education for all

Universal education is a concept fairly close to my heart. Of late, there has been a lot of deliberation from various quarters on universal education access. The major problem is the access to quality education. Not every institute or school has great faculty or infrastructure. Second thing to ponder upon is whether we are doing it right. Education in today's world is career oriented which creates competition and when the demand for few lucrative careers outstrips supply there is bound to be a fierce competition at various levels, resulting in rat race. These factors, competition, fear of failure, lack of proper education and of course the affordability part of it results in large scale school dropout, suicidal tendencies and building up of stress in the society. Also a large number of people do not have proper access to education.

I think the access problem is easier to solve than anything else, leveraging technology. Esp. since mobile phones are now ubiquitous, once 3G comes through, remote education policie can be used to bridge the gap of lack of quality teachers or even lack of proper physical infrastructure. Digital education medium can revolutionize the field. However there are two practical difficulties - 1) development of technology infrastructure, esp. broadband and its reach. When we do not have electricity in many villages, we cannot even imagine to develop fast broadband networks in these areas. 2) Content is the key to quality. If we do not have good content, even a powerful medium cannot meet the goal. Like open source software movement, there should also be an open source education movement, whereby access to quality content is not restricted but is opened up even to people who cannot otherwise afford the price. Another important access factor is delivering of the content. Having a good quality of content is not enough, the success depends to a large extent on who is delivering it. Here we come back to the starting point -quality of education depends to a large extent on the deliverer, i.e. teacher. You cannot have cart before horse. Just as the country needs great leaders, it needs great teachers, who are actually leaders at a more fundamental level - building the building blocks. To develop quality teachers there can be and should be programs at various levels. But the lowest cost solution is again a cue taken up from open source movement - that of opening up the discipline to all sections of the society. In a way, if we look at it, we have some thing to learn from every individual and every segment of society, so why restrict education to a special and privileged class who is not necessarily the best in this field. Why not opening up this discipline for participation from all sections and all stratas of currently educated society? e.g. a kid at standard 5 would much more benefit in learning history from a practising historian or archeologist than from a primary school teacher. He would derive the fun from actually seeing the ruins and drawing correlations rather than memorizing dates and names and vomiting them to the paper. Similarly a biology student of standard 8 would immensely benefit from experiences shared by a doctor or a molecular biologist or a botanist.

This is too vast a subject to cover in a single blog, but then, its just a random thought. This is also a wonderful business opportunity for some visionery social enterpreneurs who has the ability and zeal to develop the ideas and dig out the business potential.