Schooling in India: is the school climate conducive to the overall development of children

Abstract

Most children spend around 8 hours a day in school in the formative years of their life. Thus, School climate is one of the most critical factor to play a role in the overall academic and psychological development of the child, especially adolescents (high schoolers) who are easily impressionable. The education system in India needs some significant reforms, especially today. Along with the academic curriculum, school climate should also be considered for enforcing the such reforms. There have been extensive studies on this in many developed countries like the USA. But the problems that exist in the school culture of different countries and societies are radically different. For example, in the United States, possession of weapons during school hours maybe be a big problem leading to children feeling unsafe, but in India caste and wealth based discrimination might be the case. Still, no such studies have been done in the Indian context. Also within India, problems in school culture maybe different for different states as India is such a huge and diverse country. This project aims at bridging this gap by investigating the teachers, students and parents’ perception of the school climate the children face every day. This project also plans to test the relevance of the survey that was used in the USA and Mexico (MDS3) in the Indian setting. As a part of the project we will also compare the results that we got to the results that we get using this survey.