Date: 18/10/2022

Relevance: GS-2: Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation

Key Phrases: Dealing With Teacher Absenteeism, Idea Of A Surveillance System, Fatigue Amongst The Educational Community, National Commission On Teachers

Why in News?

• A face recognition attendance system has been put in place in schools in Andhra Pradesh.
• Teachers’ attendance is recorded twice a day and the alerts are then sent to administrative officials via SMS informing them about the longitude and latitude of the place where the teacher is present.
• This policy change is aimed at raising the quality of education and improving the learning experiences of students, including their assessment of the formative level.

Key Highlights:

• Several reports have welcomed the move as a revolutionary shift that will help children develop an array of abilities and provide them with experiences that will enhance their problem-solving and critical-thinking faculties.
• However, the teachers' unions have described the policy as problematic as how an app will lead to the acquisition of intellectual abilities by his/her students.
• However, that has been turned down as teacher scepticism and attributed to a work-shirking attitude.

Problems With Teaching In India:

• Lack of environment that promotes emancipatory education, and nurtures the true spirit of the vocation of teaching
• With rote learning, poor teacher-taught ratio, pathetic infrastructure, chaotic classrooms and demotivated teachers, it is not possible to expect even the slightest trace of intellectually stimulating and ethically churning education
• Because of nepotism, corruption, and trivialisation of BEd degrees, there is a massive devaluation of the vocation.
• The triumphant political class has caused severe damage to some of our leading public universities, and fancy institutes of technology and management see education primarily as training for supplying the workforce for the techno-corporate empire, teachers are becoming mere “service providers” or docile conformists

Policy measures for reforming the education system:

1. Dealing with Teacher absenteeism:
   • Teacher absenteeism has been recognized as a systemic issue four decades back and thus, keeping teachers in the schools and dealing with their absenteeism has become an end in itself.
   • The rationale behind the move assumes that the mere presence of teachers in a school is enough for the students to acquire these abilities.
   • As a result the policies framed to ensure this have an inspectorial character rather than a reformatory one.
2. Linking app-governed attendance system with the acquisition of intellectual skills by students:
   • The policy actors have assumed a link between the app-governed attendance system for teachers and the acquisition of intellectual skills by students.
   • Efforts are being made to bring them on board, probably by offering them incentives.
   • A teacher who has to be “motivated” and offered “incentives” to download an app is expected to build intellectual abilities and make learning inquiry-driven and with this, the government aims to establish the link between the policy measure and its intended result.

Why the issues related to teachers’ absenteeism cannot be resolved by an app?

• Policymakers need a humanist understanding of teachers as professionals, their predicaments, and their needs.
• The idea of a surveillance system to control the teacher has been tried several times.
• Sudden visits by school inspectors, community supervision, and even panchayat scrutiny were part of educational policies of the past three decades.
• These surveillance mechanisms failed to appreciate that teaching is fundamentally a social interaction like the app-based attendance recording system and about students and teachers putting their minds together.
• There seems to be a sense of fatigue amongst the educational community that the goals remain largely the same, plan after plan and project after project.

Conclusion:

• A teacher’s presence is, of course, necessary but it’s more important that he/she has curiosity and passes on the spirit of inquiry to students.
• The Reports of the National Commission on Teachers (1983-85), National Curriculum Framework-2005, and the National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education (2009) have much that’s useful for this purpose.
• All three policy documents argued for treating teachers as professionals and not as caged employees whose presence has to be constantly monitored.
• Two decades ago, UNESCO described the attitude of policymakers towards teachers as a silent crisis by asking and the face recognition app might end up highlighting the same crisis at the cost of massive investment.

Source: Indian Express

Mains Question:

Q. A face recognition attendance system has been put in place in schools in Andhra Pradesh. Discuss the various issues faced by the education sector in India and discuss why the issues related to teachers’ absenteeism cannot be resolved by an app. (250 words).