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Is premature English making India a super-dunce?
Source: Swaminomics (The Times of India dated 22-Jan-2012)
In the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) international competition for children’s learning, India came 72nd out of 73 countries. The Annual Status of Education Report (Aser 2011) reveals that the proportion of Class 5 children able to read a Class 2 text has fallen from 53.7% in 2010 to 48.2% in 2011. The proportion of Class 3 students able to do simple subtraction sums is down from 36.3% to 29.9%. India is bidding to be a super-dunce rather than superpower.
The government’s two flagship programmes, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the Right to Education Act, emphasize huge spending on school infrastructure and teacher training. But learning outcomes have not improved at all despite Rs 100,000 crore of extra spending in the last five years.
One answer is to make teachers more accountable for results. But politicians of all parties fear teachers’ unions, and dare not discipline them. Instead, politicians pretend that higher spending is the solution.
Desperate parents find free governments schools so bad that they have shifted massively to private schooling. The proportion of children in private schools is up from 18.7% to 25.6%, with another 26% going for private tuitions. The puzzle is that not even the huge shift to private paid education shows up in improved learning outcomes.
Many research studies (eg. Muralidharan and Kremer, Tooley and Dixon) have found that private schools yield better learning outcomes. But this is not vindicated at the national level in ASER’s surveys. Can so many researchers be wrong? Can millions of parents be wrong?
We need more research to find answers. Maybe research studies so far have focused on relatively strong states. Maybe outcomes have improved in higher classes but not yet in elementary schools. Maybe the shift to private schools will improve outcomes with a lag.
A fourth possibility is that states and private schools have shifted prematurely to teaching English, or teaching in the English medium. Poor parents desperately want their children to learn English. Thousands of private schools have come up, especially in the Hindi belt, with outlandish names like Saint Convent School, or even Popatlal Convent School. But not even the teachers in such schools know decent English.
Some state governments have made English compulsory in Class 1. But premature teaching of English may worsen all learning.
Educationist Helen Abadzi writes “people must be able to read one word per second, or per 1.5 seconds at the outside, to be functional readers. If they read more slowly than that, they find that they have forgotten the beginning of their sentence by the time they reach the end... If they cannot read fast enough, then all their mental attention is taken up in decoding the letters…If a child cannot read quickly, it cannot follow what text books or teachers are conveying. All schooling can bypass such children. They can spend eight years in school and remain functionally illiterate.” This sound so much like India!
Elite children enter school with a vocabulary of 3,000 words, and can read easily. But poor children start with a vocabulary of just 500 words, and struggle to read. Teaching English in Class 1 compounds the problem. Here again el | | | Monday, Jan 23, 2012 11:44AM Go to Top 2 persons liked it. |
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MIT Sloan to support Munjals' B-school
 The Munjals of Hero group have tied up with MIT Sloan School of Management to develop Munjal Global Manufacturing Institute (MGMI), one of the four new institutes coming up at the Mohali campus of Indian School of Business (ISB).
The business school of Massachusetts Institute of Technology will provide faculty support and help design the curriculum, offer joint executive-education programmes and facilitate joint-action learning projects for management students. Describing MGMI as an one-of-its-kind management institute dedicated to promote manufacturing excellence in the country, Mr Sunil Kant Munjal, Chairman of Hero MotoCorp said there is no such institute in the country at present. Mr Munjal said the country is currently lagging in the manufacturing segment and the objective of achieving at least 25 per cent of the GDP from this sector can be realised only if the country focussed on globally competitive manufacturing.
“We were fortunate to get a partnership with MIT, which is considered the finest institute in the world known for technology and converting technology into manufactured goods. We hope the institute will help raise the positioning of the manufacturing,” said Mr Munjal.
The Munjal family has pumped in Rs 50 crore to help ISB set up the institute, which will consider roping in IIT-Ropar and other Punjab-based institutes and industrial houses to create a virtual space for young entrepreneurs. “We hope the MGMI will offer holistic management expertise for students to build, promote and nurture manufacturing enterprises, apart from creating leaders in policy advocacy,” said Mr Munjal.
