Schools without a Difference(The Indian Express)

Mains Paper 3: Governance
Prelims level: Navodaya Vidyalayas
Mains level: Navodaya Vidyalayas significance and their assessment

Context

•  Boarding schools are part of India’s modern history.
•  The central government launched the Navodaya Vidyalayas (NVs) in the mid-1980s.
•  NV plan was part of the National Policy on Education (1986).
•  Rajiv Gandhi desire to set up a residential school in every district was apparently inspired by his own experience as a child at Doon School.
•  Enrolment to NV’s Grade 6 was based on an entrance test, with 80 per cent reservation for children belonging to villages located in a district.
•  Not everyone was convinced that enrolment through a selection test was a good idea.
•  NCERT conveyed its doubts about the reliability and validity of a selection procedure dependent on a test among 11-year olds.
•  The government went ahead and started setting up NVs across the country.

Each school was allotted sizeable land in the countryside.

•  Generous funding and impressive infrastructure, including on-campus housing NVs were promoted as “pace-setting” schools, implying that they would serve as a model for other schools in the district.

How could they?

•  Their facilities and funds were way ahead and they were not governed by the state directorate.
•  Soon after the scheme was launched, coaching centres sprang up in every district to help children succeed in the NV enrollment test.
•  From the central government’s perspective, NVs offered a congenial institutional ethos where policies could be showcased.
•  The implementation of the three-language formula in NVs included exchanging the entire Grade 9 cohort across linguistic regions for the entire session. It was a great idea and it generally worked quite well.

Dilemmas faced by Navodaya Vidyalayas

•  After a few years of inception, the NVs faced a big dilemma.
•  Should they serve as models of child-centred education in rural areas or prepare village children for national-level contests for seats in prestigious institutions of medicine and engineering?
•  Proposals to provide coaching to the senior secondary level students were mooted.
•  NGOs like Dakshana were given permission to select children with the best potential and coach them.
•  Grilling the selected round the year without break The Dakshana website proudly claims that “more than the 1,400 of Dakshana scholars, till 2017, have cracked the JEE Advanced to secure admissions into IITs”.
•  It is hard to explain to the users of this discourse that there may be more to life than cracking the JEE.
•  From the beginning, NVs had emulated the urban public school model.
•  There was little concern to develop a new vision for rural children.
•  I recall the case of a child who was passionate about playing the flute.
•  Success in examinations, that too with high marks, had dogged the NV experiment from the beginning.
•  Principals and teachers were supposed to dedicate themselves to pushing all the children to work hard for marks.
•  The one-size fits-all template adolescents routinely face and feel, feel lonely, depressive and suicidal.
•  Suicides before and after higher secondary exams are reported every year across India.

Coaching institutions have also joined this trend.

•  In the NV case, nearly half of the reported 49 cases over the last five years are from marginalised groups.
•  As usual, the administration places the blame on teachers who are themselves overburdened.
•  The absence of trained counsellors adds to the problem.
•  The NV administration has asked teachers to notice symptoms of depression among students.

Way forward

•  Such steps might offer some help, but they will not mitigate the larger tragedy of a scheme that forgot its mission and took the beaten track.
•  Most schools justify putting children under pressure by referring to parental pressures.
•  They were expected to provide a humanistic alternative to the moribund, bureaucratised culture of common government schools.
•  Financially secure, NVs could have posed a challenge.
•  NVs had the potential to present a creative alternative to the mindlessly competitive atmosphere of English-medium urban public schools.
•  Regimentation of the child’s body and mind, and driving everyone towards a single goal that of getting ahead of others became their guiding principles.
•  The bureaucracy that runs them had little imagination or vision to define their pace-setting role in an original, creative manner

Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

Prelims Questions:

Q.1) The National Smart Grids Mission (NSGM) is an important component of the modernization of power sector in India. Which of the following best describes a "smart grid"?

(a) Any power grid that runs only on renewable energy.
(b) Power grids that will be set up only in smart cities.
(c) A power grid that allows for two-way communication between the power utility and its customers for better power management.
(d) A power grid which focuses on feeder separation of agriculture and rural households.

Answer: C

Mains Questions:
Q.1) Should they serve as models of child-centered education in rural areas or prepare village children for national-level contests for seats in prestigious institutions of medicine and engineering?