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The Gujarat Education department went into a tizzy after a senior bureaucrat pointed out several learning shortcomings among students in schools in the state’s tribal belt.
Geology and Mines Commissioner Dhaval Patel, who visited six primary schools as part of the flagship school enrolment programme Shala Praveshotsav, found several Class 8 students who could neither add single-digit numbers nor read a word in Gujarati; instead, they would read it alphabet by alphabet.
Some students could not point out where Gujarat or the Himalayas were on the map of India. He added that mass-copying in exams is more than common in these schools.
In a letter dated June 16 addressed to Education Secretary Vinod Rao, Patel has not only highlighted the “extremely poor” education level of the students, but also how the teachers had failed to respond to his queries.
“These poor tribal children do not have any other source of education. It is my strong opinion that we are doing injustice to them by giving them this rotten education. We are ensuring that they continue doing labour work generation after generation and not move forward in life. This is the height of moral decadence where we are cheating students and their parents who trust us blindly.
Despite required infrastructure and teachers, how can we get such a level of education is a puzzle for me. Children stay with us for eight years. If they still cannot add and subtract, it shows the lack of capability of teachers,” the 2008-batch IAS officer stated in his report.
In the aftermath of the stark revelations, Education Minister Kuber Dindor stated that he sought a report from the department. “I have learnt about the observations from the media and have sought a report. We will take all necessary actions and (will see) what can be done in the future to correct the same,” Dindor, who was in Godhra for the annual convocation of Shri Govind Guru University, said.
The minister, who also holds the tribal development portfolio, said he, too, belonged to the same interior tribal region where parents lack awareness. “We will try to spread awareness among the parents. All the shortcomings will be looked into,” he added.
Minister of State for Education Praful Pansheriya, who was also at the same convocation, told mediapersons, “Improving the standards of education is our responsibility. We will take all corrective steps to improve education in schools with poor results. There might be some schools in some areas with bad results, but many schools are there where teachers work very hard and take extra classes, too.”
The eye-opening report also led the education department to conduct a review meeting over video-conference on June 21 of all the education officials and staff of the six government schools in Chhota Udepur district that Patel visited. According to sources, block and cluster resource centre co-ordinators, district primary education officer (DPEO) and taluka primary education officers also attended the review meeting chaired by Rao in the presence of Patel.
“Though I was not with the commissioner (Dhaval Patel) as I was accompanying Development Commissioner Sandeep Kumar in other schools, I learnt about the report and immediately called a meeting of the school staff and my staff,” Chhota Udepur DPEO Imran Soni told The Indian Express.
Despite repeated attempts, Dhaval Patel did not respond to calls, while Rao declined to comment on it.
According to Patel’s report, students at Timla primary school of the district exhibited “extremely low quality” standards of education. Class 8 students were not able to even read words. They “added single-digit numbers with great difficulty and even that was not correct”, he claimed.
Highlighting the menace of mass-copying in annual exams, Patel pointed out how despite an erroneous Mathematics question on square root, the answers given by all the students were correct. “When I asked the Maths teacher, he said the students have made a mistake in calculating and gave an incorrect answer. My heart just sank hearing that,” he wrote.
He applauded the Rangpur Primary School where teachers were good that reflected in the education standards of students. However, the standards at Bodgam Primary School were in a “pitiable state”, he stated. “Students failed to answer simple questions such as ‘what was the opposite of day and light’. However, they had written it correctly in the answer sheets. A Class 8 girl student could not point out the location of Gujarat or Himalaya on the India map,” Patel cited.
In Wadhwan Primary School, Class 5 students could not subtract 18 from 42.
“I saw some magic here. In their answer sheets, students had described how to make lemonade in English, but they failed to read the question in English. They even failed to read the English words! Despite not understanding the question, how could they have written the answer? We can only imagine that the teacher had made them write the answer,” the officer alleged.
At Jamli Primary School, a girl student started crying when asked to add 15 and 14, but another student gave an incorrect answer when asked to subtract 36 from 80. Similar standards were reported at Ranikheda Primary school where Class 9 students failed to respond to Class 8 questions.
All these schools are in the red zone, according to the state education department’s annual performance of government schools. “These are tribal villages on the border where parents do not care much about their wards. Students do not even understand Gujarati properly and normally, nobody visits these schools. So when they were asked, while some got scared, others failed to understand the questions like the opposite of day and light,” Soni explained.
Patel visited the schools during the state-wide annual enrolment drive on June 12 and 13. He said he had randomly selected class 2-8 students to ask questions from their previous year’s annual examinations.
Barring basic infrastructure and the number of teachers, which were satisfactory in all the schools, everything else was “worrisome”, the officer warned.
Often, students do not start coming as soon as the schools reopen, Soni said. “It takes the teachers to get them back. Normally it takes two to three weeks for these children to get to the routine and revise what they have studied in the previous classes. Students had just arrived at the schools just that day. This would not have happened if the visit had taken place two to three weeks later. It made the teachers worried, too, as many children started crying and could not reply to the questions,” the official added.
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