Parallel institutions damaging public education systems
By A City Reporter
GUWAHATI, Nov 16 To achieve a remarkable success in the field of education
in our country, we need to engage every single person of the society in the
process or else we will never be able to create a civil society and gradually
loss faith in the public education system, remarked Prof Ved Prakash,
Vice-Chancellor, National University of Education Planning and Administration
(NUEPA), while delivering the tenth Foundation Day Lecture of the Assam Higher
Secondary Education Council (AHSEC).
Speaking on the topic of Educational Development in India: Positioning
Secondary Education in Policy Planning, he said that the most prominent factor
hindering the progress of education in India is the hierarchical values and
attitudes that are entranced in our society.
There is a deep-rooted thought in our society that education is not
everybodys cup of tea and we still believe in the superiority of intellect,
which is more prevalent in the elite, upper middle and middle class people, he
said. After independence, we created different layers of educational
institutions in the society, which classified the public education on
hierarchical basis. Elaborating his point he said, When the Sainik Schools
were created for the children of soldiers, the officials of higher rank sought
for Army Public Schools for their children. Similar divides were made in Air
Force and Navy also.
In the same way, he continued, the so called babus in government asked for
Kendriya Vidyalaya. He further added that instead of strengthening the public
education system, a chain of parallel educational institutions was created that
demolished the public education system.
It is important to keep in view that we need to learn much about our secondary
and higher secondary education so as to rightly position them in the policy
planning process. The starting point, therefore, is to create comprehensive
database and undertake diagnostic studies on different aspects of secondary and
higher secondary schooling to feed into our policy planning process, he added.
Blaming an inappropriate centre-state participation for further deterioration,
he stressed that getting a major share of the total revenue collection, the
central government should play a major role in the field of education. Only
ten per cent of the total expenditure on education is given by the federal
government and rest 90 per cent is spent by states. On the other hand only 3.56
per cent of the total GDP is spent on education in the country, where there is
a need of spending more than 6 per cent of total GDP on education, he
maintained. Though Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Deputy Chairman of the
Planning Commission MS Ahluwalia have declared to establish 30 more central
universities, 7 IITs and IIMs, 20 IIIT and 346 more colleges, the country
strongly lacks a serious exercise of manpower training to teach in these
institutes, he added.
(The Assam Tribune,17.11.2007)
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