Teachers’ Day musings
SHILLONG: The delay in finalising education policy, lack of regular inspection of schools, absence of any study to ascertain the cause of the poor results in board examinations and the tardy literacy programmes plague the State as the nation celebrates Teachers’ Day on Friday.
Last year the state education department uploaded the draft education policy inviting comments from the stakeholders and the public. But till date nothing has happened.
“We have received only a few suggestions and we are waiting for more observations and comments from people before finalizing the draft” Principal Secretary, Education, PK Srivastava said on Thursday.
While the education department said that not many opinions have come from the public about the education policy, the lack of publicity on the part of the Government is one of the reasons for the delay in getting adequate response to the draft education policy.
There are also allegations that there is hardly any inspection of schools by the Inspectors of schools thereby affecting the performance of the schools especially in the far flung areas of the State. Another area of concern is the poor pass percentage of students appearing in the examinations conducted by MBoSE. Other than blaming militancy and unrest in Garo Hills, no proper study has been carried out by the State Government on the reasons behind the poor success rate in board examinations. Moreover, unlike the states like Mizoram which has taken as mission to make people literate, the total literacy campaign in Meghalaya is in limbo.
Silver lines
However, Srivastava said that a series of steps are being initiated to improve the education scene and also quality of teaching. He said that with almost 14,000 schools in Meghalaya, 93% percentage of population have access to schools. While there are more than 35,000 teachers all over the state, the number of population of students from elementary till class 12 is 8.5 lakh.
He, however, admitted that the quality of teaching especially mathematics is a cause of concern.
The official said with the implementation of centrally sponsored Jodo gyan, an innovating teaching programme, there will be vast improvement in the quality of maths education. Jodo gyan makes maths interesting for the learners. The ADB funded initiative to improve the quality of education in Meghalaya is another blessing.
According to Srivastava, a lot of new initiatives of the Government have also helped in reducing the dropout rate from the earlier 12 per cent to the current 9 per cent.
