A perspective on the state of primary education in Bengaluru: Some insghts

Abstract

When William Wordsworth remarked “Child is the father of man” through his poignant poetry, he had actually thrown a caveat for the modern society. Childhood, as much as it is a period to enjoy without any care in the world, entails unconscious learning and orientation of one’s thought-process and actions for the times to come. It is very hard not to agree with Wordsworth, as realised by us during the course of our study in the field of primary education, primarily focussed upon government schools. For children to mature into dynamic, knowledgeable, wise youngsters, it requires good educational background and an enabling environment because children have unbridled passion, unbridled energy to take the world by storm. However, there is scope for this storm to deviate from its path and intrude into other areas. It is then that handholding by a robust, enabling environment becomes very critical. We are pass-outs from private schools which by now would have expanded into new age real estate locations. But, what about our peers across India who have gone through the government mode of education in their years at school. To address this public vs private school issue, we included a specific question for the teachers and Head Masters which asked “Why do some of the parents prefer English-medium private schools over Government schools?”. Pat came the reply from almost all quarters which said that the attraction of learning English language in private schools draws majority of children across the country, initiated by their parents who tend to get attracted by such proposition. Also, it is due to better and sophisticated physical infrastructure present at the private school premises. Moreover, RTE has further lead to lesser number of students in almost all the surveyed government schools as private schools are mushrooming quite fast in their territory. Through our field research in Primary Education, we gained various insights on the true picture of government schools in Bangalore. We also spoke to Loyola Convent and Carmel School as Govt.-aided and Govt. Unaided institutions in the vicinity of IIM Bangalore. Through this report, we just wanted to explore the current government primary education scenario in Bengaluru and the challenges that loom large. We have presented insights and observation from ground work done in Bengaluru Urban and Rural government schools. This section acts as an introduction to the harsh realities that we found on the ground and further, this study deliberately excludes insights from extant secondary research of the internet to see the situation for ourselves, first-hand. However, we have included references in the report as the sources from which we derived our motivation for studying this topic initially.