Although there’s not the slightest doubt in my mind that quality universal education — especially early childhood, primary and skills education — is the foundation of national development, it’s a telling indication of the low priority given to teaching-learning that news of the US-based Khan Academy establishing an India office in Delhi, has been buried in obscure corners of mainstream media. The point is that KA is not just another digital content provider. Since it was promoted in 2006 by Silicon Valley boy wonder Salman Khan, who has three engineering degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology plus an MBA from Harvard B-school, to tutor his niece over the internet to understand and grasp science and maths concepts, KA has captured the imagination of the US and the world. Currently, the online KA has 31 million registered users worldwide, who are patiently tutored free-of-charge in several subjects by online tutors of the academy.
According to the Annual Status of Education Reports, which measure primary school learning outcomes in rural India year after year, a growing number of desperate parents and children are fleeing to private schools including 300,000 unrecognised private budget schools which provide marginally better education, including rudimentary English learning. According to the latest ASER 2014, over 30-40 percent of rural children are enrolled in fee-levying private primaries. Clearly, raising teaching-learning standards in education across the board is beyond the capability of the academic establishment and the country’s 7.5 million poorly selected and ill-trained government school teachers.
Against this backdrop, the establishment of a Delhi office by the globally acclaimed superstar teacher Sal Khan offers new hope.
The Khan Academy offers online one-on-one tutorials by way of videos posted on its easy-to-use website (khanacademy.org).
Fortunately, KA’s India arrival has attracted the attention of industry behemoth, the Tata Group with the Tata Trusts offering unqualified support as “lead strategic partner”. The academy’s India debut has also drawn the attention of the Delhi-based Central Square Foundation — arguably India’s premier education NGO — which has started translating KA’s platform mapped to the NCERT curriculum in science and math into Hindi for class V-VIII students.
In our special report, we provide coverage of our 6th consecutive Early Childhood Education Global Conference addressed by internationally and nationally reputed ECCE (early childhood care and education) experts. The objective is to invite the attention of our lackadaisical policy formulators to the critical importance of professionally administered ECCE to India’s 158 million neglected children in the 0-5 years age group. At the EW ECE Global Conference, the country’s best pre-primaries adjudged in a national poll — EW India Preschool Rankings 2015 — were celebrated and felicitated.
This letter is being written from a hospital bed. With 650 million Indians unschooled in basic hygiene and sanitation — an indictment of pathetic syllabus formulation — there was a certain inevitability about it.
