There is hardly any country that is not attempting to improve its Education system. As can be expected, there is such enormous complexity in the efforts to improve school education systems that each country and society must be understood in itself. To improve Education, improvement is needed inside and outside the classroom. There is no substitute to good teacher preparation; unless teachers are well prepared, their capacity to perform is limited.
In a conversation with Shri Anil Swarup, Hon’ble Secretary Department of School Education & Literacy, MHRD, Government of India, we were enlightened with the initiatives taken up to reform the Education space.
What do you think should be the main focus on today’s Education sphere?
Our main concern today is to see whether these children who are coming to the schools are getting quality Education. And hence, our complete focus will be on teaching and how to get the teacher to the school, get him trained and make him teach the way it is done.
So, the focus would be on quality education in the days to come. And government has recently laid out the learning outcome parameters that are there on the portal which we have finalized as to what is actually happening on the ground. According to the analysis, that we do, we will see how we can further analyse and improve the date of affairs by improving their curriculum and quality of teachers.
The other challenge in terms of globalization, in that context, is that, Technology is going to play a very important role whether it is schools in the remote parts of the country or schools in cities like Delhi, because technology can transform the way we deliver education and we don’t have to go the traditional way of Rote Learning as it was in the past.
How is the Government working to bring about this change in the Education setup in the remote areas?
In this sphere, I think, Technology can play an important role as I was mentioning sometime ago, we are trying to introduce a small technological gadget like tablet, in a school which can work offline and online. We can use that for the purpose of taking attendance of children but much more than that, we can use that small gadget for downloading a lot of audio/visuals material which can then be used for calculating the children.
And interestingly, this is already being experimented in some parts of the country. The real challenge for us is to replicate it and scale it to level that it benefits children all over the country.
