Inside India’s Education

I am glad to say that I am one of those lucky few kids in India who had the privilege of attending a private school. My parents could afford to send me to a good school, and I am eternally grateful to them. But, I did not understand how lucky I was until 2006, when I volunteered to teach English to a group of kids studying or rather enrolled in a government school where subjects are taught in regional language. It was when I met these kids aged between 6-12, and I got firsthand information about their class structure, teachers, syllabus, etc. Recently, I read “Needs Improvement’: Despite Progress, India’s primary education system has ways to go” published in The Lauder Global Business Insight Report 2013 by Knowledge@Wharton. In the rest of this paper, I would like to compare my first-hand experience and reflect on this article.

Majority of the population in India lives in rural areas with access mostly to government led primary schools. Rural India is the backbone of India and the future of India lies in the hands of the children of India. Currently the problems I see with government-led schools in India are:

* The teaching medium in most of the schools is the regional language of the state in which the school is located [5] * The very large ratio of students to teachers hence lack of individual attention [6] * A large number of untrained teachers [7] * A general lack of disinterest in learning due to the attitude of people surrounding the children i.e. parents, teachers, friends, etc. [8] * Even if some good-will exists in some of the politicians, it is lost in bureaucracy [9] * Government teacher’s salaries are not as high as those given to teachers in private schools, so all good teachers look for opportunities in private schools rather than in government schools * Some of the people are employed