Children are seen as assets of a nation. Though at the policy level, children have become the focal point of development and education, yet much requires to be done at the implementation level so that the benefits of policies reach every child of India. The child development policies of the last five decades are enshrined in the following documents: Article 45 of the Indian Constitution; National Policy for Children (1979); National Policy on Education (1986/92); Convention on the Rights of the Child (1992); National Nutrition Policy (1998); National Charter for Children (Ninth Plan) and the recent constitutional amendment for making elementary education a fundamental right.
Policy-Action Gap
Despite these policy initiatives and large scale Education-for-All projects like Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan implemented in the last one decade, no break through has been made as far as the contextualization and improvement in the quality of rural elementary education is concerned. One thing positive has happened is that the access to primary education has improved tremendously. Now there is a primary school within one to two kilometre periphery of every habitation.
More than eighty percent of rural schools have situation in which a single teacher has to handle many classes or a multi-grade situation, but the teaching methods are geared to the mono grade context. Thus the whole system of rural education is designed to fail. Another two factors which are contributing to the low quality of rural primary education are the alienation of the local community from the school and developmentally inappropriate child care and protection both at home and school.
Two-Pronged Strategy
Keeping the foregoing in view, two pronged strategy is required to improve the quality of life and education of rural primary children as follows:
1. Empowering the families and communities to provide developmentally adequate care and protection to children;
2. Making education quality-oriented by contextualizing child development as well as community-basing of rural schools for a non-graded of multi-level primary education.
For small rural schools, an integrated child development initiative is required. The rural schools need to have a non-graded system with requisite teaching-learning material for all children with a pupil-teacher ratio of thirty. The management of the school should be completely community-based including the supervision of mid-day meals. Also, formation of separate empowered mothers’ group would be required for rural schools. The mothers’ group can be imparted family-life and child-care education so that their participation in routine immunization programme also increases.
The quality of rural schools should be judged by the indicators of enhanced academic achievement levels of children, increased participation of girls in education and successful completion of primary education by all enrolled children. Unless proper attention is paid to the care and education of rural children, the development and progress of society will remain biased for urban section only. There is need to couple equity with quality for education rural children.
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