Problems in rural education

Summary:

There is a noticeable difference in the academic performance of public and private schools. The gap is even steeper when we introduce the location of a school as a variable. Children from urban societies perform far better than students from the rural districts of our country

The truth is that today, more than 50% of students in Grade 5 cannot read a Grade 2 text or solve a simple subtraction problem. The truth is that today, the socio-economic circumstances that a child is born into determines the type of school she attends, the kinds of co-curricular opportunities that are available to her, the quality of life outcomes she attains as an adult, and the kinds of opportunities she passes on to her own children. It is our duty to provide equal opportunities to every child in our country. This requires innovative thinking and support.

India's future depends on its children. Socio economic conditions should not be a bottleneck to a child's future and dormant abilities. We must stress on the quality of education provided to a child-

We believe that it will take a movement of leaders with the drive, skills, and commitment to actualize this vision. The effort to eliminate educational inequity Every problem has a solution. Complex problems simply require investment of time and effort. An open attitude to ideas from key stakeholders in education will go a long way in improving the school system and mobilising resources for support.

Kith n Kin:

The Kith and Kin School was established in April 2014 to improve education levels in the district of Auraiya, Uttar Pradesh.

Low income schools lag significantly behind private schools in terms of academic achievement. Lokarpan strives towards a vision that one day all children will attain excellent education. Educational equity will ensure that all children have the opportunity to reach their potential. And the day that all children reach their potential is the day that India reaches her potential.

The schools mission is to build a complete ecosystem revolving around the parent, student and the teacher.

The school heavily invests in a specially designed curriculum to address learning gaps in children, better teaching tools, skill development and technology to build a platform. The objective is to integrate technology to aid and not replace teachers in delivering core curriculum.

Solution:

  1. Help teachers to learn the necessary skills to formulate lesson plans that stimulate student learning and thus contribute to improving the quality of Mathematics and Science education.
  1. Boost partnerships with institutes of higher education and research, including technical and professional education, schools, vocational education and training.
  1. Infrastructure investment in the education sector.

In short,

Avenues to explore:

The answer is to design a delivery system that revolutionizes education on a system level. That implies no aesthetic changes or small fixes.

  1. Teacher as curator vs. "sage on the stage" this blows apart the "banking model of education" is which info is dumped into the brains of students.
  2. Project-based learning.  Teams and collaboration. (KIPP I believe is big on this)
  3. Experiential learning.  This is backed up by education theorists since John Dewey (one of the founders of American pragmatism).  Kolb at Ohio is one of the main proponents, but certainly the TED talk on Tinkering backs this up.
  4. Real world mentors.  Skype creates the ability to bring experts into the classroom virtually and record them for later use.
  5. Kids teaching kids. 
  6. De-centered due to internet & social media
  7. Time-shifting due to internet & social media
  8. Crowdsourced (and collaborative/networked) due to internet & social media
  9. More data-driven
  10. Mobile as a platform for learning (and shared content or dataset creation)
  11. Gamification of learning

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