Posts Tagged ‘parallel colleges mushrooming’
The Kerala state government has for long pontificated on the benefits of having an inclusive education system; an education system that cuts across gender bias, income groups, caste, religion, and so on. Emphasis has also been laid on rendering education to the socially and economically backward classes. Women in education and education for women have also been taken up in a big way.
Middle class people have grown in stature and affluence. To fulfill their growing needs in the realm of education the government has to take huge strides to up the ante of educational development activities. Some educational institutions have the benefits of getting their fees subsidized. This helps them rope in students from all backgrounds. Transport costs have also been reduced, and in some cases waived off. What this does is, that it provides students the opportunity to come to schools without many disadvantages like huge travel costs, and huge fees.
Though efforts are being made to increase the accessibility to education, and also enhancing the viability of it, it remains to be seen if education breaks the barrier of cost. Free education as propounded by educationist visionaries has had to struggle for survival, given the numerous private coaching centers and parallel colleges mushrooming all across the state.
Private coaching centers have become the bane of the free education enterprise. Lack of scientific structuring in syllabus has led students to run to private coaching centers, which happily lap up the students and extract more money from them. So this means that education is only for the well-heeled middle class individual? If so, where is the right to education in Kerala? If the government is willing to subsidize education, why should it let private coaching centers run amok? These questions have remained unanswered.
The poor people in the rural regions have no access to the upper echelons of education. They are disadvantaged when taking up professional technical education at the graduate, postgraduate, and doctoral level. This indicates, that Kerala has to scale-up its educational system to make it truly accessible to all sections of the society.