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Ashwin Mahesh

@ashwinmahesh

26 Oct

The pandemic has hurt a lot of children's education, but it's also done one other thing that was long overdue - it has left govt education departments with a much smaller role to play than previously, as more parents begin to look for and accept alternate paths to learning.

Most parents still look forward to the reopening of schools, I'm sure, but their expectations from the schools are bound to have shifted during the pandemic. The most important of these is the sense that physical infrastructure is only a small part of how children learn.

A second shift is the recognition that schools are not the only place to learn. They've always seemed like the natural place to learn, to a lot of people, but if that natural order is disturbed as violently as it is now, there's no choice but to start looking for alternatives.

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Ashwin Mahesh

@ashwinmahesh

25 Oct

Across the world, politicians who built rickety public health systems that allowed a full-blown pandemic are offering voters free and locally-made vaccines. It would have been infinitely better to have leaders who wouldn't have landed the world in this soup in the first place.

It should be an easy choice. What would you rather have - a made-in-your-country vaccine for covid, or no virus to worry about in the first place? But the day-to-day machinations of politics converts even a pandemic into a silly soundbite contests.

In a few weeks, we'll probably become the country with the most Covid cases in the world. We'll tell ourselves that's because we have a lot of people, so we should expect higher numbers on everything. But that will just be the excuse of the moment. The truth is a lot worse.

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Ashwin Mahesh

@ashwinmahesh

25 Oct

Political promises of a 'free vaccine' are no big deal. There is simply no way to roll it out effectively if it is not free. No matter who makes the decision, it will have to be free to have any chance of being useful. Promises of more jobs, OTOH, are worth examining closely.

This is now a common promise in elections. "We'll CREATE more jobs." Mostly, the promise is not linked to any policy for job creation. It's simply stated as a promise, and repeated. That's unfortunate, because there is a lot that can actually be done to enable more employment.

Or more correctly, there is a lot that can be done to improve livelihoods. This distinction is important, because the the number of educational and training institutions that provide paths to 'employment' in the conventional sense is too small to serve even 10% of the population.

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Ashwin Mahesh

@ashwinmahesh

20 Sep

WHO SHOULD TEACH? (From my column in Deccan Herald).
----

For decades, we've known that the education system in the country is badly broken. Fewer than half the children complete school, and many in college are merely going through the motions. None of this is new.

What is new is an Education Policy. The NEP, some educationists say, accepts there are many things that need to be changed. They point out that for the next twenty years we can expect this new vision to dominate the landscape of education policy and implementation.

News articles have picked up the key phrases - pre-primary learning, inclusion, vocations, emphasis on foundational literacy and numeracy, etc. And another set for higher ed - multidisciplinary education, balance between research & teaching, credit banks for courses, and so on.

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Ashwin Mahesh

@ashwinmahesh

5 Sep

Why don't ALL schools do what the BEST schools do? Especially the public schools. Clearly there are some schools in the country that are doing well, and are sought after by parents. Why don't we figure out what these institutions do, and get more schools to do the same things?

The usual explanations are (a) it costs a lot of money to do what the best schools do, so that can't be done everywhere. (b) the best schools have parents who are themselves well educated, many others don't. (c) the best schools have great teachers, and they're in short supply.

Bunkum. What's in the way is something else. When it comes to education, we're in wilful blindness. The biggest reason we don't measure outcomes in our education system is that we can be 100% sure that if we did, we would find that we are an unmitigated disaster on all counts.

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Ashwin Mahesh

@ashwinmahesh

26 Jul

Consider these two options. In option 1, you are experiencing power cuts every day at different times, and this frustrates you no end. But if you complain to the Discom, someone gets around to attend to it quickly. In option 2, you don't ever lose power. Which is better?

A govt that can prevent problems from arising in the first place is considerably better than one that merely fixes them as they arise. But it's not a simple matter to ensure that only such govts get elected, or that public administration is strong regardless of who's in power.

Power cuts and potholes are actually the much smaller examples. The biggest deficit is in education, from which all else flows. We have a situation where more than half the children in the country are not receiving even a complete school education. It's bound to crumble.

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