Forget Everything Else,deal with Education

Forget everything else, deal with education
Season of promises is on. Politicians are making promises left,right and centre. And the cycle continues. No delivery of promises after the elections. This is because there are a lot of promises that are being made. The emphasis is on quantity of promises and not quality. Rice for 2 kg, waiver of loans for farmers, free electricity, increase of income tax exemption limit , free bicycles,salary rise for government employees and the list is endless.

I would suggest that we only look at one promise that is the mother of all others- Education. A lot needs to be done in this field and all other parameters of the Human Development Index like standard of living, poverty, health, social issues like dowry, gender bias are related to this.
To address the issue of education, what needs to be done is the uniformity of education across the country is ensured. Since it is in the concurrent list( and rightly so), the variability factor between states is very high. So Kerala progresses while the North East lags. This uniformity in execution is one key area to be addressed.
The Teacher Training curriculum is ages old and needs to be upgraded. This again is not uniform. The UGC will have to upgrade the skeleton curriculum followed by all universities in the Department of education. The children have progressed and the trained teachers are still in the age old methodology creating a mismatch. This also makes teaching one of the lowly ranked career option.
Vocationalization and skill development to make children more occupational friendly from the middle school itself is necessary. Although this is spoken about at length in various documents like the National Curriculum Framework, the implementation is not as good, infact it is dismal. Until the school children, especially in areas where the dropouts are more , are given some vocational skills like gardening & carpentry , they will not be ready to make a living with the education they attain.

There are a lot of issues but Education has to be at the forefront of all election manifestos which is not the case now. Politicians are taking the shortcuts to success through appeasements and subsidies which burdens the taxpayers. On the other end of the spectrum, the education budgets of states and the centre are not consumed within the stipulated time.