Education

Education is one of the most important drivers of India’s social and economic development. Higher levels of literacy lead to greater economic output, higher employment levels, better health, better social structures, and higher marks along a number of other development indicators. More specifically, the impact of educating girls and women has been shown to result in rapid improvements in family planning, nutrition, health, and income and is seen as one of the best tools for promoting social and economic development.

The 1986 National Policy on Education (NPE) first emphasized universalization of elementary education (UEE) as a national priority. Yet, despite a huge expansion in India’s formal education system in the last few decades, there are still roughly 50-60 million children out of school in the age group 6-14 years, or nearly 25 percent of total child population in the elementary age group. The key challenges to achieving UEE are:

Access: The reasons for children being out-of-school are to do with lack of physical access as well as social access. In several parts of the country, especially in small, remote habitations, children still do not have access to schooling facilities and thus remain out of school. Seasonal migration of families in search of work for several months every year is another reason which deprives children the chance to go to school. In addition, a sizeable proportion of children live in villages and habitations where formal schools exist, but due to social reasons such as caste and gender they are either not allowed to go to school, or not given the proper treatment in school.

Retention: This is an issue of serious concern. According to statistics 53% of children drop out of school before completing the elementary level, or grade VIII. This high drop out is due to poor functioning of schools, for example, dilapidated school buildings, overcrowded classrooms, irregular attendance of teachers and children, lack of teaching learning materials, ineffective teaching, unintelligible language used by the teachers and the discriminatory attitude of teachers towards children of the marginalized sections of society.

Quality: Many studies have shown that children who do complete primary schooling attain abysmal learning levels. A majority of grade V children are estimated to be at a level no higher than grade II or III. The causes stem from the poorly functioning educational system which are transmitted down to the schools.

LINCOLN, Neb. – Nebraska lawmakers got to work Friday in a rare special legislative session designed to repair a unique “safe haven” law that has unintentionally allowed parents to abandon nearly three dozen children as old as 17.

Legislators introduced bills calling for limits on the age of children who can be dropped off at hospitals in an effort to prevent newborns from being dumped in trash bins or other dangerous places.

Nebraska was the last state to enact such a law but didn’t include an age limit. That has resulted in 34 children so far being abandoned there, some of them from other states.

Even as the session to correct the law approached, a 5-year-old boy was dropped off at an Omaha hospital on Thursday night. Earlier in the day, a woman dropped off two teenagers at another Omaha hospital, but one of them, a 17-year-old girl, fled. Authorities have not found her yet.

Two bills were introduced Friday; one proposes an age limit of 3 days, and the other would let parents drop off children as old as 15.

But because several lawmakers plan to propose revisions that would limit the age at anywhere from 10 days to 1 year, the Legislature will probably approve an age somewhere in the middle.

A public hearing on proposed changes is scheduled for early next week. State senators will then have three rounds of debate on the legislation, followed by a final vote as early as Nov. 21.

If a revised safe-haven law is passed with a two-thirds majority, it could take effect as soon as the governor signs it. Gov. Dave Heineman has five days from the final passage of the bill to act.

Heineman did not say Friday whether he would support age caps other than the 3-day limit he has suggested.

There is no consensus among child welfare experts on what age limit works best. There are 11 different age limits under similar laws across the country, including 3 days, 3 weeks, 3 months and 1 year.

Multicultural Education is an idea which has reached its time. Carrying the legacy of the 1960’s and 1970’s, a period of profound social change when the people of the United States were forced to reexamine their cultural heritage, multicultural education has emerged in the 1990’s to address the educational needs of a society that continues to struggle with the realization that it is not monocultural, but is an amalgamation of many cultures. Much of the overt and covert national conflict about race, ethnicity, social class, and gender in the U. S. has been based in the mythology of a superior culture into which all others must be assimilated. The imbalance of power between the dominant culture and subjugated cultures has created centuries of aggression, antagonism, and resistance. Fortunately, the concept that cultural differences enrich, rather than diminish, our society is increasingly acknowledged. It is the suppression of cultures that weakens the society. The ongoing discourse and practice of multicultural education is an effort to mine the possibilities of plurality through education.

