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.
