Will computers help Goa's children? By Daryl Martyris dmartyris at hotmail.com
For the last five years a silent revolution has been happening in Goa's village schools. Overseas Goans have been sending money and used computers to village schools. The government has been distributing PCs (personal computers) to schools. These are merely symptoms of a wider trend -- the growing awareness of the need to be "computer literate", and to meet the demand computer training classes are mushrooming. But why this strongly felt need? Ask parents and teachers and they'll tell you that their kids need to know computers to get a good job. No doubt the Indian software and BPO boom have something to do with this calculation. Ask school-kids and you get the same response. But, with few exceptions, kids also say that they don't want to be computer programmers. I know this because in my five years of being involved with the Goa Schools Computers Projects (GSCP), I have asked dozens of kids the same question. The question then, is whether getting a computer diploma from NIIT or learning computer skills in school will help, say, 14 year old Geeta be a fashion designer, or 15 year old Elroy be mechanic... or help any of the other thousands of kids in one of Goa's approximately 450 secondary and higher secondary schools which have PCs become what they want to be? One would hope so. The crores of rupees being poured into computers for schools by the government are seen by the authorities as an investment in the future of Goa's children -- an admirable goal indeed, and one pursued with much greater efficiency by the Goa Department of Education than perhaps any other state in India. The reality, however, just might be different. In May this year, Gaspar D'Souza wrote a series of well-researched articles in the Navhind Times on how basic computer skills or even an intermediate diploma from the private companies no longer commands a wage premium in Goa. In short, for the handful of students who get into the post higher-secondary institutions offering computer programming skills, the future beckons brightly in Bangalore or Mumbai -- but for the B.As, B.Coms and BScs, acquiring a basic computer skills diploma is just another line their Curriculum Vitae's that is rapidly becoming standard. Now, this doesn't mean that kids don't need to acquire computer skills in school. It means that they don't need three years to learn how to use a word-processing and spreadsheet application, as the present syllabus prescribed. They can learn the same thing in a month's time by themselves, without any help from a teacher. I've seen it with my own eyes -- barely literate slum kids teaching themselves how to use the computer. Computers in schools can be use in a much more effective manner to improve cognitive skills in students, giving them a boost in learning math and other subjects, thereby increasing the probability that students from humble village schools can compete for admission to professional colleges on par with elite city schools. The Internet can also compensate (though not fully) or the lack of good libraries in schools. Internet can give children from village schools a window on the world that normally only city schools have. For example, kids from the little village school of St. Bartholomeu's, Chorao, under the strict supervision of their computer teacher, email their cyber-buddies in a Boston school and learn about each other's lives. They use the Internet to make learning more interesting. Without computers in their school, few of them would have these opportunities. Personally, I'm not so sure that computers are the most important thing for school kids. For example, I'd rate a clean latrine in the school much higher, or good ventilation, or a well trained teacher who doesn't spend his entire class making kids mindlessly copy from the blackboard into their notebooks. Ten years after the Clinton administration's "The Internet in every classroom" became a reality in the US, there is no still firm link between computer usage and improved academic performance. Recent studies in Israeli schools and closer home, in municipal schools in Mumbai, have shown that unstructured learning exercises with educational software do not help children perform better in language studies and math. In fact, at lower standards, using computers on a regular basis actually caused them to regress. Conversely, a study by Michigan State University shows that low-income children who spent more than 30 minutes a day on the Internet saw improvements in their grade point average and their scores in standardized reading tests. There is a lesson to be learnt here. Firstly, unlike the US where every student has his or her own computer to use in schools, few schools in Goa have more than four computers and often barely enough room to fit a whole class into a lab. So kids are divided into batches and called after school for computer subject practicals. However a subject teacher, say a math teacher who wanted to explain a concept using say graphing software for geometry (which many kids find hard to visualize), would need to split the class into several groups to take them to the lab. Too complicated and there's not enough time for that. So its back to the old "stare at the blackboard and copy into your notebook" routine. Maybe tuitions after schools. The solution is obviously to increase the number of PCs, and to incentivise teachers to use the computers. Not an easy task, but one being accomplished by some of the schools helped by GSCP. Most of them got 3 PC's from the education department and additionally 4 from GSCP. Some schools got their PTAs to hold raffles and canteens to raise money to buy new PCs or put wiring in the lab. The winner of last years Computer Society of India award -- Savior of the World, Loutolim -- is one such school. Others wrote to their MPs to help them via the MPLAD (MP's Local Area Development Scheme) scheme. Then there were the schools (that I shall leave unnamed) that let their valuable computers gather dust because the headmaster or principal did not care enough to take the initiative to raise money to buy an relatively inexpensive un-interruptable power supply. Waiting for hand outs from the government or private parties is not the solution -- nobody has the resources necessary to give every school a decent computer lab. Some resources have to come from the community itself. In the final analysis, nothing succeeds like success. In my opinion, the kids in St. Bartholomeu's I referred to earlier, already have a better chance of succeeding in their careers because they now have the priceless gift of confidence in themselves to build bridges to strangers. Across the world, more and more schools are following along the same path. Those that don't risk being left behind. If parents care about their children's future, they urgently need to take an interest in how schools in Goa are using their computers. -- A Goan who lived mostly outside Goa, Daryl Martyris is a board member of Knowledge Initiative Trust, the non-profit organization that oversees the Goa Schools Computers Project. He is a former management consultant with PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP and is currently completing a masters degree in International development at Harvard University. ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
