Dr Manasvi M. Kamat
Rural education is the only hope and the future of any country’, recently remarked Jack Ma, at a graduation ceremony for 220 rural educators who completed a three-year training program jointly offered by the Jack Ma Foundation in China.
A former teacher and presently the global conglomerate, Alibaba Group’s Executive Chairman Ma is popularly known for his work in improving China’s education system in poverty-stricken areas through his Foundation.
In 2016 this Foundation launched a rural education program to offer on-the-job training for teachers and headmasters in China’s most resource-deprived areas.
A year later, the foundation created a training program to encourage graduates of teachers college to work in these remote regions, where there is a shortage of qualified teachers.
The above is a perfect example of how corporates and civil societies could complement efforts of the government in alleviating the quality impediments in rural education, given the grand magnitude of rural children the government has to cater.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China’s rural population now stands close to at 1.43 billion with approximately 41 percent of this total number.
In comparison India’s 2019 population is estimated at 1.28 billion based on the UN data out of which 67 percent live in rural areas.
Given the high rural population, problems associated with rural education in India is growing multifolds given that we are expected to unseat China as the world’s most populated country in few decades.
It is believed that rural education holds the key to solving many primary problems of like youth disenchantment, unemployment, poverty, and rising crimes.
In light of this statement, India needs a considerable rethinking given the pressing fact that, the number of children in India who do notattend school is over a 100 million and rural India accounts for an overwhelming majority of this figure.
Educationists believe that instead of harping on uplifting literacy rate in India it is time that we focus on quality education in rural areas. The state of education is quite worse here.
A recent version of the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018 indicates that from the 14 to 18 year-olds surveyed across 596 rural districts; only 43 percent could solve a class IV mathematics problem. More than 40 percent could not find their State on a map of India.
Around twenty seven percent of 14 year-olds and 21 percent of 18 year-olds could not read a Class II textbook in their regional language while more than 40 percent in each age group could not read a simple sentence in English.
This survey covered around 3.5 lakh households comprising 546,527 children.
Surprisingly it is found that poverty is not the only major obstruction for education in rural India but there is something more to add to the story. The problem in rural areas is that the students lack access to education.
The World Data Lab estimates that the number of Indian living on less than $ 1.90 has fallen from 306 million in 2011 to some 70 million until today; on the contrary, more than 27 percent of the country’s youth are still excluded from education as there are no enough schools.
Most of the times the infrastructure is pathetic and the student-teacher ratio is quite improper which makes it even more difficult to pay attention to every student. Poor teaching skills, ill-informed teachers and focus on rote learning are also the other culprits.
One issue is that our schools are ill-equipped with infrastructure and available teachers.
For instance, the District Information System for Education (DISE) data shows only 53 percent of total government schools which form majority of schools in rural India have electricity connection.
Only 28 percent schools (18 percent government schools) have a computer and 9 percent (4 percent government schools) an internet connection.
It is also found that approximately 78 percent of primary schools having three or fewer teachers to attend to all grade levels.
Other major problem of rural education in India is that rural schools are still stuck on inculcating rote learning and that the quality of teaching-learning is abysmally poor.
Untrained teachers and the teacher absenteeism is also an issue. The competencies of the teaching staff in rural India are found to be below par according to the available data.
Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018 data shows that around 18 percent rural teachers in India have no professional qualification in teaching while the World Bank study found that one in four teachers are absent at a typical government-run primary school.
The case of rural education illustrated above show that more than the problem of infrastructure, it is crucial to focus on the development of four major elementary skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing, to improve the overall standard of rural education.
No doubt those standards of the teachers and the availability of infrastructure has to improve, but at least by fostering elementary skills in rural students condition of education can change in rural areas.
To enable the pupil from their schools to confidently compete in the employment sector with the urban students, the overall quality of teaching-learning in rural education has to improve by leaps and bounds.
We need many fora like the Jack Ma Foundation in India.
