Norwegian Social services.

About 25 or 30 years back, I had been horrified to read an article about a family where two small children were taken away from their mother because she had not kept her house tidy. This was in Norway or Sweden (I forget which). A woman with two small children very often does not have time to tidy up her house. I remember my house when my son was about 5 years old and my daughter was an infant. I did not have any domestic help and it was all I could manage to cook a meal of sorts, send my son to school and take care of my daughter. Tidying the house was last on my priority list. If I had chosen to spend time tidying my house I would have to stop cooking or bathing the baby or some such more important task. (in my age group, husbands did not consider any of this their business)
In most of our households, very small children sleep with was their parents. In fact, when one of my relatives made her infant son sleep in another bedroom alone, I thought that was ill treatment of the baby. I believed (and still do), that a small baby needs to be near its mother at night.
It is ridiculous for governments to decide how someone should bring up his own child unless the parent is actually hurting the child in a manner universally perceived to be harmful.

Contd..........

Coincidentally, I just read Amy Chua's book "Battle hymn of the Tiger mother".
I do believe that we must praise children appropriately (meaning no extravagant praises), but Amy Chua is something else.
The Chinese mother treatment is fine when the child turns out to be a concert pianist as well as a cosmologist at the age of 16, but what about the normal, average children? If they become just a run of the mill physics teacher who plays the piano at family get-togethers? I think Amy Chua was lucky that her daughters survived the sergeant major treatment.

excellence

A recent post on nanopolitan mentioned something that I have come across many times. People who firmly believe they can sing beautifully, or that Harvard is just waiting for them to apply in order to give them a PhD. It varies in degree, but it's the same thing.
In our college, we have an assembly every morning where a prayer is sung. A group of students lead the prayer. A boy often goes up on stage to join this group. He is really tone-deaf, but holds the mike. So his voice predominates. The result is really painful. So why does he not know that he cannot sing? After all, these are not small children. In our college fests, students put up dances which are reproductions of the popular Hindi movie songs and that too very often with lack of coordination. The practice for just a couple of hours and it shows. But they get "wows' from the audience of fellow students.
We do not expose our children to excellence during any part of their education.

A project

I had posted on my stint as a judge for a school science fair under the INSPIRE scheme.
In this exhibition, one participant had set up a the lemon battery. Old hat. I think every science fair has one lemon battery. But when I probed a bit, this boy told me he had observed that if he used old lemons, that were spoiling a bit, he got a higher voltage. That is a remarkable observation and I found it intriguing. I told him that he must take it further.
So though his actual project was unimpressive, his was probably the most scientific work.

RGUKT

The RGUKT Rajiv Gandhi University for Knowledge Technology is a fairly new institute functioning in different campuses- Basar, Nuzvid, R K Valley and the Hyderabad unit functioning from IIITH campus.
The idea is to educate rural youth after class 10 for six years leading to a BTech degree.
What is different is the pedagogy adopted.
There are course coordinators who design the course content. Based on that, the students are presented with video lectures. They use these and the study material. There is a mentor for the class.
Students are expected to study Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Humanities and social sciences and later, the core engineering subjects.
I am curious to know if this works.
One complaint I heard was that since the students have not been exposed to the English language much, they find the video lectures difficult to follow.
I am trying to go and see how it works one of these days.

education again

"The widespread shift towards bottled water products is increasingly causing consumers to lose faith in public water infrastructure, which ultimately leads to public reluctance to support investment in public water supplies. This concerns many cities who are worried that a lack of public support will cause funding for water infrastructure to erode."

This is what has happened in the realm of education. Most people, who can salvage even a few hundred rupees, send their children to private schools. So anyone who has even a little clout, is not using this facility (govt. school). Hence there is no pressure to improve them. There will soon be "public reluctance to support investment" in school education.

more on pisa

The KV system though run by the government, works well. The learning outcomes are good in these schools. When it comes to the state government schools, the system does not work- infact, TN which was one of the states chosen for the PISA, is one of the better states in our country as far as school education goes.
I was talking to some officials of the KV sangathan and they tell me that the state governments' funding for the state schools are a small fraction of what the KV s get. That is one problem.
Another thing is to make the SCERT independent of political influence and set up an autonomous "sangathan" like the KV sangathan, and make it accountable.
The goal of every state government is making the numbers large....more number of students passing the 10th class...irrespective of whether they have learnt enough or not.
Education will improve only if the goal is to make children learn and not to just have good-looking statistics.
Will that ever happen?
Maybe not -since the Anna Hazare follower types, the now vocal middle class does not send its children to these government schools.
NDTV has been covering the admission to the KG classes of various private schools in Delhi, where they are demanding bribes of Rs 8 lakhs.
But does it give a 5 minute slot to government schools? even those in Delhi? Not that I know of.
So the chances of any pressure building to improve the govt. schools is a bit low.