Education

Credit: Dan White
Government schools are not yet speaking the language of education
Balu Thanda in the Telangana region in Andhra Pradesh, a teacher who himself is a Lamabada (a nomadic tribe who belong to that region) says that he does not ever teach children in their own language i.e. lambadi.

In government schools teachers must only teach in Telugu, which, the children in standard I, II and III in his school do not understand, it is not their home language. He demonstrates this by asking a girl from standard I to shut the window. While the girl looks at him blankly, another older child quickly explains to her in Lambadi what she is expected to do. “Look at that," he says. “The children will learn from among themselves."

Despite some children’s resilience to learn under such difficult circumstances, for the majority it is a major cause of school drop outs. Save the Children is working on inclusion of imparting education in the mother tongue of the child. We have been doing pilots on this at the bridge course centres that we are run in our project areas across the country.

The Indian education system is the largest in the world, serving more than 190 million students of different socio-economic backgrounds from pre-primary age to the university level.

India is a signatory to both Education For All Goals and Millennium Development Goals, and in 2000 launched Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan to make free and compulsory education a fundamental right, for children of 6-14 years age group.

India’s challenge to have education for all is magnified by the sheer size of the child population, which is estimated at 440 million. With 27.5 percent of the population living on less than $1 a day, access to education still seems like a distant dream to millions of children in India..

Vital Statistics

Approximately, 37 percent of the population lack literacy skills
53 percent of children drop out at the elementary level
Over 75 percent of rural schools are multi-grade i.e. the schools are under staffed.
India still has over a third of the world’s children (6–11 year olds) out of school—around 40 million , though latest Government of India statistics shows this figure at 7 million only.
23 percent of children remain out of school - 59 percent of whom are girls. These issues are compounded even further by various forms of social exclusion that exist in Indian society, such as caste and gender discrimination, and the fact that a large number of children remain engaged in exploitative labour.
Pre-primary education in India is not a fundamental right, with a very low percentage of children receiving preschool educational facilities.

Save the Children’s objective

By 2011, children in the age group 3 to 18 years in all project areas including those belonging to marginalised groups will be in learning environments, within an enabling educational system, that is relevant, inclusive, and responsive to their diverse needs.