Madhav Chavan in his article on reforming primary education (‘Wiping the slate clean’, IE, June 25) has asked the government to think afresh the Right to Education Bill as well as the current Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan programme. Here, I focus on our methods to train teachers. The devastating impact of norms-based funding is most evident in this arena. Our pre-service teacher education system need a major overhaul. Country-wide, teacher-training programmes are offered increasingly by private (self-financed) institutions which have seen an exponential growth in the last decade. Neither the Centre nor the state governments have been able to regulate the quality of new institutions. Most of them are small teaching or diploma giving shops without qualified faculty. There is little transparency in the sanctioning process leading to suspicion about the way permissions were given. Educationists, administrators and people who run schools (government and private) admit that the quality of teachers coming out of these institutions is extremely poor.

As a result we today have thousands of young people who graduated from these institutions, but ended up learning little. The impact of this is felt by our schools —the quality of teachers appointed has steadily gone down, resulting in further dilution of standards. It is a fairly well known and documented fact that many teachers who join have poor subject knowledge and the training they receive does not prepare them to work. They learn a few theories to pass examinations, have little hands-on experience of working in multi-grade schools or in classrooms where there is enormous diversity among the children. The institutions they study in does not familiarise them (leave alone prepare them) for the real situation in the thousands of schools in rural and urban areas.

... contd.