Smart faculty proportionate to Smart Classrooms

The school education in India is undergoing many changes and reforms and this is a positive sign for the children of the country.The government is making all possible efforts so that all children get education and are able to contribute in the development of the country in an effective way. Our country is full of diversity which exists in almost every walk of life.On one hand, we have the rich people whose names appear in the list of the richest people of the world and on the other hand, there are large number of  people who do not have access to two square meals in a day. On one hand, people have large bungalows, big farm houses,lavish lifestyles and on the other hand,there are many people who sleep on the roads under the roof of stars.If I mention all, it will take a lot of time and space. Hence my thoughts will be confined to one of the most important issues and that is education; and here also you find such a disparity that the meaning of all the reforms take a back seat. In our constitution, the children of the age group six to fourteen years were given fundamental right to free and compulsory education and it has taken about sixty years for the government to implement it in the right earnestly. In the meanwhile, the education of the country has gone through many changes. Initially the government schools were preferred by the parents for the education of their children and the private schools were limited in number. Neither all people could afford these private schools nor they wanted their children to study in these schools.The teachers in government schools used to be very  qualified and devoted to the welfare of their students. Over a period of time, there has been a rapid increase in the number of  private schools and one of the reasons for that is, the government schools did not increase in the proportion to the increase in population and also the quality of the teaching was not improved according to the need of the hour.The lack of quality and the quantity of government schools made the parents to drift towards the private schools( that does not mean that all private schools were/are better than the government schools). As on today ,the condition is that the very low income group parents also want their children to study in private schools and spend most of their income on children`s school education by curtailing expenditure on other essential daily needs.Once again, I would like to state that there are still many government schools that have qualified and devoted teachers and on the other hand, many private schools have an average infrastructure and not very competent teachers. We all read stories about how some of the private school teachers are exploited when it comes to remuneration.

Having said all this, I would like to focus on the quality of the education in the schools irrespective of whether it is a private school or a government school.The children have the fundamental right not only to education but also to quality education and the government is bound to provide it to them . Leaving things in the hands of private schools will not solve the problem because private schools are not necessarily established for the noble cause as every private school administration talks about, but there is some expectation of returns in terms of money.Initially great people like Sh. G.D Birla Ji and others were really concerned and many schools opened by them were really for the service of the nation and not for any selfish motive. But now the situation has changed and many businessmen have come forward to invest money in this sector. Again I would like to mention that most of them are really doing it for the cause of the country but all are not like that.

Another important change has come in the way teaching- learning takes place in the classrooms. Earlier the blackboard and the chalk were the only  tools which were available to the teachers but later on that changed to green boards and then to whiteboards and also chalks were replaced by the markers and now the whiteboards are being replaced by the interactive boards.Not only this, the traditional classrooms are being named as the smart classrooms, by adding a few software tools . This could be possible due to the emergence of the technology in big way and at a very fast pace.The Internet has made the information available on the click of a button. Many people rightly thought of taking advantage of the available technology and the concept of the smart classes came in the picture. You might have noticed that many schools write this information more prominently on the main gate than the name of the school. Smart classroom are the ones  which  have the electronic gadgets like computer/laptop,interactive boards and the projectors etc.This has revolutionised the concept of a classroom but one thing which remains unchanged is the importance of the teacher in the class. Let us look at the other extreme where the children do not have even the basic needs fulfilled like the furniture,toilets and the activity rooms etc.But that is not hampering the spirit of some teachers and the students and because of that only, many students perform extraordinarily well in their board exams and many of them are even able to make it to the civil services at center and state level.They are the students from these schools of rural set up.The only problem with these village schools and the children is that they lack the knowledge of language which has become the need of the time and they are also not exposed to the information related to the other avenues which they can explore. The concept of the aptitude test and counselling is beyond their reach.If these things and information is made available to such children they will perform much better than what they are able to do today.

Hence,these innovations of smart classses can be used as aids and tools by the teacher. Moreover, the teacher should be the master of  technology and not vice-versa.To me all class rooms will be smart even without these electronic gadgets if there are smart students and smart teachers, not in their appearance but in their thinking and behaviour.