Yesterday and today we were able to go and visit two schools in Bangalore. The education system is very different in India than in the U.S. Students attend either a Government school (public) or one of the many private schools. Students attend school until grade 10 then they apply for a pre university school for 11 & 12 focusing on a stream such as Arts, Science, Economics etc...After 12 they can go on to college. They take an end of year exam in 10th and they must do very well on it to get into a "good" plus two which is the 11th & 12th. They must also do considerably well on their 12th grade exam to get into college. Some colleges are extremely competitive, if you don't get a 100% you will not get admitted! Many times I heard it is easier to get into Harvard than some colleges in India. This places a large amount of stress on the students!
Students/parents must also make the decision on what language they wish the students to be taught in. As previously mentioned there are many different languages in India and there are schools which are taught in the state language or Hindi. English is the unifying language and to be successful you need to be able to speak English so many parents chose to send their students to an English medium (everything taught in English) school. In addition each child must study two additional languages so even if the student is not taught in English every student in India learns 3 languages.
Below are some pictures and video to our visit yesterday to the Government Higher Primary School
Students arriving as we entered the school
Morning Assembly: Every school has a morning assembly. The students line up by grade, there is some sort of warm up activity, then songs, music, and this school had students read from the paper.
This is a 1-3 classroom where the students learn in their state language, Kannada . There is one teacher with three grades so she must differentiate the instruction, with different degrees of success. The students are learning the alphabet, some are putting together words and others are learning sentences. There are no desks or chairs at this school for these grades so all learning is done on the floor.
Students/parents must also make the decision on what language they wish the students to be taught in. As previously mentioned there are many different languages in India and there are schools which are taught in the state language or Hindi. English is the unifying language and to be successful you need to be able to speak English so many parents chose to send their students to an English medium (everything taught in English) school. In addition each child must study two additional languages so even if the student is not taught in English every student in India learns 3 languages.
Below are some pictures and video to our visit yesterday to the Government Higher Primary School
This video is a short clip of the band that played while we entered the school.
Two Morning Assembly videos (sorry for the video quality)
This is a grade 7 class. These students are taught in English which is offered for students in grade 3, this is a new offering for a government school.
Today we were given the opportunity to visit an affordable private school called Citizen High School. It is an English language school meaning all the lessons from preschool up to 10th are taught entirely in English. Students come from a predominently Muslim section of Bangalore and are typicall first generation learners, meaning their parents did not attend school. This is affordable as it is 500 rupees a month (remember there are roughly 60 rupees to the dollar) but the parents struggle to pay the school fees. They are low income families.
This was a science class. All students rise to answer a question.
Below is a preschool class. These students are ages 3 1/2 to 4.
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