Teacher?s Attitude and Its Impact on Children?s Access to Primary Education: Evidences from Primary Data

Education is recognised as a basic input for empowering individual and overall development of the society. The universalisation of primary education continues to be a distant dream even after sixty years of indepencence, enormous funding and promises. Rather, the goal of universalisation has only been sparsely achieved and much has to do with the way access has been defined. The government's approach of defining access in terms of attainment i.e., increasing literacy rate, enrolment ratios, infrastructure and teachers availability etc. and then making them affordable to the masses has proved to be grossly unsatisfactory. The approach has been narrowed in including a relevant aspect i.e., the attitude of providers which determines the willingness of first generation learners to join educational institutions and thus, affects access to primary education to a large extent. Keeping this in background, the present paper argues that mere availability and affordability of facilities cannot ensure access. It must be accompanied with an encouraging attitude and high commitment of education providers. Availability and Affordability would fail miserably in ensuring access if those who are involved in providing the facilities to the deprived section actually do not accept their role, acknowledge their responsibility and are not prepared to work tirelessly towards the end.The paper intends to measure the rural-urban disparity in attitude of teachers for which it uses data collected through a primary survey of six basic survey units- 4 villages and 2 wards from the Varanasi district of Uttar Pradesh. Multi-stage sampling has been done to select the schools and households to be surveyed. Two groups of people were interviewed- parents whose wards were studying in the schools in the survey area and headmaster of different primary schools falling in the locality, thus making the total sample size of 450 parents and 31 headmasters, respectively. For measuring attitude, a psychometric response scale developed by Likert has been used. Likert scaling on 1-5 points has been done for transforming the qualitative indicators into quantitative one.The findings of the study suggests that excessive reliance on year end examination, sparse personalised attention of teachers towards individual problems of the weak students, checking homework on irregular basis and lack of commitment or an easy going approach of teachers towards their job have been the major problems with schooling system in general and government in particular. For ensuring commitment and dedication among the providers, government can employ college/university students during their vacation days for carrying different surveys so as to reduce non-teaching burden of teachers and allow them to solely teach. Besides this, the grading of teachers should be done on the basis of their qualification, behaviour and involvement with students, classroom activity and student's performance both in terms of oral and written examination of student. This would enhance the motivation and commitment level of teachers.