India Today School Summit 2016: Bring back the energy in classes, say speakers

The first India Today School Summit 2016 began with a panel discussion on whether the homogeneous education system is valid for the heterogeneous society. The inputs from the panel discussions would be presented to the Ministry of Human Resource Development on a white paper and a follow-up would be done this with them.

The speakers, R Govinda from NEUPA; Ashish Dhawan from Central Square Foundation and Meeta Sengupta, Founder of Centre for Education Strategy, talked about the need to introduce multilingual learning and real life connectivity, massive investment on principals and teachers, assessment and evaluation of the resources, administration and teachers.

The speakers said measuring the conceptual understanding at every level, be it the teachers or the students, and providing better opportunities to children and developing a paradigm for teachers was the need of the hour.

R Govinda said that till the foundation of the elementary education is strengthened the children would not learn. "50 per cent schools in India do not deliver and it is the irony that they are called school. There is a need to develop a sense of ownership among the teachers. At the moment we have a fragmented education system and from 15 years now we need to shrink the number of schools. We need to make massive investments to make our schools comfortable and wellequipped if we have such long aspirations to fulfils the lives of children. We also need to invest on teachers as there are 80% teachers in our country who want to teach compared to the 20 per cent who don't want to teach. Develop resources, material availability, train teachers to cope with the fastchanging world," he said.

Taking the discussion forward Ashish Dhawan focused on the need to formulate indicators to assess the level of education in every state that could be used to strengthen quality of teachers. "We need the people on the bus. It is the teachers and principals who make the difference. Technology can be used as a way to get to the teachers. The education technology could be used to upgrade skills of the teachers and the principals.

The third speaker, Meeta Sengupta from Centre for Education Strategy talked about the need for diversity and innovation in the education system. She explained that the there is a need to build such a community that will in future build create corporate citizen. Schools are in the business of creating employable citizen.

The education system along with innovations should also focus on diversification. "Why should schools be standardised? There is a need to connect innovation with the diversity. Teachers need to bring back the energy to their class. We are asking teachers to join in action. "We should be highly focused on infrastructure, innovation and interactive among universities" she said.