Modern societies are engulfed by innumerable social and suicidal evils like drug abuse, murders, kidnapping, militancy etc, that pose threatening effects on the society. Education being the backbone of the society needs immediate and urgent attention as it is the process through which the society deliberately transmits its Cultural heritage, knowledge, values and skills from one generation to other generation and is an important tool to eradicate the social evils from the society. Nothing can better reform the society than the education. Education may rightly be called as the basic structure on which the entire society rests and without which building will definitely collapse. Our well-versed Prime Minister Indra Gandhi has rightly quoted that Education is a liberating force, and in our age, it is a democratizing force, cutting across the barriers of caste and class smoothing out inequalities imposed by birth and other circumstances. Given the recently introduced New Education Policy, it is the ripe time to undertake educational reforms and to do away the lacunas persisting in the education system. Against the national literacy rate of 74.04, % Jammu and Kashmir has a literacy figure of 68.74%. The first and foremost reform that needs to be done is infrastructural development. In the educationsystem, either the schools are housed in rented buildings or if Government buildings are available, they do not have sufficient accommodation. In Government Schools, we often see unavailability of clean drinking water and lack of toilet facilities for students. There are a number of schools where honest and dedicated Head of the Institutes have constructed classrooms of teen (commonly called Teen Shed) as temporary alternatives to well-built classrooms but these classrooms too face certain limitations in hot summer. Here mention may be made of Government Higher Secondary SchoolHarduPunzoo where the dedicated Principal has got built two classrooms of tin shed to accommodate the increasing enrollment. To build up a high quality education system, adequate funding must be made available by the Government to improve quality and making education affordable to all. Another important area where the Govt needs to give utmost attention is the deficiency of teachers/lecturers as it is hugely affecting the academics of children. The New Education Policy ensures Pupil teacher ratio as under 30:1 but in actual practice such ratio is not practically seen as almost 90% of the Schools are having insufficient teaching faculty. Here the mention may be made of MS Waragam/ MS Ringzabal of Zone HarduPunzoo where only 5 to 7 teachers have been teaching to almost 215 students. We rarely find sufficient teachers in Primary, Middle and High Schools in rural areas. In and around Srinagar city, Schools are over staffed, as the teachers prefer to get themselves posted at such Schools lying in the vicinity of the city. It is very unfortunate that we are expecting good outcomes in academics without equipping Schools with required staff. Appropriate pupil teacher ratio should be maintained for the smooth functioning of teaching learning process. The Schools instead of being deficient of teaching faculty are further over burdened by certain additional duties including BLO duty, COVID 19 duty, Survey duties, election duty, etc. The Government has assigned BLO duties to teachers and has recently deployed such teachers for electoral summary revision for 20 days. It is to be mentioned here that the teachers should not be assigned such additional duties as it amounts to loss of their main duty i,e.,teaching duty. Here we should learn from the education model of the Delhi Government where teachers are meant only for teaching, no additional duties are assigned to them, and such a practice along with other reforms has yielded best results as the Govt Schools have been over performing the private schools since the reforms were introduced in Delhi. Trainings play an important role in our education system but in J&K, imparting trainings to teachers has not been effective and efficient nor based on modern and sophisticated techniques. Our ZRPs and CRPs are no longer meant for the job of imparting trainings but they have been used as carriers for submitting Roll statements, Staff statements, MDM statements etc. Although India is going to be digital and all the information should have been made ready on the official websites in regular updation forms. Digitization would relieve the resource persons of their carrier jobs. The services of such resource persons remain unutilized owing to such mismatching of assigned jobs. Moreover, these resource persons should not be stationed at CRCs but they should be involved in teaching at their own Schools and called to impart training only when required. Promotion of teachers to higher posts on the basis of seniority is also a big challenge that needs to be resolved. A strategy needs to be devised to ensure quality teachers are promoted to higher posts. One such strategy is the promotion through departmental examinations and even promotion to administrative posts in education department must be made through these examinations. Classrooms need to be brought on the same footings as like that of modern and developed nations like USA, UK, etc., Implementation of Smart classrooms should be viewed and watched seriously by utilizing the services of inspection teams that need to be appointed among the teachers after undergoing departmental examinations and such teams should be transferred regularly to avoid monopolisation and favouritism. Monopolization of offices by teachers need to be taken into consideration as monopolization leads to corruption and favoritism. The Government needs to come up with a transfer policy for RReT teachers as such teachers should not monopolize offices by enjoying duties at the single place nor feel bored by working at the same school for years. Moreover, these teachers should be given same status and similar treatment as given to other teachers. The political uncertainty is another major problem with the education system in Jammu and Kashmir. Sometimes the educational institutions remain shut for days and even months, which spoils the career of the students. A strategy should be devised through which we can make schools able to run even in curfew. Curriculum of the Government Schools is faulty and improperly framed and needs to be revised and updated. The Government should introduce text books of private Schools in Government Schools as such text books are time tested and have yielded good results in private Schools. Since the elementary schools have already been established under SSA scheme in almost all the villages of J&K. Now, the Government should make efforts to establish higher secondary Schools and colleges in rural and backward areas to enable poor and needy students to get easy and cheap access to education. The role of the parents is of utmost importance and they should actively participate in the learning process of their children. They should be encouraged to take part in the activities organized by the educational institutions. Parental care is equally important and parents need to equip their children with moral values right from the birth of their children.
Learning oriented teaching should be given emphasis instead of syllabus-oriented teaching and the teachers should not be forced to be restricted to syllabus and its completion. Mental distress is also a big problem in J&K. According to a Doctor without Borders study in 2016, 45% of the population in Kashmir are experiencing “mental distress.” From a child to an old age group, no one is safe from outside violence. This mental distress needs to be given much attention and steps need to be taken to reduce it. Salary of the teachers especially of private school teachers is a discouraging factor, as the teachers remain depressed even in classrooms, which hampers the teaching learning process. These teachers do not bear the expenses of their families and frequently draw loans from banks and fell victim of the debt trap. The details of bank accounts of the teachers reveal that more than 70% of the teachers have availed loans. The No Detention Policy is another major challenge before the education system in J&K. The enforcement of this policy makes it mandatory for the teachers not to detain any student out of his own negligence against the best efforts taken by the teachers at their end. Due to this policy, the teachers are bound to promote students to higher classes even if they are not fit for the next class due to their academic weaknesses. By promoting these academically weak students to the next class, their academic weakness gets increased by regular promotions to higher classes. This increased and accumulated academic weakness poses disastrous effects on the carrier of these innocent students. This policy needs to be done away and the teachers should be allowed to detain the detain the academically weak students who fail in the exams and by detaining these students would improve them academically and this will prove a big achievement. The laws governing the suspension of Government employees especially the teachers need to be amended and these suspension laws should be made strict and much punitive in nature. A suspended teacher should not be allowed to avail the benefits of periodical increments. The Uniform Academic Calendar recently introduced by the Government in J&K is a novel and reformative initiative as it will bring J&K on equal footings with rest of the UTs and states of India.
(The author is a Freelancer. Views are his own)
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