Thaindian News

New Delhi, March 20 (IANS) Following yet another shocking incident of a teacher severely beating up students in Delhi, an official of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) said Friday that they are trying to revamp their teachers’ training course to include human rights education.
“The recent cases of violence in classrooms, both amongst students and students suffering at the hands of teachers, have got us very concerned. There are not enough sufficiently trained teachers and the teachers’ training course is a big issue,” Savita Sinha, head of NCERT’s department of education in social science and humanities said.

Speaking on the sidelines of a conference on human rights education in schools, Sinha told IANS: “In the pre-service and in-service teachers’ training courses, we are making efforts to include human rights education and make it more practical based instead of theoretical”.

A day after a teacher of a Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) school was arrested for beating and seriously injuring 10 students for making noise in the classroom, Sinha said that she does not believe that simply revamping courses is the solution to the increasing violence in classrooms.

“A teacher today is under tremendous stress. For most, teaching is not a career which is lucrative like others. Then, even if a teacher wants to bring about innovative methods of teaching in the classroom, the pressure by the administration to finish the syllabi within a certain time, handling scores of children, is not an easy job.

“Frustration therefore easily sets in in a teacher’s psyche. Therefore although child psychology is being taught in the teachers’ training course, very little of that actually comes to be used in reality. For that the community has to take responsibility and be more sensitive,” Sinha said.

NCERT is also working on making their B.Ed course a two-year course, from the present one year.

“We are still working on it, but we would want to make the B.Ed courses of two-year duration so that teachers-to-be get to visit and spend time in classrooms and interact with students besides learning the theory.

“Basically the aim is to make the courses more practical based,” Sinha said.