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| EDUCATION TRIBUNE |
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Curricula need revamping
Tackling school students’ suicide
Campus Notes
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Curricula need revamping
THE growth of higher education in India has been phenomenal. In 1950- 51, there were just 30 universities, 750 colleges and only 263,000 students in all disciplines. Today, we have around 400 universities, 20, 000 colleges and 4 lakh teaching staff, besides around 70 unaided deemed universities and more than 8,000 unaided private colleges. Ironically, in spite of such huge higher education system, which is the second largest in the world, there are just about 1 crore students enrolled in it. This proportion is only 11 per cent of those in the relevant age group (17 to 23 years) who should be enrolled in colleges or The growth of India’s higher educational institutions in terms of the number of universities and enrolment rates since 1990-91 has doubled, but the improvement in the quality of education did not follow a similar trend. With the proliferation of private unaided academic institutions, the government’s control over quality of education has gone down. The government-owned and funded higher educational institutions still maintain the conventional rigidity in the course-design and remain aloof from community needs. Professional councils that are responsible for quality control seem to loosening their grip. The culture of self-financing courses seems to be mounting up, adding miseries to the common man. The provisions of government grants have only depleted over the years. Most of the higher educational institutions offer outdated academic programmes with inflexible course structures and irrelevant contents. Most often the teaching-learning process within and out the classroom remains within the established but outdated academic frameworks. There seems to be no concern over changing them to make them more community-friendly and need-based. The meetings of university bodies for redesigning curricula like the “Board of Studies” are more ritualistic than critical and analytical. Little emphasis is put on updating the curricula that could meet the rising demands of the market and infuse critical thinking and skills responsive to the real-life situations. The difference between education and indoctrination is little or not realised at all. Education is all about generating knowledge, encouraging critical thinking and imparting need-based skills. To achieve this, the classroom teaching-learning process needs a paradigm shift. It is high time that the academia in the higher education should focus on testing the claims rather than justifying them. The students cannot remain passive believers but active questioners in the new paradigm. While teachers expect students to continue to upgrade their knowledge and skills; many of them do not help acquire self-directed learning skills themselves. There is a little time for most of them as they are under “tremendous pressure” to serve on the committees and administrative assignments. The guidelines of the UGC also have put extra burden on them to publish for promotion. It is mandatory for a lecturer (senior scale) to have three publications in order to get promoted to the next cadre. Similarly, for a ‘Reader’ to become a Professor, one needs to have five publications. So, the pressure on the educators to publish as well as to teach and to serve on committees leaves little time to redesign a curriculum which could emphasise on students learning to think critically. For the UGC, it appears as if teaching is no more a work worthy for promotion. There is little or no consideration of the fact that teaching, publishing and research require different set of skills. A person good at teaching may not be as good at research or publishing. Therefore, the UGC should introduce some ways by which the teaching skills of teachers are also given due weightage besides publications. Some methods must be devised with which the objective appraisal of the efforts of a teacher put in the teaching-learning process can be made. Students’ feed back can be one such way to evaluate the teaching skills of a teacher. The ‘publish or perish’ criterion, in any case, needs to be redesigned. Secondly, in order to be able to attract and retain qualified and competent teachers, the UGC should make the salary and compensation packages more attractive, recruitment and promotion procedures more objective but less complicated and the working environment more conducive. It should not overlook the fact that a substantially high proportion of high-ranking students prefer to work in private companies or go abroad than taking up the teaching assignments. Therefore, in the globalised academic environment, if the government universities don’t reconstruct their existing almost outdated academic curricula and policies, they would possibly have serious repercussions in the times to come. The private universities have already given them a tough competition, at least, as far as the employability of the students is concerned. So given what is at stake, the revamping of higher education is urgently required. The writer is Reader (Social Work), Punjabi University, Patiala
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Tackling school students’ suicide
“Now that the examination results are going to be declared, the incidents of suicide will also increase,” said my neighbour while attempting to make polite conversation. Next day at the work place, an emergency meeting was called by the institution head to highlight an attempted suicide by one of the students who had recently taken his boards and feared he would not get a high score.
