Singapore has the best education in science and math in the world, followed by Finland, Switzerland, Lebanon, Netherlands, Qatar, Belgium, Estonia, Honh Kong and the US, according to the World Economic Forum. India stands at the 37th position.
The quality of math and science education depends upon public funding and the education system.
The countries ranked up to 36 spent more than 6 per cent of their GDP on education against 3.3 per cent in India.
“Our education system gives more stress on marks and grades rather than quality. Our education policy should be changed to address quality concerns,” an expert said.
Dr Srini Bhupalam, an education expert, said, “It has been proven that quality of education can be provided pretty effectively to small populations.”
“If you look at the list, most of the countries population is very small. It’s always a challenge to do the same for very large populations. Nevertheless we have a lot of scope to do better,” he added.
He said Indian students were good at reproducing on paper due to rote learning. “We cannot expect any change in our rankings until the method of teaching is transformed into practical, concept and application based,” he said.
“Our testing and evaluation methods also need to be transformed to measure students understanding and application for creative problem solving,” Dr Bhupalam said.
Dr Narsimha Reddy, Principal, Hyderabad Public School, said, “Small countries are progressing in science, math and technology. The government must take education as a challenging field. The curriculum and methodology should be altered to teach science and math’’.
He said most teaching happens to score marks. “What, why, where, when and how are the most important questions in science and math. How many schools are really making students curious and inquisitive,” Dr Reddy asked.
He said hands-on experience was given top priority in developed countries.
“What facilities are available in our schools. Teachers are busy finishing the syllabus and parents are worried about marks. Curriculum and pedagogy have to be changed,” Dr Reddy said.
Not everyone was in agreement that Indians did poorly in maths.
P. Obul Reddy Public School principal Anjali Rajdan said Indian students do very well in maths but the WEF ranking did not reflect it.
“I can accept the ranking in science as our labs and infrastructure are not at par with other countries, so standing 37th is humbling.”
Source of the notice: https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/current-affairs/041118/india-ranks-37-in-quality-of-education.html
In an alarming development for Indian students, Balbharati – the Maharashtra state bureau of textbook production and curriculum research – has issued a copyright policy that forces all publishers, digital educational-content creators, and coaching classes to obtain expensive licenses for developing material directly or indirectly relating to Balbharati’s content. The stated object of the policy is to prevent commercialization of Balbharati’s physical and digital material.
Balbharati is responsible for setting curriculum and content for Classes 1-10, which is followed by Maharashtra state board schools. It is estimated that that around 85,000 schools in Maharashtra follow Balbharati’s prescribed content and syllabus, and the policy is set to affect students’ access to affordable supplementary material in state board schools, especially – most of which belong to the vernacular-rural section of society.
The government faced a backlash from various groups after the policy was released last week.
Parents have expressed serious concerns about the impending increase in the prices of educational material; publisher groups have already declared that the burden will be passed on to students. Some booksellers have stopped selling material altogether until the issue is resolved.
Digital and print publishers, booksellers and coaching classes are the ones directly affected, apart from the students, some of whom have lodged appeals with the state education minister, Vinod Tawde, to roll back the policy. Faced with the ire of multiple groups, the state government released a revised policy with a new license-fee structure. The new structure is based on “Balbharati Specific Turnover” slabs (defined as turnover of an entity from Balbharati related content), which depends on the nature of content produced – physical, digital, or tuition classes content.
A license is required of any person involved in the business of developing educational material such as guides, reference books, questions or tests, chapter summaries, model practice question papers, interactive digital content and software, with fees chargeable on a per subject, per medium, per grade basis.
The revisions to the policy only allow for a reduction in licensing fees, and it is likely that the government is still in ignorance of serious legal defects in it. Drafted with support from global consulting firm KPMG, the policy uses copyright as an instrument to justify the collection of license fees by making two fallacious assumptions: first, that all material produced by Balbharati is copyrightable; and second, that any dealing in Balbharati’s material, directly or indirectly, amounts to copyright infringement.
For example, the English Kumarbharati for Class 10 uses Tagore’s historic poem “Where the mind is held without fear…,” which is a work in the public domain now, and then proceeds to provide certain academic exercises for the reader.
Similarly, for science and mathematics syllabi, where basic facts and fundamental principles are provided and explained, is the Maharashtra government trying to establish copyright over such material, implying that this is creative material that has been developed by Balbharati’s staff?
Much of the content in Balbharati books deals with subjects that have been known to mankind for hundreds of years. Copyright law protects only expression of ideas, and not the ideas per se. Any supplementary material developed by another publisher over Balbharati’s syllabi should not amount to infringement, provided it is not a substantial copy-paste of Balbharati’s own expression in the books – and this is a conservative view of the scenario.
Indian copyright law
In fact, the Indian Supreme Court in the Eastern Book Company vs Modak (2008) case held that, “to establish copyright, the creativity standard applied is not that something must be novel or non-obvious, but some amount of creativity in the work to claim a copyright is required. Selection and arrangement can be viewed as typical and at best result of the labor, skill and investment of capital lacking even minimal creativity, which does not as a whole display sufficient originality so as to amount to an original work of the author.
“To claim copyright, there must be some substantive variation and not just a trivial variation, not the variation of the type where limited ways of expression available and author selects one of them.”
