Social activist and recipient of Magsaysay Award Sandeep Panday on Sunday said nationalisation of private schools and implementation of Common School System would go a long way in purging the education sector of the existing maladies.
Speaking at a roundtable on “Students’ Suicides in Corporate Colleges” here, Prof. Pandey spoke about how every other country was reaping the benefits of the Common School System which was operated, funded and maintained by the government and envisaged equity and social justice in education. “In South Asia, Sri Lanka has 99 % literacy rate; even in the US, you have neighbourhood schools imparting free education. But we have not yet implemented it here in India,” he said.
He pointed to the fact that in 1964, the Kothari Commission had recommended a 6 % allocation of the GDP for education sector, a policy recommendation endorsed by the National Policy of Education, two decades later in 1986.
Citing the mushrooming private schools, he said they could be divided in two categories, one for the rich and the other for the poor. Reminding of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009, he rued that child labourers were dime a dozen across the country. He said though there was a provision of 25 % reservation for children of disadvantaged groups in private schools, big schools which enjoyed political clout did not implement it.
He said to galvanise the education system there was a need to delink exams from the education process. “Emphasis on exams should be reduced; there should be no detention policy; if children are not studying properly, it is the teachers’ fault; of course, some children take longer to understand,” he argued. Demanding a ban on all coaching centres, he said if schools function properly there wouldn’t be any need for them. Leaders from YSRCP, Congress, BJP and others from the civil society also attended the meeting.