TEN SUGGESTIONS TO IMPROVE EDUCATION IN INDIA

Few will be surprised at the news that India ranks very low in global rankings of learning. 

Here is my das paisa on what to do about it. 

In India, the emphasis in education has always been on developing technical manpower at post-secondary levels. Improving quality, access and infrastructure at primary and secondary levels has always had much lower priority, until very recently. These policy priorities of the last 65 years urgently need to be reversed. Here are 10 proposals to do that. 

1. Let the main beneficiaries of technical education, viz., industry, pay for good quality education by investing in universities and IIT's, and vocational institutions. 
2. Let the state enable and subsidize community and private sector participation in primary and secondary education, and let schools and workplaces link up more effectively so that the walls between them are lowered. 
3. Let more teacher training institutes be created by the state and others to raise a generation of educators who model good learning, and who are able to design good SOCIAL learnscapes (see 9 below). 
4. STOP EQUATING EDUCATION WITH SCHOOLING and devise alternative flexible channels for learning, using IT and broadband. 
5. STOP EQUATING ASSESSMENT WITH STANDARDIZED EXAMS, and introduce a wider range of assessments of performance based on authentic understanding. 
6. Develop alternative credentials that post-secondary institutions and employers can recognize, based on the new assessment methodologies. 
7. Restructure schools so that their students can learn to function creatively, compassionately and productively in the real world, not spend their childhood and youth in misery preparing for one test after another. 
8. Assess and reward private sector contribution to education by measurable benchmarks for enhancement of intellectual and social capital, not by RoI or market share alone. 
9. Let the best teachers teach at the primary levels so that by the time learners reach secondary and tertiary levels, they are capable of SOCIAL (Self-Organized Collaboration for InterActive Learning). 
10. Devote the major share of educational resources to developing primary years and secondary learning for an unknown future, not for the past.