Thus the policy fails to appreciate fundamental developments in Indian law and places a barrier to creation of all kinds of educational material – without distinguishing between various kinds of supplementary material and showing precisely as to what nature and quantum of use as per Balbharati would qualify as infringing.
Interestingly, the previous version of the policy contained an FAQ (frequently asked questions) section that elaborated principles of copyright law. However, this section has been removed in the latest version. In any case, the FAQs presented incomplete explanations of Indian copyright jurisprudence, making references to outdated case law.
As noted earlier, publishers and digital content development companies are already suffering from the ramifications. In places where the quality of classroom teaching and learning is sub-par, it is unacceptable to deprive students access to affordable guides, reference books, digital content, and so on by unreasonably deeming indirect usage of Balbharati’s content as infringing activity.
Given India’s socio-economic conditions, it would be fatal to implement policies that seek to create a self-serving market of educational licenses for the state, very much at the expense of ensuring quality and affordable education. At the very least, the Maharashtra government should have conducted a proper public-consultation exercise before arriving at such a policy that stands to affect students and other stakeholders in the education system adversely.
Source of the article: http://www.atimes.com/maharashtras-copyright-policy-makes-education-unaffordable/
06 de diciembre de 2017 / Fuente: http://theconversation.com
The Indian higher education system faces stiff challenges. Australians may not imagine they’re well placed to help. But there are opportunities for exciting collaboration between Australia and India in reforming higher education.
In 2004 and 2005 I spent a year living in the north Indian city of Meerut, where I was working as a geographer and anthropologist. Every day I’d get up, walk past a crowded tea stall, and enter the local college to chat to students.
On one side of the college gate was a statue of Gandhi. He passed through the campus in the early 1920s, when the college attracted students from as far away as Nepal.
Near the statue a small group of students congregated to protest about corruption in the city. They called themselves the Chingari group – “chingari” means “spark” in Hindi.
On the left of the gate was a decrepit science block. A student had scrawled on the building in huge white letters “In need of an acadmic atmosphere” – with “academic” misspelled. Although a few students saw themselves as sparks and tried to effect change, the general feel of the college was depressing. The graffiti was like a projection of the mood of most students I met. One told me:
The equipment here is like the equipment in your country fifty years ago. They should throw it down a well.
One in ten people in the world is Indian youth under the age of 30.
Roughly 94% of Indian students study at state-run universities and colleges. These State run institutions face many challenges.
First, curricula are poor. India has a rich tradition of critical education. The British systematically eroded this system, and post-colonial governments have not been able to sufficiently revise colonial courses. By some estimates, only a tenth of those graduating from private colleges in India have skills relevant to employment markets.
Second, there is a lack of research occurring in universities. This partly reflects Prime Minister Nehru’s decision in the 1950s to channel research funds into non-university research institutes. And this situation is getting worse. In 1990 India produced more scientific research papers per year than China. In 2011 India produced barely 30% of China’s.
Other major problems include inadequate governance arrangements and mismanagement within universities, poor university links to industry, and lack of funding. Educated unemployment and underemployment is also a critical issue. Some students say they’re engaged only in “timepass”: everyday efforts to stave off boredom and manage a sense of dead time.
A statue of Mahatma Gandhi, a leader in the Indian independence movement against British rule.Shutterstock
Why should Australia be involved?
There’s a moral argument for Australian universities to engage with this situation, since they profit from Indian student enrolments.
There’s also a financial incentive. People in regional India are spending enormous amounts of money on poor quality education. Australian providers could fill the gap in this market by offering better quality courses.
There’s also untapped talent among the mass of Indian students in state-run universities and colleges. Australian universities should be helping to identify and provide opportunities to these many great minds.
And there’s a mandate from many sections of the Indian government. Niti Aayog, India’s Policy Commission, has called for international assistance in reforming higher education.
Challenges to collaboration
Australia is poorly placed to respond to this challenge in some respects.
Despite the tripling of the Indian population in Australia since 2005, India knowledge in Australia is low. Six universities in Australia taught an Indian language in 1996. Now only two do.
Australian universities tend to concentrate only on engaging with elite higher education institutions in India, which puts the significant amount of students in regional Indian institutions at a disadvantage.
Within India, philanthropists have established some excellent private universities in recent years that could generate educational and economic growth in the regions they’re located. Australian universities have recruited faculty with Indian expertise, and are already engaging in some exciting experiments in this space.
How efforts could be extended:
Australian universities could link with top universities in India to create regional educational ecosystems. Many of the best new private universities in India are already engaged with their regions. Ashoka University, for example, runs workshops for college principals and outreach programs in schools. Australia could learn from and supplement such initiatives, using the best private and public universities as hubs.
Australian universities could sponsor basic research. We know almost nothing about Indian higher education in regional and rural India. Even within India there’s very little understanding of higher education in those areas.
Australian universities could develop access scholarships for talented Indian students who are not part of the elite. This might entail trusting Australian faculty with India expertise to make qualitative assessments of students outside the normal metrics.
For these approaches to work, we need to use Australian universities’ experience in thinking about access and diversity onshore, and apply it in India.
Some of my friends in Meerut have responded to educated unemployment by getting involved in counterfeit private education. They are reproducing the system that produced them as unemployed youth. But others are energetically improving their local school and college systems. These “sparks” could be partners in reform.
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