Source: The Hindu Business Line
BT Comment: Do you think this kind of a collaboration will help improve the quality of manpower availability for the Manufacturing industry? More importantly, will quality resources prefer to stay in the core manufacturing industry rather than hop over to the management career? | | | Sunday, Jan 22, 2012 11:34PM Go to Top Be the first to like it. |
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What's wrong with Education cannot be fixed with technology
 Steve Jobs once said: "What's wrong with Education cannot be fixed with technology". With the proliferation of technology aids and products in our classrooms today, are we really looking at the root causes of the problems, or are we simply trying to tackle the symptoms?
Read the article
for the "other" perspective on technology for education... | | | Thursday, Jan 19, 2012 12:48PM Go to Top 2 persons liked it. |
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Seven Free Platforms for Teaching Online Courses
Anyone of you interested in offering your own online course? Here are seven FREE platforms to help you do just that! The list aptly starts with Moodle, the grandpa of such solutions. But you must check out the others before you decide on the most suitable one for you.
- Moodle
- Claroline
- Udemy
- RCampus
- Learnopia
- eDhii
- Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU)
Of course, the bigger challenge is to get students for your courses! But this is a good beginning:) | | | Tuesday, Jan 10, 2012 10:36PM Go to Top 2 persons liked it. |
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Share your teaching innovations in our news magazine, The Staffroom
BT is launching "The Staffroom": The Teacher's News Magazine exclusively for teachers. We invite your teaching experiences/ innovations for the inaugural publication due early February.
Please send your articles in the following format:
- What was the objective of your teaching innovation?
- How was it implemented?
- What was the result on the students’ learning?
Please send any appropriate photographs of the innovation along with the mail to thestaffroom@beyondteaching.com. The deadline to send the articles is Jan 15, 2012. | | | Monday, Jan 09, 2012 7:51PM Go to Top Be the first to like it. |
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Beyond Teaching is to serve the teaching community across the globe with innovative offerings that will help them in self-development, which in turn, will effect social change by passing on information and awareness to their students. BeyondTeaching was conceptualized by a few concerned educators who have had a combined experience of over four decades. Having interacted with scores of teachers, both in the formal and supporting systems of education across the world, we felt that it was time we paid homage to the influencers of the society. | BT Admin
Job Alert: Part-time content development
An education technology product development company is looking for teachers who can develop curriculum and content for their innovative product due to launch in early 2012. The Company so far has enrolled 30+ top schools in India as their co-creation partners, and plan to take their products to thousands of schools in a few years time. The product aims to solve fundamental quality issues that exist in K-12 education globally. The team consists of founders (Most of them from IIT/IIM) having significant experiences in business creation and technology creation.
Beyond Teaching is proud to be associated with this company and invites applications from interested members to work part-time from home on this project.
The work involves the following:
- Curriculum design for CBSE/ICSE/IB/State boards
- Content development
- Explanation creations
- Question templates
- Solution development
- Audio/Video recordings
- Content classification for various type of children
- Experiment design
- Concept/story creation for games for each topic
- Brainstorming and reviews
Expected Qualification/Skills:
- Passion for creative teaching
- MEd/BEd
- Post graduation in science
- Teaching experience from Grade 1 to Grade 8 or Grade 10 science in CBSE/ICSE/IB schools
- Any teacher training program for more than 3 months abroad
- Any teaching exp abroad esp in US/Europe
- Any science content development exp in any other company
- Very good written and verbal communication skills in English
- Teaching exp should consist of
- Class room teaching
- Creation work books/activity books
- Writer of science books for any publications
- Designer of new games/experiments in science that did not exist in books
- Exposure of children psychology
No of positions: 3-5: Virtual contribution, company will train selected candidates in tools , guidelines and templates
Expected hours per week: 20 ( Evenings and Weekends)
Expected infrastructure at home: PC+MS office with broadband network connectivity
Remuneration:Rs. 5,000 to 10,000 per month depending on relevant qualification and experience.
If you are qualified for the above, and are interested in applying, please update your profile at BeyondTeaching.com and submit more detailed information on this form online.
In case of any questions, please comment on this post. | | | Wednesday, Oct 12, 2011 7:47PM Go to Top |
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