It’s much easier to modernise the industry than modernise education. Allocate resources, import technology, borrow know-how and automate. We will soon witness the growth of modern industry.
Transforming industry requires capital resources, whereas renovating and revolutionising education necessitates human resources. For a modern industry we can look at the markets of technologically advanced nations.
For a modern education, we have to look inwards at our human resources engaged in education. They cannot be borrowed, imported and installed. They do not exist; they need to be created. This is the singular and biggest challenge to the effective implementation and roll out of the New Education Policy 2020.
We have a plethora of reports and recommendations on Education commencing with the Radhakrishnan Commission to date. The 1986 education policy made the structural change replacing the 11+4 pattern with the 10+2+3 format.
The 2020 Education Policy proposes the 5+3+3+4 plan. The first stage of education is referred to as the Foundational Stage, which will comprise of children in the age group of 3-8 years.
The first component would be pre-school i.e. Nursery, KG-1, KG-2. The second module of the Foundational Stage would be Class 1 and Class 2 of Primary. This is designated as Early Child Care & Education (ECCE). The Preparatory Stage would be children in the age group of 8-11 years with formal schooling in Class 3 to Class 5.
The ultimate purpose of the NEP is unquestionably laudable. It is to develop human beings with rational thinking, scientific temper, creative imagination and ensure that the education system fosters the unique strengths and capabilities of each learner.
The NEP recognises that the work to achieve the educational goals need to commence from the bottom of the educational pyramid. The unequivocal admission that 85% of the brain development of the child takes place till the age of 8 should open the eyes of all the stakeholders including the parents.
Our system of rote learning providing the highest pedestal to memorisation and exclusive written modes of evaluation commencing from Nursery level has caused irreversible damage to the growth of children.
Our current inflexible, rigid schooling system with uniform methodologies and learning outcomes have not provided scope for nurturing diversity of natural talents in children.
Transforming the teacher
The Foundational Stage envisaged in the NEP is the most desirable and critical step. It’s a herculean task to implement in the context of the current infrastructure in schools coupled with the mind-sets of teachers and parents.
A flexible curriculum along with the methodology of teaching and learning which fosters and facilitates self-learning needs to be adopted. At the Foundational Stage the methodology of teaching and learning should be completely activity-based and learner-centred.
Parents, teachers and educational administrators should be on one page with the maxim—“Children are natural learners”. Children will definitely learn more than what is taught in an environment of freedom and ‘play-based’ education.
The issue is not of the curriculum. The National Curriculum for the Foundational Stage is prepared and organised. The issue is of orientation, training and induction of teachers and educational administrators to teaching cum learning through free play, guided play, structured play and activity-based modules.
These human resources also need to be refreshed with programmes to re-draft learning outcomes from what they are conventionally accustomed to. Before we attempt to transform children, we need to convert teachers to this new religion of the Foundational Stage.
To adopt a discovery-based approach to learning, teachers need to imbibe the reality that children have strong tendencies of self-discovery if properly aided and propelled.
DoE, SCERT and DIERT
Primarily, the Department of School Education is packed with personnel who can manage administration. For them, the implementation of the Foundational Stage will begin and end with a circular instructing educational institutions to compartmentalise their class-rooms as per the new pattern of 5+3+3.
At the most, another fiat of administrative instructions would follow on curriculum and text-books. The Department has to closely look at the upgradation of physical infrastructure in government, aided and non-aided nursery and primary schools for the delivery of the National Curriculum for Foundational Course.
The core issue of ‘teacher education’ has to be addressed. The agencies for continuous training and motivation of human resources in education will be the State Council for Educational Research and Training (SCERT) and the District Institutes for Education and Training (DIERT). These are the agencies who are supposed to put the academic structure and resources in the required gear.
In SCERT (Goa) the Director is due to retire in February, 2023. Around 80% of posts in this institute are vacant. There are no full-time academic personnel with this institute. There are a few officers shifted or shunted from the Education Department holding additional charges.
There is a question whether these officers parked with SCERT are suitable for education, research and training. As regards, the DIET (North), it is just a change in nomenclature of the former institute which was providing in-service training to primary teachers without the required personnel.
We do not have a DIET for the South district, we need to establish and equip the District Education Training Institutes for continuous orientation, training and academic development of teachers at nursery and primary level.
They have to steer the academic base in our government institutions as well as in aided and non-aided educational institutions. There seems to be quite a big void in the most critical aspect of preparing human resources in tune with the NEP.
The real battle for the success of the New Education Policy has to be fought at the Foundational Stage of education. If this falls in place, then we can expect the required methodologies of teaching and learning to rule the roost in the Preparatory, Middle and Secondary stages of school education. Otherwise, Goa will boast of implementing the NEP in theory not in practice; on paper not on the educational campuses.
(The writer is an educationist
and political commentator)