siliconindia | | January 201819Let me just focus on the scenario in the rural north Karnataka, where the parents who are well off prefer residential schools in the cities or towns for educating their male chil-dren. The reason for this option is many. First and the foremost is the availability of the quality school in their nearest surroundings. What is a quality school? Is it a school with good faculties and facilities? When we speak about faculties, especially in rural private school, retaining the faculty is a big task. The facul-ties of any quality, selected through interviews and selection tests gets better through various in-service programmes, workshops and train-ing etc. Once they feel they are bet-ter off; they try to move out to cities and towns in search of better ameni-ties. Then there is always a question, what about the government schools? In government schools attendance of the staff and the students is a big challenge. The government has intro-duced mid day meal programme for the students, which has improved the students attendance but not learning. If we can really transform the gov-ernment schools into a real place of transferring knowledge, and if we are serious about it, the government need not invest crores of rupees in RTE to educate the poor. We also should think seriously whether, through RTE the needy are really benefitted? The second reason for choosing a residential school is because, in day scholar schools after school hours, once the child reach back home, they won't be able to learn unless they are self motivated, genuine and has a craze for learning. Many parents leave their children independent for learning. They won't be able to check what exactly he/she is involved in. They feel that the entire responsibil-ity of educating their child lies in the hands of the school as they are pay-ing for it. Also they are not in posi-tion to be available to their children as they are busy with their farms and are sometimes staying in distant farm houses. Another challenge faced by ru-ral India is availability of quality school in their reachable surround-ings. In rural Arunachal Pradesh you cannot dream of quality school in their reachable area due to limited population. To serve rural India, one should have a mind prone to service and sacrifice. Education in present days is the responsibility of every individual. For the lack in quality, let us not completely tarnish the school and teaching community for all the un-wanted incidents that we come across through media. Of course, stringent action needs to be taken against the culprits. To bring out the innate ca-pabilities and creativity of the child, the teaching community requires a free and undaunted mind. A teacher requires constant motivation and ap-preciation to work better. When the parents pressurize teachers for marks, and if the performance of the teacher is evaluated on the basis of the scores made by the children, the teacher may not be able to do much in improving the quality of education.The need of the hour is to im-prove the quality, we at K J Somaiya English Medium School, which is lo-cated in rural north Karnataka, con-centrate on building self esteem and confidence in students. This confi-dence and self worth makes the stu-dents work harder. We believe that, for better learning children require more motivating and nurturing envi-ronment, which we always stick on. We should also think seriously about the syllabus and the number game. In the run of completing syllabus and scoring marks do we sometime forget the under achievers? May be that is the reason, our children are not able to master the numeracy and literacy skills. If we can really transform the government schools into a real place of transferring knowledge, and if we are serious about it, the government need not invest crores of rupees in RTE to educate the poor
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