Just as a high rise building with faulty load bearing pillars cannot remain stable for too long and will eventually collapse under the load. So is true for primary education, if not imparted to a minimum necessary level, the grown up students will never get the confidence of taking up complex projects later on in their life. (Part – 1)
Recent reports point out that this year none of our universities could qualify for the list of top 300 world class universities (China has many).
Good quality primary education is the key to transforming India to a modern nation. Unfortunately our emphasis has so far being on institutes of higher education like IITs, IIMs, AIIMS etc. Nothing wrong with that as such but going for a fancy high speed bullet train in a country where railway tracks and bridges need urgent repair, it is more a question of priority when faced with scarce fund.
Primary education in which a student learns how to read and write languages, do arithmetic calculations FORM the real foundation. Higher education will not convert the short falls of primary education. Higher education is somewhat like interior decoration of a building. However good and attractive it may appear obviously it cannot compensate for faults that exist in the pillars of the building.
Purpose of primary education is to achieve the following minimum requirements which will make the kid confident. When given an unseen passage to read in the languages normally mother tongue and English etc. He should be able to express himself in simple sentences in that language. He should be confident in adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing integers. Should have a feel for fractions, decimal numbers what does the place value of a number means. He should be able to carry out these calculations when purchasing items in a market. He should have a feeling of difference between lengths like millimetres, meters, kilometres, weights like grams, kilograms.
Such skills though may look trivial to an educated adult. However if they are not acquired properly and adequately at the primary level itself, the kid will never get enough time to acquire them with full confidence in later life. This will result in shaky personality when faced with scientific tasks and projects.
To continue as Part – 2.