Editorial»
Wrong schooling
KATHMANDU, MAY 11 -
Even well managed government programmes to boost literacy struggle to get the desired results. Take the federal-funded Head Start Programme in the United States. Started in 1965 with the mission of promoting ‘school readiness by enhancing the social and cognitive development of children,’ the programme’s success has, at best, been mixed. Although its short-term success in increasing IQ scores is widely acknowledged, the programme’s long-term benefits remain a matter of intense debate. It is hard to get this kind of programme, whose outcome depends on a wide range of factors, right: the progarmme’s duration, socio-economic background of students, parents’ academic qualifications, teacher quality, available funds and many other variables have to be factored in.
Though geared towards a completely different purpose, some of the same factors are likely to determine the course of the ‘Literacy campaign’ launched by Nepal government last year in order to meet the MDG target of eliminating illiteracy by 2015. Head Start’s success might have been a suspect, but the failure of the literacy campaign in Nepal is there for everyone to see. Already, Rs. 2 billion has been spent, but no one is quite sure where all the money has gone. Right from the start, educationists have expressed serious reservations about the very concept of making a person ‘literate’ in a matter of three months. In their opinion, it’s an impossible goal.
Then there is the question of implementation. There is little or no monitoring of the programme in most parts of the country. There is also no reliable, scientific method to assess its effectiveness in improving cognitive abilities of students. As the programme was brought in haste, the capability of the teachers who were selected to run it is a suspect too. Student dropout ratio is high. Even those who complete the three-month course, according to limited studies on its impact, can pronounce alphabets and rattle off numbers in sequence, but can do little else.
There are plenty of other murky areas. The method of tracking potential beneficiaries of the campaign is riddled with flaws. A recent Ministry of Education report on Achham district put the number of beneficiaries higher than the district’s overall population. It is no less surprising that the second phase of the programme kicked off in February this year without proper evaluation of the first phase — which was widely acknowledged as a failure, interestingly, even by government authorities. The budget for the second phase was slashed to Rs. 750 million from 1.04 billion last year in light the “dismal” first phase results.
A consensus seems to be emerging: There is no point in continuing with the campaign in its current form, which has, with leaks and loopholes aplenty, rightly come to be seen as a waste of government time, money and energy.
Posted on: 2010-05-12 07:30
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