Institutions of Higher Education and Research in India:Do they Need to Take Interest in School Science Education?

As education policy documents have repeatedly stressed, the challenge facing school education in India is of quality. Experience from around the world indicates that the quality of education depends critically on having well prepared and motivated teachers. The role of the universities in school education is generally thought to be the preparation of school teachers. However, universities and research institutions in India have typically played a minor role in teacher preparation, which has taken place largely outside the university. Teacher education in India, like engineering and medical education, has been hived off from mainstream university education into the professional stream. Teacher education has expanded massively over the last few decades to meet the enormous expansion of the population attending schools. Most of this expansion has been in the private sector - over 90% of the secondary teacher education colleges are now privately owned. Recently, the Justice Verma commission on teacher education described teacher education institutions as 'closed spaces' outside university campuses and identified their isolation as a major problem. The isolation of teacher education from mainstream university education has indeed taken deep ischolar_main and is endemic to the entire education sector.