Fases del Algoritmo Paralelo Potencia Eliminación

We have already documented how the decision of the State government in the early 1990s to remove the requirement of pre-service training from the eligibility conditions of recruitment as a teacher, led to a deterioration or even closure of teacher education institutions at both elementary and secondary levels. The then existing capacity in the State for training teachers was rapidly lost. We have also noted how the State government failed during the early 1990s, to utilize the funds available under the Centrally Sponsored Scheme of establishing one DIET in each district, while the rest of the States/UTs took full advantage of the Scheme and created effective structures for teacher education at elementary level. Put together, both of these factors can be identified as being responsible for the sorry state of teacher education which we see today in Bihar.

The conception of a well-provided teacher education institution like DIET at district-level may be regarded as one of the most significant contributions of NPE-1986. It implies decentralization in envisioning teacher education, field- inspired agenda and a sense of autonomy with accountability. In this regard, the Guidelines issued by the Ministry of HRD (November 1989) for setting up DIETs made the following significant observation:

“The DIET will itself adopt the attitude of a ‘life-long learner’ rather than that of an oracle or know-all. It will receive as much from the ‘field’ as it would endeavour to give to it. The district will serve as the ‘school’ for its learning experiences, while it may carve out one or two special areas as its ‘lab areas’ . . . . .” (Section 1.8.2)

While elaborating further, the same Guidelines expect DIET’s programmes to, be need-based;

enable the participants to experiment, explore, learn, practise and innovate for themselves, rather than being lectured to;

organize learning activities in individual as well as group modes;

make optimum use of the local socio-cultural milieu in the learning process and relate curricula and learning activities to it.

However, what happened at the ground level, at least in Bihar, was in total contradiction of the original policy vision. Snatching away all creativity, autonomy and field-orientation of agenda, the BEP reduced DIETs to acting as agents or contractors of its pre-determined programmes.

The role assigned by the BEP to DIETs suffer from the same basic flaws as those characterising the role assigned to the BRCs:

a) They are of a mechanical nature;

b) They are in the context of a partial and fragmented approach to providing

elementary education, advocated by DPEP and SSA; and

c) They do not take into account other important related developments like assigning

the role of preparing educational and other plans at the village and district level to the Panchayati Raj Institutions.

There is no scope within the framework of such functions to experiment, explore, learn, practice and innovate as suggested in the 1989 Guidelines.

An opportunity for a reconstruction of the DIETs is offered in the Guidelines for the Centrally-Sponsored Schemes of Teachers Education for the Tenth Five-Year Plan (Ministry of HRD, Govt. of India, January 2004). These Guidelines envisage DIETs as “nodal institutions for improving quality of elementary education in the district” and, among others, expect them to undertake initiatives to upgrade the quality of teaching- learning process in the district’s elementary schools, develop district-specific curricula and teaching-learning material; lend support to resource centres at sub-district levels; undertake research to build an improved understanding of elementary education; and undertake activities to improve and support community involvement in elementary education.

Such a foundational role of DIETs calls for a radical shift in the conventional ways in which we tend to view the functioning of teacher education institutions. The direction of change in terms of scope, content and orientation of faculty in some of the areas of specialization outlined in the 1989 Guidelines, can be on the following lines :-

The Educational Psychology could be a separate field of study and viewed as being integral to teachers education. Both child and adolescent psychology should inform

the designing of courses under this subject. Language education is important on its own merits as it is aimed at the empowerment of the teachers and building up her capacity and courage to articulate. Besides, language policy is one of the major common norms recommended under the Common School System. In the scheme of things, proposed under this norm, the mother tongue as medium of education in pre-elementary and early primary years assumes great significance. Learning of English will be introduced as a subject from Class III onwards. This will call for intensive research, development of raw- materials and field testing and finally restructured teacher education curriculum relating to languages. There will also be challenge to devise the pedagogy of switching from the mother tongue to Hindi/Urdu/Bengali in Class III. In Environmental Studies and Social

Science(EVS) it will be necessary to go back to the original EVS which was conceived as

an engagement of the children in exploring their own environment and the children being instrumental in constructing knowledge in this area and the teacher facilitating this process. Envisaging Work Experience as a separate subject negates the powerful pedagogic role that work plays as a source of knowledge, values and multi-skills. There is renewed emphasis in the Common School System on art education and health and

physical education. This calls for undertaking research in order to evolve course material

and learning method in these areas. The specialization included in the Guidelines on Non-

Formal Education and Adult Education will have no place in the changed scheme of

things under the Common School System. The non-formal education and the parallel structures built for promoting it should no longer be on the agenda of DIET’s Education Programme, and Adult Education should be transformed into a major programme of Public Education aimed at building a critical understanding on issues relating to the Common School System.

The failure to take advantage of the Centrally Sponsored Scheme for DIETs from 1988-89 onwards rendered the nominal exercise of upgrading 27 PTECs into DIETs, a mere farce. This has resulted in a massive backlog of trained teachers for elementary education. Keeping in mind the vast requirements of building a Common School System within a matter of five years and then sustaining its quality, it has become urgent that we create a full-fledged teacher education structure for pre-elementary and elementary education. This structure should have the capacity to conduct pre-service, on-service, in- service and induction teacher education programmes at the expected scale and pace as well as with a transformative quality necessary for preparing lakhs of teachers for the Common School System. This is probably an unprecedented challenge in the post- independence history of teacher education in the country. Keeping this in mind, the

Commission recommends that all of the nominal 37 DIETs and 23 PTECs be together

taken up for being upgraded into full-fledged 60 DIETs. This is of course more than the policy norm of providing one DIET per District but this is the price the State should be prepared to pay for the omissions of the past and the challenge of building a Common School System in the future.

A picture of the restructured DIET (and the PTEC to be upgraded) with its various Branches and specialized Units can be seen in the Annexure I to this Chapter. In summary, we are envisaging 11 Branches and 3 Units having 6 senior lecturers, 19 lecturers, 2 instructors , 4 research assistants, 1 lab assistant and 1 multi-media assistant.