District Institutes of Education and Training - Teacher Education

District Institutes of Education and Training: A Comparative Study in Three Indian States
Due to their parents’ weak economic condition in most of the rural areas the
children are not able to achieve their education. As they are economically weak
they go for labour work from their homes with their children and family. They
come back after one month and sometimes the situation is such that they come
after 3-4 months. In such a situation the child is not able to acquire the
competencies. This mostly happens in rural areas because they are economically
weak. On one hand the child remains absent for 1, 2, 3 months and the Saheb
[officer] says ‘make the child achieve all the competencies’. In this condition
how can the child be made to acquire the competencies?…if the child does not
come to the school how will s/he acquire the competencies? (MP/T 038
July 01).
Teachers object more to short-tem absenteeism, perhaps because it has greater dayto-day
consequences than more permanent absence, and because it seems to them
more avoidable. Their sympathetic reading of absenteeism, based on an
understanding of economic hardship and the imperatives of subsistence, is often
blurred by teachers’ sense that many parents do not care about their children’s
education, and thus do not make sufficient effort to ensure that they attend school
regularly.
The environment in the rural area is not there. The people of the rural area are
highly conservative. They have many bad habits like child marriage,
gambling…when a child returns from school back home s/he goes back to that
kind of environment and is moulded in that manner. The most a child takes part
in the teachers’ activities is 3-5 hours. The child is influenced by the family
environment, s/he is involved with the teacher and activities for some time,
most of the rest of the time they get knowledge from their surroundings…So
why not open a hostel…It is clear from this that if we want to give good
education to the children they will have to be separated from their old
conservative ideas and thoughts. Then only can we evaluate what talent rural
children have, otherwise they won’t be able to be enlightened because their
talents remain hidden behind their conservatism (MP/T 016 July 01).
Teachers often use words like ‘irresponsible’ and ‘careless’ when commenting on
such parents, and their illiteracy is usually implicated in this equation too:
Here the parents of weak children are always illiterate. It’s not like we don’t
make any effort but these parents don’t understand the importance of education
(GUJ/ T 013 23.10.99).
A minority of teachers relate parental illiteracy to problems in, for example,
providing practical support with homework. But literacy itself is inflated to mean
much more than literate or numerate; it also connotes a desirable and civilised state
of human development, in contrast with the backward state of being illiterate
42 DFID