Education | South Asia

Two Approaches to Improving Education

SciDev.Net reports that Peru will soon receive the first batch of its 270,000 OLPC laptops. Other countries that have signed on to the initiative include Bolivia and Uruguay, and Carlos Slim has committed to buy a good number for Mexico. Despite setbacks, like another spat and divorce between founder Negroponte and Intel (which offers a competing product called the Classmate PC), the OLPC project does have serious customers now.

Against this backdrop it is noteworthy to see how India is approaching education. SciDev.Net points to a NatureNews article on initiatives by the Indian government to expand higher education. These include the establishment of “30 new Central Universities, five new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, eight new Indian Institutes of Technology, and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology,” as well as “1,600 polytechnics, 10,000 vocational schools and 50,000 skill-development centres.”

These plans would be the first major investment in education in India in a very long time. But they point to two underlying differences between what Peru and India are doing.

First, India previously rejected the OLPC, calling it “pedagogically suspect.” Instead, India is building on tried and tested ways of improving education - providing scholarships and expanding availability. Given the scale of needs in India the government rightly believes its money is best spent on methodologies that are known to work, and should be commended for making a safe but reliable bet.

Second, and in Peru’s favor, what is striking is that it is spending on primary, not higher, education. While the amount involved is small (US$ 50 million), it is telling that the government sees investment in remote rural and tribal communities as relevant - even if it uses those communities as educational guinea pigs. By contrast, while Indian policymakers now accept the urgency of expanding primary education, there is no urgency yet to move the issue up the agenda. The neglect of primary education (and health) remains the biggest challenge and most criminal oversight of Indian policymakers.

© 2008 The Discomfort Zone.