Ethnic minorities and women of the 1970’s confronted the racism and sexism of society reflected in monocultural education. Ethnic studies and women’s studies were developed to add their traditionally silenced voices to the analysis and development of the culture of the United States. Multicultural education of the 1990’s continues that tradition on the K-12 level and takes five, sometimes interconnected, directions. Sleeter (1996) delineates five approaches to multicultural education:

• Advocates of the Teaching the Culturally Different approach attempt to raise the academic achievement of students of color through culturally relevant instruction.
• In the Human Relations approach students are taught about commonalties of all people through understanding their social and cultural differences but not their differences in institutional and economic power.
• The Single Group Studies approach is about the histories and contemporary issues of oppression of people of color, women, low socioeconomic groups, and gays and lesbians.
  The Multicultural Education approach promotes the transformation of the educational process to reflect the ideals of democracy in a pluralistic society. Students are taught content using instructional methods that value cultural knowledge and differences.
• Educators who use the Social Reconstructionist approach to multicultural education go a step further to teach students about oppression and discrimination. Students learn about their roles as social change agents so that they may participate in the generation of a more equitable society.

These categories overlap, and educators may use more than one approach simultaneously.

Multicultural Education also is a response to the changing demographics of the United States. By the year 2020 46% of the students in public schools will be children of color and 20.1% of all children will live in poverty (Banks, 1997a). The need to address the various learning needs of such a diverse student population and the subsequent pluralistic society for which those children will be responsible is an urgent task faced by American public schools. However, the monocultural approach to education which emphasizes middle class Eurocentric content, instruction, and values adds the additional learning task of acculturation to the work of schooling, which complicates learning the academic knowledge needed to be successful in school. Culture is what we learn and create to make sense of the world. The discontinuity between the cultures of poor and ethnic minority students and the culture of schooling affects academic underachievement and failure (Nielson, 1991; Nieto, 1997). Moreover, caught in the ambivalence of success and failure in schools that transmit a culture of domination the learning of children of color and poor children is further hindered by the factors of invisibility, alienation, and resistance. In view of an increasingly multicultural society and student population, multicultural educators reflect the need to address the systemic, curricular, and pedagogical impediments to the learning of traditionally marginalized students. Multicultural educators also recognize that a increasingly multicultural nation and a shrinking and contentious planet at the edge of the twenty-first century demands a people who are critical thinkers and able to deal with the complexities of multicultural differences.

The practice of multicultural education in the schools is often criticized for trivializing the goal of multicultural education, which is the transformation of schooling to include the needs and perspectives of many cultures in shaping the ways in which children are educated and thus, the transformation of society. The inclusion of an occasional hero or holiday in a curriculum which leaves the European American story as the master narrative in the description of the United States cannot begin to create the understanding necessary for a multicultural society, nor can it produce the kind of education needed to successfully educate a multicultural populace. Students who understand that the perspectives of the Native Americans as they encountered the Europeans is as necessary to the story of U. S. development as that of the colonial settlers or the pioneers are more likely to understand that the challenges of society are complex and cannot be approached from only one direction. If they can learn that women have had a particular view of and impact upon society, varied not only by their gender but by their race and social class perhaps they can bring more balance to the ways in which they approach problem solving. If they can understand that the resistance of many European Americans to slavery, long hours and low pay, discrimination, and the destruction of the environment has advanced the society for everyone, perhaps students can challenge the limitations of ethnocentricity and create a more equitable society. Thus, multicultural education is more than holidays and food, it requires critical thinking with attention paid to complexity. It requires research and learning about the multiple perspectives involved in any historical or contemporary experience in order to understand the rich meaning therein.

Multicultural education is often given narrow parameters. Many think of it as education only for students of color. Certainly there is a substantial need for the education of ethnic minorities. Racism in the U.S. has created an educational system which continues to ignore the culture of students of color in learning and tracks many of them into continued subordinate positions in society. A restructuring of schools to meet their needs is essential. However, children of color do not live in a vacuum. In a democratic, multicultural society all children must be educated about the multiple strands of the past that have created the webs of the present. For example, African American students must learn about Asian Americans and Latino Americans, all of whom need to understand the journey of Native Americans, and vice versa. European Americans should study the past and present relationships of European Americans to people of color, the history of privilege and resistance in the dominant culture, and all students should understand the dynamics of social class.

Multicultural education also provides a perspective for math and science. Ethno-mathematics (Nelson-Barber & Estrin, 1995; Tate, 1995) presents a view of mathematical thinking that incorporates the ways in which culture and mathematics are intertwined. Math is an aspect of all cultures. In the sciences there is the opportunity to study environments from the perspectives of the diversity of cultural knowledge, to approach nonwestern science as legitimate knowledge construction, or to include social justice as an aspect of science (Sleeter, 1996; Harding, 1998).

