Indian Education Services
Human resource development minister for India, Kapil Sibal is looking at creating a dedicated service for education, on the lines of Indian Forest Services, and Indian Revenue Services. Looking at the report it seems to be coming from acknowledgement of the fact that “Education administrators do not have in-depth insight into education. So they require training and knowledge on the subject.”
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).