India is in the throes of a major mess in its education system, particularly primary and secondary-level education. Despite spending Rs 5,86,085 crore ($ 94 billion) over the last decade on primary education, India has been unable to arrest the decline in learning. The quality of teaching and teachers – millions of them untrained or under-trained – is now emerging as a key problem. Poor learning outcomes in India’s classrooms pinpoint urgent need for education reform.
A recent United Nations (UN) report showed that some basic indicators such as enrolment and access to education have improved. Over 12 years, India has reduced its out-of-school children (enrolment rate) by more than 90 percent. Universal primary education has achieved 99 percent of children (6-14 years) in school. India had a ratio of 35 pupils for every teacher in 2012, up from 40 in 2000 – the second highest in South Asia after Bhutan – but behind the global average of 24 pupils for every teacher. Despite these improvements, learning outcomes in India have fallen.
The latest edition of the country’s largest private audit of elementary education in rural India tells a familiar story: rising enrolment, growing number of private schools and poor learning levels in reading, mathematics and English. Five years after the implementation of the Right to Education (RTE) Act of 2009, the fact that only an average of 48 percent of Class V children in India can read a Class II level text is a worrying sign of the abject failures of the Indian education policy. Reading levels in some states are higher, of course, but overall data from the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) by Prathan, a non-government organization (NGO) working in the field of education, which surveyed 577 districts, 16,497 villages and about 5,70,000 children in the 3-16 age group, underscore the urgent need for reform.
The Union government in 2011 launched a programme under the universal education initiative, or Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, to support states and union territories to boost the quality of teaching in government, and government aided schools. The focus of the government’s education policy has been to spend more money – (read) inputs.
While the government spent money on building schools, hiring teachers, providing free textbooks, uniforms and mid-day meals, the net enrolment in government schools went down, and enrolment in private schools rose, especially in primary schools, according to the ASER study.
Between 2007 and 2013, according to official data released by the District Information System for Education (DISE), a division of the Human Resource Development (HRD) ministry, enrolment in primary schools (Classes I to V) peaked in 2011 at 137 million, while upper-primary enrolment (Classes VI to VII) rose from 51 million to about 67 million.
Presently, there is a policy of not failing students and promoting them till Class VIII, even if they perform below par. Students thus promoted cannot even write a three-digit number, leave alone adding or subtracting them. Perhaps, it’s not the fault of the students but that of their teachers who have not done their Job well.
The no-fail (nobody can be branded as a failure) policy is a part of the plan of the RTE Act-2009, which is primarily meant to take pressure off students and change the way students are taught at schools. Earlier, children in Indian schools were trained to test their memory power rather than turn them into creative minds. This step, no doubt, is aimed at training young minds to learn rather than mug up reams of text books.
But, while turning the system around, it is also important that schools have creative teachers because only a creative mind can tap the creative mind of the child. So, going forward with the present system of education (with the no-fail policy) we need teachers, headmasters/principals with a creative mind. The way students are taught in schools need to undergo a thorough overhaul.
Changing the education system to have a no-fail policy has put additional pressure on the teachers to teach the students the right way. The burden now has shifted to teachers from students, because the system has truly put the onus on the teachers. Monitoring of each student has become a most important task of a teacher, who has to give detailed attention to students as envisaged in the plan to have the no-fail policy in the education system. Schools, including those run by the government and those aided by the government need to have quality teachers.
A recent study by Vimala Ramachandran of the National University for Educational Planning and Administration – an affiliate of the HRD ministry – revealed that in the wake of Teacher Eligibility Tests (introduced after the implementation of the RTE Act) and the high proportion of candidates who fail to clear the examination, there are people who argue that subject knowledge is poor among our teachers.
They pointed out that it is the quality of teacher – her/his mastery over subjects, pedagogic skills and aptitude to teach – that is perhaps responsible for poor learning in schools in India. Many of the people argue that persons enter the teaching profession as a last resort – when they have no other option, Ramachandran wrote in her study.
Experts in the field point out that while government concentrates on reviving the economy, the poor state of Indian education is a ticking demographic time bomb. In a country with the world’s largest proportion of young people, economists have long talked about the demographic dividend but if large sections of these Indians remain functionally uneducated and unskilled, this demographic dividend can soon turn into a demographic disaster, experts warned.
So, the message is now very clear, building classrooms, spending billions on school infrastructure and making children sign up to attend won’t be enough till we start focusing on what actually happens inside the classrooms. In fact, besides required infrastructure, we owe our children an effective and out-of-the-box education system with adequately trained teachers, in order to bring about improved outcomes in schools.
(The writer is a freelance journalist)
