Bereft of talent within, Punjab is looking for English teachers from abroad to teach the children of the State. Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal on Wednesday asked the Canada’s Thompson Rivers University to provide good teachers to the State for teaching English in its Government schools and colleges.
That is not all! Badal has also announced that the State Government would bear the entire expenditure of such “guest teachers”.
Badal’s offer came during his meeting with a high level delegation of the Canada’s Thompson Rivers University that called on the Chief Minister at his office on Wednesday afternoon.
During the interaction, Badal asked the visiting delegation to provide good teachers to the State for teaching English in Government schools and colleges.
“The State Government would bear the entire expenditure of such guests teachers, who could enhance reading, writing and speaking skills of students in English language, to brighten their future prospects,” Badal said to the delegation, led by varsity’s chief executive officer (CEO Baihua Chadwick).
Badal further opined that the State Government was also open to the idea of sending delegation of teachers from the State to Thompson University for imparting training to them in order to enhance their capacities and capabilities.
The development is significant as Badal’s request comes as a veiled admission of the state government’s failure, so far, to upgrade the education standards in the State’s Government schools by recruiting talented teachers.
Only recently, the high court of another State had suggested education for the wards of bureaucrats in Government schools for upgrading the standards. Academicians believed that the presence of the teachers from the foreign land may go a long way in improving the education standards in the state and make Punjab students more competitive.
More than 80,000 students, out of more than 3.78 lakh appearing in Punjab School Education Board (PSEB) Class X exam in 2014-15, have failed in English subject or had compartment. In Mohali district alone, having highest literacy rate of 85 percent, 31 percent of Class-X students in PSEB, failed to clear English exam.
To make the matters worse, Punjab Education Minister Daljeet Singh Cheema was in for a shock when he met about 220 English teachers, whose students have displayed poor result in the Class X exams from the Government schools across all districts, in June this year to know the reasons for students’ disappointing performance in English subject.
The reasons for the dismal result in English became crystal clear after Cheema asked the teachers to submit their reports, during the meeting, citing reasons for the students’ poor performance, and suggestions regarding further improvement which were full of grammatical errors and inferior standard of English.
Their replies signified that the teachers were not capable of giving good lessons of English to the students. Besides grammatical errors, some teacher could not spell even the common words like lack, which was spelled as “lake”, vacant as “vacent”, recess as ressess, among others.
Expressing concern over the deteriorating academic standards in the schools, Cheema had said that the teachers were more responsible for the decline than the students.
Virtually sending the state’s English teachers back to school, the Punjab government had constituted 29-member core group to chalk out a curriculum for them to improve their language skills.