To aggravate the problem, each State pursues its own curriculum for the students. Even Central Government of India has ICSE and CBSE.
Does this mean that students in AP are different from those of Punjab?
Or is it just that we would like to have more diversity than we already have.
I think standardizing education and its delivery can be thought of in the following ways.
1. Having same curriculum throughout India except for vernacular languages.
2. To pool the best brains in India to devise this curriculum. 
3. To make the curriculum interesting to students.
4. To utilize the TV, Internet and CDs to deliver the education. TV is far more effective than any other delivery. It engages the kids the most.
5. Identifying the best teachers in India, pooling them and letting them research on each topic and come up with the best way to explain it. Did you ever wonder why students get a few concepts right and fail to get the others?This is because they were taught those few concepts in a way they could understand easily. Good teachers know this trick. But all students don't get good teachers. Even in the best of schools, all teachers are not good.
6. Recording the delivery of this best method on a Video by the best teachers. Using as many examples and illustrations as possible.I always felt the UGC programmes that I used to watch on TV when I was a student are the right way to teach.
8. Delivering these programs through TV, Internet and Pre-recorded DVDs/CDS
9. The teachers in the schools will just facilitate the process of learning at the time of delivery.
10. Even the tests can be standardized. They can be delivered through emails on the test day to schools.
Imagine the immense advantages that this will bring for a country like India. 
1. Lack of quality teachers is no longer a problem.
2. All students get exposed to the same quality education. Be it a rich kid or a poor kid.
3. Students will get their concepts right.
4. India will get a great advantage in the world with their students getting their concepts right.
5. Countless teachers, educators et al are saved from devising separate curriculums and delivery.
6. Standardizing education saves a lot of time.
7. Saved time can be put to a better use to increase productivity and thereby GDP.
8. What more, We can have a standard method of training teachers too on facilitating the students on getting the concepts right.
9. Even if students miss a few classes they can always catch up from DVDs / CDs.
10. Students and parents are freed from the big dilemma they face when they have to change from a school with one curriculum to a different school with a different curriculum.
It is unfortunate that mass education is the only area which did not take advantage of the new technologies that came in the last 80 years. It is high time we use these for everybody's good.
3 comments:
Much too diffuse, too little study of the problem. They do it like that in France - at any moment, precisely the same thing is being taught to a class in all of France. But it requires extreme standardization not only of the curriculum, but of teachers; in our country where teaching is a least preferred job, where many teachers hate teaching and where no one can be dismissed, this kind of standardization can work only if the standards are set too low. There is another approach, of giving children opportunity to teach themselves, which has not been tried in this country; see Sugata Mitra's Hole-in-the-wall experiment.
Wow! I did not know that it is already practised in France. Then what I wrote has sort of got validated. I felt what I suggested solves the very problem of what you expressed too - lack of good quality teachers. Lack of teachers will not be an impediment to what I suggested. Instead what I proposed solves the problem of lack of good quality teachers.
Having a standard curriculum and getting delivered through recorded episodes done by the best of teachers improves the quality of schooling to a great extent. These teachers can teach the most complex concepts in a simple way. These teachers can take the feedback and opinion from the fellow teachers in India or all over the world to teach concepts in most effecient manner possible. Also, these recorded episodes can go through a continuous improvement every year from the feedback received from teachers and students.
Thanks for introducing me to Sugata Mitra's Hole in the wall experiment. I am quite fascinated by it. Infact the success of it lies in fascinating the students. That is what I too am proposing.
Fascinate the students by teaching them the right way. Create interest in them. Make them exploratory in nature.
Bad teachers can kill the spirit of a child completely.
Did further reading on Sugata Mitra's experiments.
Some of things he suggested are not much in variance with what I proposed too from a big picture point of view.
I just took this from a source on the net which discussed his ideas.
http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/sugata-mitra-hole-in-the-wall-self-organising-systems-in-education-and-instructional-robotics/
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His second presentation addressed the problem of teachers not wanting to be in particular regions: “Is it possible for teachers to live in areas that they prefer and still be ‘present’ in schools where they do not, physically, wish to go?”.
This led to a discussion of ‘presence’- what is the main difference between in-class and online education? The presence of a teacher. So how can presence be effectively created for distance/online education? In experiments, Mitra has found that Skype could be used effectively under the following circumstances:
* uninterrupted, reliable, >1 Mbps bandwidth at the teacher and student locations
* a projection system at both ends providing near life size images of the teacher and learners (in his presentation, Mitra phoned up an English teacher in Argentina and showed the difference in ‘presence’ between mere voice, small-screen projection, and life-sized projection using Skype and the video projector - it was quite astonishing!)
* a directional microphone, such as those on most camcorders, that doesn’t pick up feedback, at both locations,
* good lighting
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