It is the breadth of multicultural education which makes it such a profound change in the ways we think about education. Banks (1997b) describes the dimensions of multicultural education in five overlapping areas in which researchers and practitioners are involved. Content integration is the inclusion of materials, concepts, and values from a variety of cultures in teaching. Knowledge construction is the recognition that all knowledge is socially constructed, created in the minds of human beings to explain their experience and thus, can be challenged. Ideas that shape society do change. As such, knowledge construction is a primary aspect of multicultural education because before teachers can effectively teach multiculturally they must reconstruct their world views. Equity pedagogy is involved when teachers alter their teaching methods to accommodate the various cultural differences of diverse students to stimulate academic achievement. Prejudice reduction concerns changing the students’ attitudes towards differences of race and ethnicity. Prejudice reduction can also include teaching tolerance about religion, physical and mental abilities, and sexual preference. An empowering school culture is the dimension of multicultural education that enables the other four dimensions. Educators must examine the structures of education that impede learning and empower students and families from “diverse racial, ethnic, and gender groups” (p.24). The aim is to create schools that encourage the full development of all students. The references and papers in this multicultural floor of New Horizons for Learning will be organized according to these five dimensions. The papers and references will include materials about the dimensions as well as the various approaches to multicultural education to demonstrate the breadth of multicultural research and practice.

Essentially, multicultural education is about social change through education. It requires deep and critical thinking, imagination, and commitment to another tomorrow, inclusive of the wealth of all of our stories and peoples. It is another aspect of the continuous human journey toward justice and pushes us toward the fulfillment of the promises of democracy. It gives us new questions to ask and directions to follow to uncover human possibilities in the new millennium. As stated by Greene (1995), “People trying to be more fully human must not only engage in critical thinking but must be able to imagine something coming of their hopes; their silence must be overcome by their search” (p. 25). Multicultural education harbors a place for a multitude of voices in a multicultural society and a place for many dreams.

CBSE Students Engineering Admissions

CHENNAI:

CBSE students who wish to apply for engineering admissions in the State could be in for a busy and stressful weekend on May 24 and 25.

With their Class XII board examination results expected around that time, and Anna University closing its applications on Monday, May 26, they will be racing to meet the deadline. Sources in the CBSE said the results were likely to be out during the last week of May.

Last year, the Class XII results for Ajmer and Chennai regions were declared on May 23.

Anna University officials involved in the admission process say that the dates may be extended after discussions with the State government and the CBSE. “We will make sure there are no problems for students …Even State Board schools will only be giving mark sheets on May 21, so we may have to extend dates,” said an official.

The original dates for submitting applications had been announced after consultation with the State Board officials.

“They expected to declare results by May 10, so we set the dates as May 10 to 16. We have not had any interaction with the CBSE,” said an official.

Marking scheme took into account difficulty level of exams

Chennai

The pass percentage of Class XII students, who took the All India Secondary School Examination conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), has gone up to 90.71 this year.

With a 7.71-per cent point rise from last year’s 83 per cent in the Chennai region, this year’s results are all the more significant as they reflect students’ High Order Thinking Skills (HOTS).

Earlier this year, the CBSE announced that this year’s public examinations would shift from testing More of The Same (MOTS), which was based on repetition and stereotypes, to Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) that emphasise interpretation and synthesis of knowledge.

Announcing the results for the Chennai region here on Wednesday, CBSE’s regional officer for Chennai Region V. Nagaraju said the pass percentage of students who appeared through schools alone was 92.84. When private candidates’ performance was included, the pass percentage was 90.71.

The Chennai region includes schools in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Daman and Diu, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Goa, Kerala, Puducherry and Lakshwadeep. Among these, Puducherry recorded the highest pass percentage of 97.75.

As many as 48, 632 students from 1,510 schools in these regions appeared for the examinations this March.

Promise kept

Students and teachers from city schools had earlier expressed apprehension about the marking scheme for the mathematics and physics papers, which were largely considered difficult. However, the CBSE had then promised that students would not stand to lose and that experts would prepare the marking scheme keeping in mind the difficulty level of each paper.

“We have kept our promise,” CBSE’s Controller of examinations M.C. Sharma told The Hindu after the results were declared.

After the examinations are held, the CBSE circulates an ‘observation schedule’ among all affiliated schools.

In this, teachers could put down their observations, suggestions and feedback on difficulty level, for all subjects. The feedback is consolidated and the points made are noted by the expert committee working on the marking scheme. “The scheme is decided taking into account all these points,” Mr. Sharma said. In TamilNadu, where the Common Entrance Test has been abolished, entry into most professional colleges in the State would depend on where the CBSE students stand in comparison to their State Board counterparts during the normalization of marks. Candidates who wish to have their answer sheets checked again could apply for the same.