Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: India, nuova legge sull'istruzione

Ma è da temere che sarà solamente un altra legge nobile ma irreale.
http://www.ansa.it/web/notizie/rubriche/mondo/2010/04/01/visualizza_new.html_1758821392.html
India, nuova legge sull'istruzione
Milioni di bimbi potranno essere integrati in sistema scolastico
01 aprile, 17:26
(ANSA) - NEW DELHI, 1 APR - Milioni di bambini indiani, fra 6 e 14
anni, fuori dal sistema educativo, potranno essere integrati nei
diversi gradi scolastici. Entra infatti in vigore una legge che
contempla l'istruzione di base come diritto fondamentale e gratuito.
Rivolgendosi al Paese nel momento di firmare la legge approvata dal
parlamento, il premier indiano Manmohan Singh ha detto: 'Il nostro
governo viene di fronte a tutti voi per impegnarsi solennemente a
fornire a tutti i bambini una educazione di base'.

Dalla cronaca The Hindu, su questa questione:
http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article381710.ece
India's children have a precarious right
Krishna Kumar
One hardly needs a reminder that the Right to Education is different
from the others enshrined in the Constitution, in that the beneficiary
cannot demand it nor fight a legal battle when the right is denied or
violated.
Now that India's children have a right to receive at least eight years
of education, the gnawing question is whether it will remain on paper
or become a reality. One hardly needs a reminder that this right is
different from the others enshrined in the Constitution, in that the
beneficiary —a six-year old child — cannot demand it, nor can she or
he fight a legal battle when the right is denied or violated. In all
cases, it is the adult society which must act on behalf of the child.
In another peculiarity, where a child's right to education is denied,
no compensation offered later can be adequate or relevant. This is so
because childhood does not last. If a legal battle fought on behalf of
a child is eventually won, it may be of little use to the boy or girl
because the opportunity missed at school during childhood cannot serve
the same purpose later in life. This may be painfully true for girls
because our society permits them only a short childhood, if at all.
The Right to Education (RTE) has become law at a point in India's
history when the ghastly practice of female infanticide has resurfaced
in the form of foeticide. This is symptomatic of a deeper turmoil in
society which is compounding traditional obstacles to girls'
education. Tenacious prejudice against the intellectual potential of
girls runs across our cultural diversity, and the system of education
has not been able to address it.
The new law has many critics. Some of them are among the nation's best
known educators and, therefore, their concerns must be heard. They
have raised two major issues: one, the law does not cover pre-school
education; and two, it offers no vision of systemic reforms leading to
a decent common school system. Both issues are valid and the
government's strategy to implement the law must cover them. As for the
first issue — coverage of early childhood — a first step can be
recognising the year before Class I as a necessary pre-school year to
provide an enabling experience for the success of eight years of
formal education stipulated by law. This step would require
substantial planning and coordination among the departments of Child
Development, Health and Education. The second point the RTE critics
are making draws attention to the divisive, and not just divided,
character of our system of education. A vast gap of resources,
facilities and efficiency exists between the private schools which
cater for the better-off strata of society and the ones run by the
government. Within government schools, there is a vast difference
between Central schools and those run by municipalities and village
panchayats. It is not true that RTE offers no vision of improving our
fragmented system. The provision for 25 per cent reserved seats for
poor children in all private schools as well as Central schools makes
a gesture towards the common school model. Critics of the RTE rightly
find it a weak gesture but they forget how difficult the execution of
even this diluted form of common schooling is going to prove in a
stratified and divided society.
Already, lobbyists of private schools have gone to court, challenging
the legal validity of the RTE. The private sector in school education
has grown quite substantially and rapidly over the last two decades.
Not just private schools, a strong ideological lobby which favours
privatisation has also grown. Members of this lobby believe that the
RTE can best be implemented by market forces and the government should
subsidise these forces by distributing school vouchers. This
remarkable philosophy sees the RTE as a crowning moment in the ongoing
history of the state's withdrawal from education. Critics of the RTE
rightly suspect that it could speed up commercial privatisation.
Considering how fast popular disillusionment with the state's capacity
to provide education of reasonable quality is spreading, we should not
be astonished if the critics are proved right. Many State governments
see privatisation as a real option, and the signals coming from the
Centre seem to endorse this view.
However, the debate over private versus public interests conceals the
single greatest problem both private and government schools face: the
shortage of qualified teachers. Behind this shortage lies a long
history of neglect of teacher training and the poor social status of
the elementary school teacher. Teacher training has remained on the
margins of the Indian academia, and the training of primary school
teachers outside it. The National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE)
has reinforced this message of the RTE by demanding a higher entry-
level qualification for elementary teachers' training. The NCTE has
also sent a strong policy signal that all courses for this level
should come under the purview of universities. These signals will
require sustained follow-up action, for which the NCTE will have to
improve its own functioning and image as a regulatory body.
Going by RTE norms, at least a million teachers will need to be
freshly recruited and trained. The challenge of teacher recruitment
and training will prove especially grim in the Hindi belt and the
northeast, West Bengal, and Jammu and Kashmir. In Bihar, the number of
teachers required is very huge and the institutional capacity for
training very low, and in Madhya Pradesh, no one knows how to undo the
decision taken long ago to stop the recruitment of career-path
teachers. In West Bengal, overlapping structures have impeded
curricular and administrative reforms. These States are not the only
ones battling internal legacies of neglect or confused planning. The
northeastern States have a vast number of untrained and poorly
qualified teachers who are already in the system. Violent conflict
between the government and the people has cast a shadow on childhood
in many parts of central and northeastern India. The progress of the
RTE in these parts cannot be easy or smooth. This also holds true for
mega-cities like Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai where children of the poor
live in Dickensian misery.
For the southern States where the system is in better health, the RTE
will pose the challenge of radical improvement in quality. How things
turn out will depend on the willingness of the directorates to adjust
their outworn perspective and policies to the new expectations the RTE
arouses in syllabus design, teacher preparation and deployment. Kerala
and Tamil Nadu are better placed than any other State to implement the
RTE with confidence, but even they require radical measures to improve
teacher training. The courses available are uninspiring and based on
obsolete ideas. The pedagogic perspective of the National Curriculum
Framework (2005) is yet to percolate into teacher education
programmes.
While the RTE's future depends on the initiative and resolve of the
State governments, the Centre's role is going to be crucial too. If
its policy signals remain coherent, the States will have a better
chance of staying on track. One major signal the Centre must send
pertains to institutional strength and capacity to deliver the RTE. No
case illustrates this better than the National Commission for the
Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), which has the responsibility to
monitor the RTE. It is supposed to keep a vigilant eye on several
million classrooms where children are to be taught and protected from
corporal punishment, mental harassment and discrimination.
How is the NCPCR going to perform this huge task with the extremely
meagre infrastructure it has today? When a child falls victim to
neglect, abuse or violence, the protective arms of the state must
reach out fast. For a national commission to serve children in every
corner of the country, it must have good State-level units with
district-level branches. As of now, the NCPCR's presence in most
States is barely symbolic. Between the responsibility entrusted to it
and its apparatus, there is a vast gap. It has no academic staff to
study cases and to work with the States to find solutions. Its first
chairperson, Professor Shantha Sinha, was a tall academic figure who
put in a monumental effort to make its presence felt. Asking her to
stay on to initiate institution-building would have been a sensible
step, and one hopes that the Ministry of Women and Child Development
might still take this decision. If the NCPCR becomes an empty shell,
so might the RTE.