The future of India at stake: UNESCO
UNESCO has surveyed the level of Indian education through its teachers and found that 1 lakh schools in India have been run by one teacher each.
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Origination (UNESCO), was established to build peace through education and culture, it works towards contributing to sustainable development,
UNESCO has conducted a survey on India for the number of schools and the teachers present in them, an ‘Educational Report for India: No teachers, No class’ has been prepared based on the survey, a total of 19 percent or 11.6 lakh positions for teachers are vacant, the 69 percent of them are in the rural area.
In the learning outcomes based on the government data of classes III, V, and VII, UNESCO has recommended improving the terms of employment of the teachers, revamping their conditions of work and in different developing regions and villages, the teachers shall also be treated as frontline warriors.
The results also show that 7.7 percent pre-primary, 4.6 percent primary, and 3.3 percent upper primary teachers are under-qualified for the job, the report that was prepared in 2019, states in its executive summary: “The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has further highlighted the role played by teachers and quality teaching in ensuring meaningful education and resilient education systems. Women account for about 50% of the teaching workforce (in India), but there are significant inter-state and urban variations.”
Three states have the highest vacancies as Uttar Pradesh (3.3 lakh), Bihar (2.2 lakh), and West Bengal (1.1 lakh). The UNESCO report keeps these states on the worst list; MP has the highest number of single-teacher schools.
On teacher qualification, the UNESCO report says about 16 percent of pre-primary, 8 percent of primary, 13 percent of upper primary, 3 percent of secondary, and 1 percent of higher secondary teachers are under-qualified in Bihar and among all the teachers at the higher secondary level, approx 60 percent are in private schools while 24 percent are the government.
As per findings “while teacher availability has improved pupil-teacher ratios are adverse in secondary schools. There’s no information on the availability of special education, music, arts, and physical education teachers. The availability and deployment of subject teachers too are not well documented and monitored almost all single-teacher schools are in rural areas and the provisions of school libraries and information and communications technology infrastructure are very low.
Writer’s review:
India is a country which was once called as the ‘Vishv Guru’ or tutor of the world but with time we can see a major degradation in the educational system of the country, the skills of teachers that are supposed to give an all-round development to children are not even properly trained.
India is on a serious threat as the major population of the country is youth, that will soon be the future of the nation and will contribute to the development of this world, the children in our schools deserve a proper education by well-qualified teachers, thus to mend the educational system of the country, reservation in teaching line must be discontinued on immediate basis.
As said by Radhakrishnan, “Teachers should be the best minds of the country”, so that they similarly nurture the future and shape the young minds in a positive direction.
