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The Education Problem: Raj Reddy (Part 3)

Sunday, March 11, 2007 | 4 comments

The cost of education has been the source of intense debates around the world. Can a new framework and approach increase the quality of education while decreasing the cost? Can it increase accessibility to quality education and become a global solution? In this next segment, Raj provides some insight to these questions.

SM: What classes are you doing, what grades, what topics, etc? RR: The problem is we are doing it at the post graduate level right now, but I want to do it at all levels. Pre seventh grade, pre tenth grade, pre twelfth grade, and so on. The numbers involved at the lower levels are staggering. There are 2 million students that enter the classes every year, I’m sorry that’s not quite right… 1.3 or 1.4 million, 2 million children are born. Apparently a lot of them die, 10% of them die, before they reach school age. So, the net result is, out of this 1.4 million only half of them get to take the 10th grade examination, and about 40% of them simply stop after the upward primary, 7th grade, mainly because the parents don’t want to send the kids to high school which is 10 miles away.

SM: What is the student to teacher ratio? RR: The ratio is awful. The number that is even more telling is the annual expenditure per student. In one state it is 5,000 rupees; $100 per student per year. Even in India there are some schools, you might have heard about Rishi Valley; they charge 2 lacs ($4000) which is roughly 40 times as much. The main problem there is they are not for profit, they simply break even at 2 lacs. If you want to provide quality education, even in India, it costs $2,000 not $100. From what I know in the US it is $10,000 to $20,000. A lot of it comes from the state, but it is still substantial.

SM: Have you heard of an economist called Atanu Dey in Bombay? RR: I have heard about him but I have not seen anything.

SM: He came up with this model of school in a box. His thesis is that everything content wise, everything that is needed to teach a child, can be synthesized into a box which is effectively a network of computers and can be plopped in any school, and the teachers can use that. What we are calling knowledge base, he calls it content, it is content effectively but it needs to be organized as a knowledge base, and basically that can be the guts of a school.

RR: I have not seen it but I am happy to look at it. I want to see what is in the box.

SM: He doesn’t have it, he is trying to pull this thing together, and there are a lot of funding issues, etc, as usual. RR: I see. If that is the case then what I need is a piece of paper he has written about what the content looks like. I already have a school in a box. If you go to the NCERT, the National Council of Educational Research and Training, they have already produced very high quality books for all of India. If you have not seen them you should go there, www.ncert.nic.in. All of the books are online, they have it, and we got special permission from them to download it and make it available for the schools.

This segment is part 3 in a 15 part series Segment 4 →
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