The institute has submitted the report titled, “Attitude towards school infrastructure in rural areas” to the West Bengal education department.

The survey, conducted by the Psychology Research Unit (PRU) of ISI, clearly says it is not enough to ensure that children, especially those at the grassroot level, attend schools. For, a vast majority of them could not imbibe conventional classroom lessons.

It also, puts a question mark on the schemes run by the Centre and state like mid-day meals which aim for improving the enrolment ratio in schools.

The survey was carried out on 572 students of Class IV in 20 schools spanning six districts.

Two rural blocks, in which 75 per cent of the residents are involved in agriculture, were chosen from each district, namely North 24 Parganas and South 24 Parganas, Bankura, Malda, Howrah and Hooghly.

The survey pointed out that 93.6 per cent of the 572 students could write their names correctly, 75 per cent could write the class they were studying in and only 66 per cent could write the date correctly.

“It does not reflect well on the education system when one-fourth of the total students could not write which class they were studying in. Neither did they have any orientation of the date,” said Professor Deb Dulal Dutta Roy, Senior Lecturer of Psychometry department.

In case of mathematics, the picture is grimmer.

When the students were given a set of numbers, only 47 per cent of them could arrange them in a correct order while, only 45 per cent could solve three-digit addition problems.

“There is no correlation between their high motivation for attending schools and their performance. There are external factors which are playing a determining role,” said Roy.

Their performances were greatly determined by the literacy level of their locality and the socio-economic status of their families as the students from high literacy blocks and better socio-economic status fared comparatively better.

Also, students in schools with improved infrastructure scored better.

The pattern was the same in both Hindu and Muslim dominated areas.

Interestingly, the “motivation” to attend school was higher among boys —both Hindus and Muslims.

“It is the first time that an attempt has been made to understand the mindset of the students instead of considering them as mere statistics. The study has shown that in rural areas children cannot relate to the conventional lessons. For them it is a forced adaptation of alien culture.