Young Achiever: Suchitra Ramesh
A foot fracture opened up golf as a potential career option for Suchitra Ramesh (13), a class VII student of Bangalore’s Greenwood High School. “In 2006, I fractured my right heel and the doctor prescribed playing golf to hasten the healing process. Once I started playing, I liked the sport so much that I couldn’t stop even after my foot had healed. And it so happened that a coach spotted me and told me I had great potential. That’s how it all started,” recalls Suchitra, after winning the Clover Greens Charity Tournament on February 4 in Bangalore, in the 0-15 handicap category. Four days later, she added the winner’s (girls) trophy of the 4th Callaway Juniors Tour Qualifier to her crowding mantelpiece. The year 2011 was exceptionally good for this budding star of the golfing greens. She was ranked No.1 by the Indian Golf Union in the girls under-12 category and won the Toyota Etios North, South and Eastern India Juniors last December. She was also runner-up in the Usha Delhi Open and the Western India Juniors. Suffering her fortuitous foot fracture when she was just eight, Suchitra honed her skills in Seoul, South Korea, where her father R.K. Ramesh, general manager of the Bangalore-based Toyota Kirloskar Motors, was posted between 2007-09. In Seoul, she came under the tutelage of Stephen Moriarty, a world-renowned golf instructor. “Now that I’m in Bangalore, he is still my coach and advises me via V1 Pro software (video swing analysis system), which makes it possible for him to provide feedback on my play via online videos,” says Suchitra. Acknowledging her parents enthusiastic support, Suchitra says her mother Uma is her most ardent supporter. “She’s my mum, PR person, friend — all rolled into one,” she says, while also attributing her success to a rigorous practise regime of two and a half hours on weekdays and five hours on Saturdays. Hooked on her unwittingly chosen sport, this promising youngster is set to make it her profession. “I want to be a professional golfer. Golf is coming back to the Olympics in 2016 in Brazil and I want to represent India in the event. I also want to wear India colours in the 2014 Asian Games in Korea. But these ambitions require intelligent training and preparation. In the short term, I have my sights set on winning the Usha Delhi Ladies and Junior Girls Amateur tournaments in Noida on April 16,” she enthuses. Fore! Rutaksha Rawat (Bangalore) Also Read: Young Achiever: Diptayan Ghosh
QES 2011 reflections
Dr. Shekhar P. Seshadri, professor, NIMHANS, Bangalore with Prof. Anitha Kurup & R. Maithreyi, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore “…But a failure to equip minds with the skills for understanding and feeling and acting in the cultural world is not simply underscoring a pedagogical zero. It risks creating alienation, defiance, and practical incompetence. And all these under-mine the viability of a culture.” Jerome Bruner — The Culture of Education (1996) The latest Quality Education Study (QES, 2011) conducted by Wipro and Educational Initiatives, not only shows cognitive underachievement but also reveals the presence of disturbing social attitudes among students of India’s top metro schools (EW February), which seem to confirm the predictions made by Bruner. Not only does QES 2011 indicate that academic outcomes within India’s best schools are poor, it also highlights a great shortfall in personal and social knowledge and skills, which has grave implications for the formation of a responsible and mature citizenry. The survey results show that early learners harbour deep-seated gender prejudices (close to 43 percent of students in classes IV, VI, and VIII opined that education for girls is not as important as “family responsibilities”, with a few stating that it is a waste of family resources). Intolerance for diversity is also cited by the survey with nearly 60 percent of students expressing intolerance towards ‘immigrants’ from other states of the Indian Union, and 50 percent opining that it’s permissible for religious differences to be defended by violence. Moreover top private school students lack sensitivity towards the differently-abled (between 70-80 percent believed they are burdensome, unhappy and poor at studies). These regressive attitudes come as no surprise. This is because, as the study details, schools seem to prepare children for mastering skills for imitation and reproduction of procedural knowledge through rote memorisation. In the absence of skills for critical thinking and reflection to engage with social and political issues, they perhaps also apply rote learning techniques to the social domain, and thus imitate and reproduce prevalent socio-cultural prejudices. Critiquing this lacuna in primary-secondary education, the National Curriculum Framework, 2005 (NCF) observed that “education often plays a passive or even insidious role, allowing young minds to be indoctrinated into a culture of intolerance, which denies the fundamental importance of human sentiments and the noble truths discovered by different civilisations”. The QES study stands testimony to this as it lays bare the disconnect between the elementary education curricula — even in top-ranked metro schools — and other social sectors such as economy, caste/class, culture, religion and more importantly, family. Read together, the conclusions of QES 2011 seem to suggest that the guidelines and directions provided by NCF and other education policy initiatives beginning from the Kothari Commission (1966), are yet to be implemented in elementary education. NCF has clearly stressed the need for schooling to become more meaningful, personally relevant and socially productive through a definitive shift from rote learning and memory-based pedagogies to learning connected with wider societies beyond school gates. It argues that teaching-learning processes must focus on the…