Cause A Chatter – Access to Education

Instead of presenting researched facts and statistics, I would like to pen down the actual picture of how access to education is in our country has been and how it has influenced its growth.

Education in India is a two-sided story. On one side, we have rural schools which strive to provide fundamental mandatory education on the other hand, the picture in urban areas is entirely different.

The pandemic has given rise to online platforms providing coding courses to schoolchildren to add to their academics.

The gap between urban and rural education in India is one important factor that slows down the country’s development.

I work online as a volunteer teacher in one such NGO that bridges the gap between urban and rural education in our country.

Once I was asked what subject you teach to schools in rural parts of India?
English language and basic grammar, I said.

The person enquired will your work make a difference in the world where programming skills, machine learning, and AI are taught along with the school curriculum. I said, not all students are going to become information technology experts. And there are several professions for students to choose from in today’s world.

Better communication skills can get better opportunities that help in building their self-confidence.

And to this person, I spoke about a class I handled in 2019. Almost all the students said they wanted to be farmers when they grew up. I asked them to select a course that helps them do efficient farming.

What else can be good than providing our daily meal? In an agricultural country like ours, that should be the kind of importance given to agriculture and allied science.

Whoever we may be, food is something we all need to survive, don’t we?
That was only one story from one of the inspiring classes I teach.

Education is the only gateway for some students to raise their living standards. An overall literacy rate of 74 percent does not talk much about the villages in our country where even today, some students drop out of school before completing secondary education.

Every year we teachers are asked to take a session to explain and encourage students to complete school education.
Let us pledge not to stop education halfway. It is not that one cannot live without education, but life becomes the hardest without education.

Every person we see these days say the world has become our hand size with mobile phones given a super-star value.
But, the truth is that every family in the villages of our country cannot afford android mobile phones nor learn their school curriculum with the help of google.

In one of the eVidyaloka meetings where volunteer teachers speak with children, I had a conversation with a boy who said, I want to study and become a highly qualified government officer so I could bring a water facility to my village. My mother walks miles to fetch water, he said in fluent Hindi.

Another important thing I like to admit is the impeccable fluency of the mother tongue of rural school students, be it Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, or Hindi as the medium of instruction and mother tongue are the same. So when I start a new session for the year to cheer them up to learn English, I say a language is a medium to communicate our ideas to others. And there is nothing to worry about if you dont know to speak English as it is a foreign language.

They have to learn English because it is a global language, and it would get them the keys to unlock better opportunities in their professional life.

You can also check out my other blog post on education.

Access to education is still a dream for some children. You can help them get a step closer to accessing quality education. To know how? Do read the eVidyaloka blog post written earlier.

The post is written as a part of CauseAChatter by blogchatter

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this post are based on personal experience and conversations.

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