Education

Advantages of NDP

·         NDP guarantees and provides for the continued presence of the child in school during the formative learning phase.

·         Detaining is unlikely to be an incentive, when social circumstances already make it hard to ensure regular attendance.

·         For example, The NITI Aayog had found that bringing back detention in elementary schooling would increase the dropout rate.

·         This would impact the poor and Dalits the most, as they depend on government institutions.

·         Thus, detention would weaken this significant, progressive feature of the RTE Act.

Drawbacks of NDP

·         While dropout rates under the earlier NDP did fall, but it also led to falling standards of educational achievement.

·         It was also found that the lack of education attainment meant that students in the age group of 14 to 18 struggled with foundational skills such as reading a text in their own language or solving a simple arithmetic division.

·         This poor understanding among students, in turn, led to a sharp spike in dropout rates in classes IX and X.

·         The general conclusion that emerged is that in the absence of detention, students had no real motivation to learn anything, nor did the teachers have any reason to make students understand.

Should scrapping NDP alone help?

·         There are some genuine concerns on learning outcomes produced by India’s schooling system.

·         But these are determined not only by a student’s effort. It depends on various other factors including –

1.       poor teaching standards

2.      inadequate infrastructure facilities

3.      lack of monitoring mechanisms

4.      skewed pupil-teacher ratio

5.      active engagement of parents and the community in encouraging excellence, etc

·         It is the lack of attention to some of these determinants that has created a “broken” school education system.

·         Detaining already disadvantaged children can only break it further.

·         Any dilution of the RTE Act without sufficient thought will erode a major constitutional achievement.

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Please Review

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