Schools using the name of saints beware!

Mou Chakraborty
Kolkata, July 9, 2007
THE STATE government has finally decided to crack the whip on schools that are using names of saints to enjoy privileges exclusively meant for minority institutions.
School education minister Partha De on Monday announced in the Assembly that his department would scrutinise details of schools that have named itself after saints to camouflage as a minority institution.
“We have found that many non-minority institutions are naming schools after saints to enjoy rights given to minority schools. But we will not let that happen. We will be scan and find out who all are founding these schools and why,” De said.
Though the school education department would not encroach upon the constitutional rights of minority institutions, it would monitor the recruitment procedure, the minister said.
Making this clear, De said: “Minority schools can recruit on their own but we will like to know how they are appointing the teachers. Are they being given appointment letters? What are their service conditions and whom should the teachers approach in case they have face problems? We want all these things in writing from the schools.”
Pointing to the poor educational quality of mushrooming English medium schools in the State, Trinamool Congress leader Saugata Roy said: “While the first generation learners go to government-aided or government schools, the third generation learners are enrolling in English medium schools, where the quality of teaching is very poor. To stop this trend the government should start an English medium section in all government-aided schools too.”
Roy also suggested that the students should be given value education. “By spending so much money we are producing cyber coolie for the USA. We must introduce value education in schools so that the students can contribute for the country once they grow up.”
In his address, De stressed on the importance of life-skill education in schools and the need to teach students about man-woman relationships. “We feel that to save our students from deadly AIDS there is no harm in talking about man-woman relationship and its physical aspect. Even if we do not let the students know about it they will find it out from wrong places.”
In response to a remark by SUCI MLA Debaprasad Sarkar, De said: “Boys should understand what problems girls have and vice-versa. They need to know about all the problems of life. When we can teach a student to stay clean, we can tell them how to keep all their body parts clean, there is no harm in it.”
De further stated that to reduce syllabus pressure on students, the school education department would implement gradation in every class along with compulsory comprehensive evaluation. “We will slowly implement gradation in all the classes, we cant allow students to run after marks, our aim should be on what quality of students we are producing and not how much they can memorise.”
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