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Schools sans teachers

IN a shocking revelation, the topper of the Class XII exams conducted by Haryana’s Board of School Education has said his school in Bhiwani did not have a regular science teacher.

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IN a shocking revelation, the topper of the Class XII exams conducted by Haryana’s Board of School Education has said his school in Bhiwani did not have a regular science teacher. It indeed speaks volumes for Deepak Kumar’s tenacity that despite being from the science stream, he could overcome this huge deficiency. However, every child is not a Deepak. The sorry fate of hundreds of children in the absence of teachers can well be imagined as thousands of posts of schoolteacher are lying vacant in the state. The problem is more acute in the backward region of Mewat and far-flung villages. It exposes the hollowness of the Haryana Government’s claim of its online transfer policy for teachers being a success. The rationalisation of staff deployment to correct the lopsided teacher-taught ratio is still a dream for students of rural areas who continue to be at a disadvantage vis-a-vis their urban counterparts.

Most other indicators of the education system too, rather woefully, point to the negative and underscore the need of shoring up efforts to improve the department’s functioning and infrastructure. The findings of pupils’ poor learning by the Annual Status of Education Report of 2019 (ASER) are almost similar to the earlier ones, showing that little progress has been achieved over the years. Children of rural Haryana were found lagging behind, for instance, in basic arithmetic as only 34.7 per cent of those aged between eight and 10 years can perform division. With 11.6 per cent of the schools devoid of the drinking water facility and 4.8 per cent without toilets for girls, the picture of the shoddy learning environment gets grimmer and graver. Shamefully, in some schools, even desks, libraries, labs and playgrounds are a luxury.

In such a scenario, the government would be hard put to show good results in its aim of arresting the school dropout rate or bettering the enrolment rate in government schools. It’s a long trudge before any parent hoping for his ward to grow academically and holistically stops looking up to private schools.

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