Gist of Education For Emerging Challenges | Gist of Rajya Sabha TV / RSTV (now Sansad TV) - UPSC PDF Download

RSTV: The Big Picture- Education for Emerging Challenges

Introduction:

Why Education  is important for removal of poverty and India’s Development:

• Education is the tool which alone can inculcate national and cultural values and liberate people of false prejudice, ignorance and representations.
• Education provides them required knowledge, technique, skill and information and enables them to know their rights and duties towards their family, their society and towards their motherland at large.
• Education expands their vision and outlook, provokes the spirit of healthy competition and a desire to advance for the achievements of their consciousness regenerating truth, and thereby capability to fight injustice, corruption, violence, disparity and communalism, the greatest hazards to the progress of the nation.
• Quality education is today’s need as it is the development of  intellectual skills  and knowledge  which will equip learners to fulfill the needs of professionals, decision makers and trainers.
• Education provides many opportunities in various fields for the development of the country. Education makes people independent, builds confidence and self-esteem, which is very important for the development of a country.
• The UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report and the Education Commission’s Learning Generation Report:-
  • 171 million people could be lifted out of extreme poverty if all children left school with basic reading skills. That’s equivalent to a 12% drop in the world total.
• Education increases individual earnings
  • Education increases earnings by roughly 10% per each additional year of schooling
• Education reduces economic inequalities
  • If workers from poor and rich backgrounds received the same education, disparity between the two in working poverty could decrease by 39%.
• Education promotes economic growth:-
  • No country in the world has achieved rapid and consistent economic growth without at least 40 percent of its adult population being literate.
• The creation of green industries will rely on high-skilled, educated workers. Agriculture contributes 1/3 of all greenhouse gas emissions. Primary and secondary education can provide future farmers with critical knowledge about sustainability challenges in agriculture.
• Education benefits people’s health throughout their entire lives, from a mother’s pre-birth lifestyle to the likelihood of developing diseases later in life.
  • Women with at least six years of education are more likely to use prenatal vitamins and other useful tactics during pregnancy, thus reducing the risk of maternal or infant mortality.
• Education has proven to benefit women and girls at a higher rate than boys. The empowerment that girls receive from an education both personally and economically is unmatched by any other factor.

How to do it:-

• Education is a means to secure employment hence there is need to encourage and expand avenues for vocational training.
• Make the problem visible
  • Regular assessments are needed to measure progress in learning .India should participate regularly in international assessments so as to set goals and benchmark its performance and progress.
  • The quality of national assessments should be improved and third party assessors like Annual Status on Education Report and Educational Initiatives should be encouraged to provide periodic feedback.
  • The District Information System for Education (DISE) system should be upgraded to a ‘Student Progress Tracking System’ which will track learning levels of individual children and provide diagnostic data to serve as a basis for improvement to schools and teachers.
• Build systemic and institutional capacity by strengthening research on learning and building teacher strength.
• The focus on students, parents and teachers is on maximising exam marks and not on learning, which needs to be corrected by having Board Exams that measure learning.
• Implement the recommendations of Subramanian report especially giving precedence to merit.

Way Forward:

• A complete paradigm shift is needed as far as our education system is concerned. However, one has reason to believe that  there are some positive signs too. For example, in schools itself, we are talking about Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA)- these are definitely encouraging signs.
• Skilling has to improve across higher education sectors and it has to be diverse. Let’s not forget that only about 5% of the Indian workforce is trained in any sort of skills today; we are staring in the face of a demographic disaster if skill development is not undertaken

Conclusion:

• Our education must be all round developer. It must be based on creative rather than memorizing. Practical or Visualize education must be promoted.
• It is time that India began viewing school education as a critical strategic investment and gave it the status of a vital infrastructure project.
• As all in-country efforts have failed, we should go in for a radical overhaul of our educational infrastructure with the help of countries that have an amazing record in providing quality school education — Finland, for instance. We can surely afford to pay for that.
• Providing universal quality education depends not on the performance of teachers alone but is the shared responsibility of several stakeholders: governments, schools, teachers, parents, the media and civil society, international organisations, and the private sector.
• If only India had begun revamping school education at the start of economic liberalisation, it would by now have had the world’s largest pool of well-educated and highly trained workers. Fortunately, India continues to have the largest number of young people anywhere.
• By ensuring they get a world-class education over the next few decades, India will be well on its way towards becoming a developed nation sooner than expected.
• Thus, access, equity, and quality, this is one aspect of education. The second aspect of education is skill development. Thus, skill development, access, equity and quality, these pillars are equally needed in all the three sectors.
• Proper implementation of the reforms and ideas envisioned in the NEP 2020 will fundamentally transform India.
• With the emphasis on knowledge-economy driven growth in the 21st century, this is precisely what India needs to dominate in the future decades of growth and drive the education requirements of our young population.