier things like insecurity, jealousy and approval-seeking habits. For example, some people say, that in his early days, Steve Jobs always had this chip on his shoulder, he always felt this need to prove his might, to prove his abilities, to prove his superiority. Where did this quality led him to? Apple Inc., today it's America's most valuable company dealing in technology.
And we all know about Mark Zuckerberg. We all have seen the movie. What drove him? Rejection from his girlfriend. Unacceptance from the social group. (No surprise, Facebook essentially thrives on acceptance from people and social groups.)
There are more examples, especially on the darker side. Criminals, murderers and anti-social personalities are the extreme examples. But I'll not get into those.
My point is, sometimes when such a quality exists inside an individual in excess, it may boost the individual's creativity beyond any imagined level. It may help them unleash their full potential, which in some cases may remain unparalled. Whether it is harnessed constructively or destructively, that's a whole different issue.