These two incidents set me thinking, is life so cheap that we can let a case of suicide be a mere incident and youngsters taking their own lives causes no concern? Are educational institutions well equipped to deal with suicide cases or is our society becoming so normless that suicides will soon be the order of the day? Emile Durkheim in his monograph Suicide considers suicide as a social fact. He classifies suicide into three types: altruistic, egoistic and anomic. Altruistic suicide results from excessive collective consciousness and social solidarity as in the case of sati and hara-kiri. Egoistic suicide results from lack of cohesion of the individual with his social group and anomic suicide occurs due to suspension of norms in society. The rising incidents of attempted suicide by children and adolescents have perplexed academicians, sociologists and psychologists. Students from all backgrounds are vulnerable to suicide. Suicides are attempted irrespective of gender. Any form of psychopathology puts an adolescent at risk of suicide. Availability of firearms at home makes completed suicide more easier. When a young scholar is having mood and conduct disorders he may also be indulging in substance abuse (alcohol, drugs, etc.). Maladaptive and dysfunctional family settings may add to the problem. At times suicide is an escape route from a chain of events that started in childhood like physical or child abuse, a broken family, depression, etc. If a family has a history of suicide, the child is more at risk. Too much of anticipated perfectionism can also snuff out a life. Adolescents are highly susceptible to imitative behaviour. Exposure to films and news flashed repeatedly over the television screen can make a young student over imaginative as he tries to enact the suicide and takes his own life in the process. With increased stress on academic achievement, meeting the demands of an extremely busy curriculum and given the fast pace of life makes it impossible for some of the students to cope up with the rigours of high academic standards. Performing poorly in the examinations or a failed romance are the most common reasons given by students who have attempted suicide. Fear of failure is associated with the loss of esteem and the young pupil develops a feeling of worthlessness. As members of a functioning society, we have to prevent suicides among the youngsters. Such people are in dire need of assistance. Before the beginning of examinations, many educational institutions counsel the parents not to pressurise the child. Twenty-four hour helplines are set up and the counsellor gets busy with over anxious students. During the examination time, the students taking the examination become the high-risk group. A little feeling of being demotivated or failure to solve a numerical may trigger a suicide attempt. Take the child seriously, if he talks of “feeling useless” and “not being there to give you trouble for long”. A potential suicide victim normally turns to his peers or a teacher he is close to when he is feeling low. All have to be sensitised to the issue of suicide. Life is too precious to be cut short when you feel that you have had enough. When the going gets tough, the tough get going .We have to teach the young scholars that suicide is not the answer to any problem. Be strong and face the challenge called life.
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Campus Notes
At a recent meeting, the Executive Council of (EC) Maharshi Dayanand University (MDU) approved the appointment of lecturers in several university teaching departments as well as to start the M.Phil programme in Defence and Strategic Studies from the current academic session.
The council also restored 11 posts in the university press. On the recommendations of various selection committees, the EC approved the promotion of teachers in several departments. Readers Dr Naresh Kumar and Dr Nirmal Kashyap have been promoted as professors under the Career Advancement Scheme (CAS). Dr S.S. Shilwant and Ms Kavit Dhull of the Law department have been given Reader’s designation and senior scale, respectively. The council recommended the appointment of lecturers on regular budgeted posts in the departments of English, History and Commerce at the university’s PG Regional Centre, Rewari, and in Botany, Zoology and Environmental Sciences at the Department of Bio-Sciences on the MDU Campus. It was, however, decided to re-advertise the posts of lecturers in the Computer Science Department. The council confirmed the appointment of Saroj Dahiya and S.S. Pruthi as Deputy Registrars. The EC also amended the qualifications for appointment to the post(s) of clerk and also revised the fee structure as regards processing fee, affiliation fee, extension/continuation fee for various colleges and institutions. Prof G.S. Randhawa and Prof S.S. Dhillon, besides Prof Javed Hussain of Aligarh Muslim University, were present at the meeting. MDU Vice-Chancellor Ram Phal Hooda presided at the meeting.
Anima Sen Award for MDU professor
Prof Radhey Shyam of the Department of Psychology at MDU has been awarded the Prof (Mrs) Anima Sen Award-2008 for his research paper titled “Religiosity, Religious Performance, Helping Behaviour and Life Satisfaction in the Aged.” The research paper was published in the inter-disciplinary research journal “Disabilities and Impairments.” Dr Radhey Shyam has been working at the department of psychology at MDU for the past nearly 17 years. His areas of specialisation include Clinical and Health Psychology and Psychological Measurement and Evaluation. In the prize-winning research paper, Dr Radhey Shyam has highlighted that religiosity is the strongest predictor of life satisfaction in the aged. He has also found that the attitude of helping others added to the life satisfaction of the aged. — Contributed by Sunit Dhawan
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