Covid Online Classroom Farce

ModiSarkar has spent 22000 crores in the last six years over Muslim scholarships and Madrassa reforms. The average per year spend is nothing alarming. However, what are the returns that the country is getting on this spend? If you ask me – negligible. Even otherwise, the Muslim community is one that will not go beyond its religion and it’s like spending money on a horse that refuses to run. The nonsense of “Ek haath Quran & Ek haath Computer” is perhaps the most moronic slogan I have ever heard from Modi. That was a couple of years ago. The biggest contributors to the Covid epidemic in India were the Muslims of the Markaz gang. Cut to the present Covid situation where schools and colleges are closed and normal schooling has ground to a halt. We hear many stories of difficulties and misery. One such recent story was a villager in HP having to sell his cow so that his kids could attend online classes being ENFORCED by the school:

I cannot vouch for this story but it seems actor Sonu Sood and others are now trying to help this man get his cow back. But as the story mentions, it is hard to understand how two kids in different classes would simultaneously learn online from one device. The smartphone is hardly a device to learn from in a regular classroom setting; one would need at least a laptop size screen and controls. Secondly, if the family has never used smartphones, laptops or internet before, they would need some training for a while to even get used to working with the smartphone and accessing online classroom. Covid is making even schools a gang of idiots. There is no way primary school students can learn from online classrooms. Schools and parents are also locked in a fight over fees and why fees should be paid when there are no regular classes. Schools demand full fees claiming they have to meet salaries and other expenses whether the school operates or not. In this Covid situation the idea should be to stick to the most essential but the news we keep getting alarms us and makes us laugh too:

Why in hell do schools behave so brainlessly? I believe it is the conditioning that they have gone through under every govt that they should not “think” in doing anything. They should behave like morons without any concern for the end-user (child) who consumes their products. A primary student, of say Class-3, wouldn’t attend online classes diligently on her own. She needs hand-holding by a parent. It’s the nature of kids to waver, to be distracted and to find some subjects uninteresting. PT and Yoga are not life and death matter for a student. People tend to forget that schools are basically “academic” centres. But the PM and GOI promote Yoga so much as a mania as against Math or Science that schoolish idiocy sets in. Instead of just Yoga, there should be a revolution that promotes interest in Math and making Math an enjoyable subject. But then Ramanujan Modi cannot wax eloquently on Math as he does on Yoga. There shouldn’t be any online classes for primary students up to Class-7 whatsoever. They can do home-study with the help of parents. But even if some online classes are held then only the most essential subjects should be taught:

English (Or Hindi, Tamil whichever is the medium) Math and Science are the only subjects that need to be taught even otherwise. These are also the subjects that should be tested. Other subjects like history, civic or social studies are not essential subjects and the students can read their text books casually and that is enough. Even otherwise, our history and social studies books are nothing but badly written garbage that the students will not miss anything in life if they don’t read them. It is only as discerning adults that people discover true history of anything. They also discover that MK Gandhi was not the only Independence warrior and that thousands of others played bigger roles. Schools are also battling with parents over fees. This is an area that the GOI or State govts should have intervened and created an amicable resolution so that both sides are satisfied. The Covid situation has brought about burdens and liabilities on everyone and parents cannot bear the same burden of fees and at the same time teachers cannot go without salaries. This should not have been such a great problem to solve if the HRD ministers of the Centre and State had sincerely involved themselves:

Once I put out a few tweets on this topic, I got some hilarious responses too. It seems there are schools charging even “transport fees” with the argument that they have to pay drivers and transport staff. This is downright stupid. In most schools, the transport is on a “contract” basis with vendors. Even so, the biggest component of transport services is the fuel. Schools would certainly not be paying for fuel with no transport. If they do have to pay salaries for drivers and staff it is manageable within the reasonable amount to be collected as fees:

Schools usually do not operate with much logic. They are centres of “Chaos” just like any govt is. Visit any school on any given day (when they are open) and you will find some staff member running here and there in some kind of emergency or the Principal still obsessed with old, redundant systems of teacher and schedule management. Schools are NOT centres of excellence in India as they should have been. They are more like assembly-line manufacturing units that produce finished goods to be packaged off to some college. There are thousands of people protesting the anti-Hindu garbage in history books in schools. This remains so as politicians have been using young students as raw-material for their own Communist garbage. If ModiSarkar has made no effort to change that, it is because Modi himself is a closet-Communist and that’s why the excessive devotion to MK Gandhi and excessive love for Mughal tombs.

A recent survey in TOI put out some information on what is happening in our school education system. It claims private schools are grooming 50% of the students being educated in the country. I don’t know what exactly they mean by “grooming” but assume it means being prepared for the next stage and a performance-driven life. Within this whole story is some damaging piece of information that everyone knows but it appears govts are totally clueless on how to measure school education. For a long time, govts’ only measure of education was enrolment in schools. They didn’t even bother to account for the drop-outs. Every govt has juggled these numbers to show they are doing better in the education domain and every govt is full of morons who really don’t understand what education is supposed to deliver: a “Learning outcome”. That outcome is never measured by anyone in the govt system:

My years of experience with schools have shown me one thing clearly – students and parents have developed a slight fear of Math. Adding to this problem is language skills that aren’t developed well. Instead of speaking, reading and writing well, language is taught and tested as some text and grammar material. These are the reasons India will remain a laggard and a country with poor innovations and enterprise.

Additionally, schools have been forced to create some kind of idiotic, composite culture that leaves a student rootless and disconnected to her own roots and culture. This is driven not only by garbage by our history and social studies books but also by social behaviour. SM has examples of glorification of Mughal mass-murderers, whitewashing of their crimes and nonsensical topics that look down upon Hindu culture and teach moronic stuff like “All Gods are one and Allah is the only God”. Why would a secular state be teaching any religious stuff at all? If the previous HRD minister Prakash Javdekar is an undisputed moron then the current one is not far behind. What does Pokri really think of education. If you see his own daughter – she strikes a Kathak dance pose (she claims to be a Kathak dancer) for her Eid greetings. In the South, Hindus often talk about Jesus and other Christian icons being dressed up as Hindus to fool people. Dressing up Jesus is not illegal unless you use it commit some fraud.

Covid is not some new disease that has afflicted our schools. For long our schools are centres of incompetence, over-burdened students and poorly trained and paid teachers. I have consistently argued that instead of increasing subjects, school education in India needs to cut down on subjects as many of them are outright garbage that students don’t need to learn. And even if any student is interested in some of this stuff then in this day and age there are enough tools to quickly learn anything. Covid will pass sooner or later but the bigger disease remains in the schools. Narendra Modi is not very interested in education. Time and again his govt forms some Committee and that is all. We will soon find more students leaving India for studies elsewhere. All this crap of Vishwa Guru, Aatmanirbhar etc are just as much lipstick as anything that this govt has been doling out. It is clearly up to parents to take care of their child’s education and culture. Leaving it to schools is a dangerous mistake.

Follow the blog on Twitter.

 

                                       Subscribe To EF                        Contribute

                                    Buy The EF Handbook               INR / US$