The goal of the 21CGs is to identify and empower the gifted rural youth to achieve their full potential. In a recent review of the educational systems in AP, we discovered that rural youth are five times more likely to drop out of school than urban youth. Thus, the high school graduation rate from rural areas of AP tends to be about one third of urban areas. Another interesting fact is that, of all the selected candidates passing the national competitive exams such as IITs and IIMs, less than 1% come from rural background
Rural youth even though they may be gifted and have high IQ do not succeed in national competitive exams because most such exams require facility in English, verbal, quantitative and analytical skills that they have never been taught. There several other factors confounding this problem. Many rural students don.t know the how to apply, how to prepare, how to communicate and succeed in the national exams. They do not have educated professional parents to provide expert advice. Usually the rural parents tend to be semi-literate and do not know how to nurture and provide help. Perhaps, the most limiting fact is that many rural families cannot afford to send the children to college and pay monthly tuition fees and hostel fees. Farmers do not get a paycheck at the end of each month!
21CG is an attempt to overcome all these problems by making the selection based on local best rather than national best criteria. They use local Mentors who act as local guardian and .in loco parentis.. The system provides every student a loan to cover all expenses which is repaid only after graduation. In the event that the student does not get a job paying atleast 2 lakhs per year, the gurukulam will hire the graduate as an assistant mentor with a salary and also payoff the loan at a rate of 1 lakh per annum (education with money-back guarantee?).
The current reservation system does not seem to help with the problem of rural youth. Most of those that succeed under the existing reservation quota system also tend to be largely from educated, urban backgrounds.
The process of identifying the rural gifted youth is a difficult one, but what we propose below should begin to address the problem. If intelligence is uniformly distributed, we can assume that out of all the children that are born, at least ten of out of the hundred are very bright, and at least one of the hundred is brilliant. We propose to identify these local best candidates by replacing the current .National Test to Select the National Best (NTSNB) Model. by .National Test to Select the Local Best (NTSLB) Model.. In this model, every student takes the .same. national examination but whether you .pass or not. is determined at the local level based on your relative performance among all the children of a cluster of villages. Thus the limitations of the quality of the teachers and facilities available, and the fact that the rural youth never had the opportunity to get quality education like the urban youth, does not deprive them from progressing to the next level.
For example, if a thousand officers are to be selected by the UPSC in any given year, the same examination will be taken by all the aspiring candidates, but the selection would be made by allocating 80% of the seats to the rural youth in some geographically distributed selection process. There are problems in implementing this idea equitably, but this is significantly better than the current seriously unfair system, where almost none of the rural youth get in. Once selected, at the beginning of the academic program a .Gap Analysis. is made. Remedial education is provided, based on the Gap Analysis, using Intelligent Tutoring Systems which permit variable duration, self-paced learning until such time they.re up to the expected level of scholarship.
In the long run, out of a hundred children born in a given cluster of villages, the top ten and the top one would be identified and sent to elite residential schools and colleges modeled after the Sainik School, leading to quality education and nurturing. Clearly, this long-term vision cannot be accomplished overnight. As an initial goal, we aspire to establish, by the year 2020, residential high schools covering 10% of the rural youth, undergraduate residential colleges for 5% of the rural youth, and post graduate residential institutes for the top 1% of the rural youth. As a first step, in 2006, we propose to establish 21CG Post-Graduate IT Academies. It is our expectation that the graduates of the PG Program will have Master.s Degrees in IT, thereby guaranteeing options that are currently denied to them.
