It’s very encouraging that the London-based Pearson Group — the world’s largest education and publishing company — has entered the Indian education market (‘Pearson Group’s megabucks rollout’, EW March). As a textbooks publishing company operational in India for the past several decades, Pearson has earned a good reputation for making foreign texts and titles available to students at Indian prices as foreign books are very expensive and inacces-sible. Now there’s the refreshing prospect of the Pearson Group offering its entire range of world-class education services and products to Indian schools and colleges at affordable prices.
It’s important that Pearson is price sensitive given that a large number of schools in India charge students very modest fees and government schools levy no fees at all. It’s these low-end schools that really need Pearson’s help to upgrade and improve teaching-learning standards. I hope the Pearson Education management will maintain its book publishing division’s low-pricing strategy for the Indian education market.
Manvendra Sharma
Delhi
Make teachers accountable!
Your special report ‘ASER 2010: Shocking primary learning report card’ (EW March) was a real eye-opener. Though the author Summiya Yasmeen has done an excellent job of exposing pathetic learning outcomes in rural schools countrywide, she has not highlighted the most important reason for stagnant outcomes in government schools — teacher inertia. We should not brush the truth that the teachers’ community is primarily responsible for persistently declining learning stand-ards in rural government schools, under the carpet.
Heavily unionised, government teachers are neither motivated nor accountable for delivering even minimal learning outcomes. The consistent drop in teacher attendance reported in ASER is proof of their indifference to doing a good job despite their steadily rising salaries.
With the Sixth Pay Commission having fixed Rs.23,000 as the starting monthly salary for primary school teachers, it’s high time teachers are made accountable for stud-ents’ performance and pay is linked to learning outcomes. In fact government school teachers should not be upgraded to Sixth Pay Commission pay scales across the board until a minimum 70 percent of children in their classes display age-appropriate reading and math competencies. Moreover the Right to Education Act must be amended to give school management committees the power to penalise absentee teachers.
Such bold measures need to be taken to check rampant teacher truancy and inertia.
Anita Deshpande
Mumbai
Root cause
Re your editorial ‘Include ethics in school curriculums’ (EW March). The purpose of education should be to empower children to make the right decisions and work for the betterment of society. Unfortunately nowadays the prime objective of education seems to be to enable students to find well-remunerated jobs and earn maximum money.
This is the root cause of the spreading cancer of corruption in Indian society. I believe that in addition to introducing ethics in schools, yoga and meditation should also be made compulsory for all students. This will help them develop healthy minds and bodies.
Mahesh Kapasi
Delhi
Overdue call
I must applaud your editorial ‘Include ethics in school curriculums’ (EW March). It’s a timely and overdue call against the backdrop of the country’s prime minister justifying the Rs.176,000 crore 2G spectrum allocation scandal as the price of coalition politics on national television. Prime minister Manmohan Singh’s clean image has been severely dented by the series of scams hitting the UPA-2 government. There’s no point in him proclaiming his honesty and sincerity if he is unable to check corruption within his cabinet. Sadly, today’s children have no role models in the political space.
With the tidal wave of scams and scandals threatening to turn into a Japanese-type tsunami, India’s 450 million children can only dream of recovering the “opportunity cost of (lost) capital”. Rigorous lessons in ethics and morality are the need of the hour in K-12 education to excise the growing cancer of corruption.
Sushmita Basu
Bhopal
Metropolitan bias
With the onset of summer I presume you will soon start work on EducationWorld’s annual survey to rank India’s most respected schools. As a journalist, while studying your 2010 league tables, I was shocked by your metro-centric rankings. You seem to have completely overlooked some great schools in small towns, where the concept of day school education originated.
Last year your surveyors completely ignored the fact that the day schools of Dehradun have given India several top politicians, industrialists and journ-alists. St. Joseph’s Academy, Dehradun (estb.1934) was the alma mater at one time of all three chiefs of the armed forces. Moreover, St. Thomas’ College (estb. 1916) and Convent of Jesus & Mary (estb. 1919) also deserve a place in your rankings, if your rankings are to be credible.
These schools were founded much before India’s partition/independence by Anglo-Irish education societies and were the embodiment of the British- derived day school tradition, which now represents the Indian school education system. Dehradun’s day as well as boarding schools have traditi-onally stimulated the all-round develop-ment and intellectual curiosity of their students — qualities required by universities in India and abroad.
Don’t leave out small-town schools this time!
Karan Mehrishi on e-mail