The driving thought process is showing an acknowledgment of a stage now at a national consensus level, that education does deserve focus at lowest level of administration to run it well.

Though all of it gets bucketed under one single bucket, the concerns of education are fairly different at all levels. If it is junior school, that is the time to love and care, sustain and encourage curiosity and teaching to think. If one goes to middle years of school education, it is the time of intense learning and getting to a position where one can bring about for herself a choice of right career. As one moves onto degree level specialization, one is expected to be on her own and establish a professional thinking.

The subjects one deals with, and the end soft goals of each segment are different. Since this is also a space of dealing with minds and hearts, it has it’s inherent need for adequate time and space to bring about changes.

The second aspect of education management is learn-ability of the teaching community. It is again divided in similar buckets. If one thinks junior schools, the teacher has to keep herself apprised of advances in child psychology beyond standard doctrines of teaching. If one looks at middle school, it is a serious matter of knowledge management and concept initiation. Immense information, learning tools, models etc. are available and it is imperative for the teacher to pick them up. When one thinks higher education it is a combination of both a research bent, and building professional expertise to meet the needs of the employment/sports/entrepreneurial trends of the times.

One needs an administrative system that is focused on enriching this process.

What are the options that exist

• Can we create two cadres in teaching community itself. One on education management, and the other on pure teaching. Both requiring minimum x years of teaching experience, and then people choosing to either continue teaching or to start administration.

• Option as proposed by Mr. Sibal, where there is a direct enrollment like IAS/IRS etc through an open exam and the young people start to administrate education services. My question on this is would they as part of their training, actually spent their time in classrooms teaching. Also would they specialize in what kind of administration they would pick up. Are the processes in schools really so difficult and challenging as to entail a seperate service. Is it a job that can be better handled through tools.

Come to think of it though, is administration really the key problem of education sector. We see a stark difference in performance of those institutions which are inherently in love with the process of learning, vs. those who are inherently using the education institution as a means to greater personal/social goals. We see that learning focused organizations fundamentally solve these problems on their own. The question is, that where are our bottlenecks. Is the teaching community getting bottlenecked by administrative roadblocks. Or is the teaching community itself non-demanding and not open to winds of change. Is the problem really of the right talent (those who love to learn to teach, and teach to learn).

Impact of technology in the field of education is not very old.  It’s still early days. Multiple models would get tried out. Some may work and some would fail.  Current places of impact that technology can have for education institutions lies in three areas. Process, analysis and learning content.

• One can optimize internal processes to free up time to do more productive activities.
• One can get deeeper insights into how each learner is doing and provide directed help with ease through analysis tools.
• And one can provide easier visualization, AV assistance as a learning aid.

These three are seperate domains. In early days of technology impact, anything sells. But as times mature, one starts feeling a need for more depth. Keeping a choice of what kind of content one needs seperate from what technology platform for process and analytics is important. It is tempting to go for an all in one package, but soon one realizes that one is locked with an inferior service on one of the fronts and is loosing money in something not very useful.

I can provide an analogy here. Last few years are beginning to see a revolution in digital media. People who create content, how it reaches us, what equipment do we use to see or hear it are changing. Remember the old days of two in ones, and three in ones. Today going for such a choice is a mistake. Given that fundamentally all content has to be seen and heard, one can invest in a good television view and a strong sound amplifier which can take inputs from multiple sources. Once this is done. You can buy seperate things like a CD player, DVD player, Blue ray player, MPEG2 set top box, MPEG4 set top box, satellite radio box or whatever. This space has not seen a final verdict yet. But each of these lies in the range of 500 rs to 2000 rs range, and one can exercise choice of the medium, without compromising on a good sound and view capability if one invests in a good television and a good sound amplifier.

All in one packages may be make a good immediate choice. But with technology as dynamic as it is today, one is bound to feel stuck with a bulky package not leaving any money to try out other things.