Education Matters!

A forest is a library but a library is not a forest!

2025-03-18T10:42:00.002+05:30

For those who can read it, a forest is like a library. From 1986 to 1992, I lived in a tribal village. Among the most fulfilling time I spent was in the forest, especially in the company of children I taught or those who lived near my home.

As we moved into the forest, I saw them look alertly at the bushes, trees and much else around them. They knew which of these presented opportunities (a fruit or a berry or a leaf that could be made into a whistle), which presented a threat (an insect that bit or stung or a danger such as a snake), or where you might fall and hurt yourself, or which was a good spot to sit and take a look at the world around you. They anticipated phenomena – which parts would be more interesting or more treacherous or dangerous after a shower or when it got too hot or after leaves had fallen and it was difficult to see the ground. They noticed changes, they commented on how something had been earlier and how it was now.

Children would accurately point out holes on a slope to say whether a scorpion was inside them or not, or would be able to pluck a particular leaf that could be crushed and put on a scratch or a wound, and acted as an effective, medicated bandage.

They navigated on paths new to them to find their way or set a general direction. They knew if an area was good for their purposes, such as when herding a group of cattle during a given season or when collecting forest produce. They made sense of sounds from different types of crickets or a truck lumbering through the forest track a kilometre away. They sensed when water was near or when not to mess with things.

The alert look that seized their faces, the searching eyes or ears or nose or hands or feet as they moved about expertly and casually, were all signs of persons competently reading the environment around them. That pause, curiosity and exploratory actions showed something new was being encountered, processed and recorded. The reaction, of moving urgently away from something or towards it, was instant reading that you and I might not conceive.

Very often, children would learn not just from their own experience but that of others too, by asking questions or being told about something at an opportune moment. As a novice, I was enabled a glimpse into this world by my expert guides and often left feeling inadequate by their quickness in reading the world around them.

In contrast, the kind of reading I taught them using books was too basic. It helped them read texts, maybe even make sense of those and occasionally enjoy or appreciate some pieces. But I doubt it could make them alert to ideas, concepts or new information in the way in which they were in their native forest environment or capture shifts in meaning or explore excitedly in search of a prize (e.g. a new revelation) or make their life more interesting or worthwhile or just plain rooted. No, we teach reading as an act to be performed, perhaps to satisfy some assessment, not as an enriched and enriching life to be lived.

In the end, as our children go through schooling, they move away from their enlivening forest but never reach that lively engagement with the written word and the vast windows of meaning it ought to open. In the end, the forest may be a library, but a library is not a forest.

Key Focus Areas for Improving Education Quality - 2025-27

2025-03-15T13:40:00.001+05:30

NITI Aayog – National Workshop on Quality Education

28 February, 2025

Getting Back To The Basics –

Key Focus Areas for Improving Education Quality

Subir Shukla

Ignus Pahal

In terms of getting back to the basics, in order to improve quality of education and learning for each child, there are three areas we need to focus on.

1. Increase the teaching learning time.

2. Improve the quality of processes and relationships that take place within that time, and

3. Prepare the ground for all children to attain higher order learning and not remain just at the basics.

Now to go into these in some detail.

1. Improving teaching learning time

While it is well understood that teachers are now burdened more than ever before with many other tasks than teaching, including filling in forms on WhatsApp or undertaking other activities, teaching-learning time is now also deeply affected by climate change too.

In a survey conducted in four major states of India last year, it was found that around 15 days on average are lost due to school closures resulting from climate events. However, between 20 to 30 days were also affected by near extreme climate events – i.e., when school was not closed but it was too hot or too cold or too wet to learn. And then when school does start after a gap, it is not as if momentum continues from before. Thus, we are losing around 40 to 50 days of teaching learning time every year, apart from all the other burden that we already have.

This requires us to do an audit and have some stronger data on exactly how much teaching learning time is actually there.

We also need to assess whether all the other tasks we are asking teachers to do lead to improvements in learning or not.

And then, given climate-induced disruptions, school needs to be seen not just as a space where we learn but as a state of learning – one in which learning continues beyond the physical building in order to overcome the effects of climate change.

Overall, our objective should be to enhance the time on task, within which there is engagement time and academic learning time, as much as possible.

2. Improving the quality of processes and relationships

Here, our first step would be to work towards a have common agreement on exactly what we want to see happening in our classrooms. Policies have always asked for active learning on the part of students, starting with activity-based learning in NPE 1986, followed by constructivism in NCF-05, ‘activity, exploration and projects’ in RTE 09 and now ‘experiential learning’ based on activity and constructivism within the NEP.

However, your notion of experiential learning can be very different from mine! And at present, different people are doing different things under this. Some believe experiential learning happens only if you take children out of the class. Others believe that some action inside the class is enough. Yet others believe that without serious reflection and application or cognitive engagement on students’ part, it is not experiential learning, or at least the learning part is not there.

Schools are now getting inputs from a wide range of sources, including many different NGOs, very often with very differing views on what pedagogy there should be. So, there are now contradictory versions happening in many places, thus dissipating all the effort underway.

On the other hand, we also have a situation where all teachers are being asked to strictly follow instructions given from the state level, consisting of which lessons are to be taught on which particular days. This is very difficult to achieve between, say, a tribal village and an urban area or a multilingual or a non-multilingual area.

Here, a degree of teacher autonomy (within a framework of agreed-upon principles) is extremely important. It is quite obvious that a one-size-fits-all approach does not work and we now need to go beyond. Most of our inputs (such as curriculum, textbooks, lesson planning) do not take into account the multi-grade context, the multi-level context resulting from children's differential attendance, and the MLE context, which is now beginning to be thought of. So along with teacher autonomy, contextualization for diversity matters a great deal.

In order to gain traction on the ground, we need to create ownership on part of implementers, including teachers. Such ownership is only possible if there are some decisions in which the implementer is involved. That is where teacher autonomy – at least in terms of deciding the what to teach, when to teach, how to teach, in keeping with broadly agreed upon principles – makes a great difference.

The way to do this would be to enable a common vision, agree on goals and then let implementers decide their targets, state these publicly and support them in the process.

We would also need to work strongly on the belief systems of teachers and officials. It is often not acknowledged but discrimination remains a deep part of our system, where many teachers (and admin personnel too) do not believe that children from certain sections of society will learn. In fact, this is reflected in newspaper reports every year when after the board exams, it is often reported that a child from a poor family has done well. It is a news item because she is not supposed to do well!

A very good way to enable progress is to use performance indicators, not just for teachers, but for all involved, including HM, supportive supervisors such as BRCs and CRCs, BEOs, DIETs, DEOs, and state level personnel and institutions too. It is not possible for the school and teachers and children to improve without those at higher echelons improving too. Thus, collecting data on performance of all echelons and students would enable us to take corrective steps and generate momentum towards improved learning.

We also need to explore creating incentive for states, districts, blocks, clusters and even schools to focus on those at risk of being left behind. One good way would be to ensure that everyone is rated on basis of the performance of the bottom 25% in any cohort. If states and other entities know that they are ranked on basis of the performance of those falling in the lowest band, it would encourage them to focus on the needs of those farthest from the expected levels, thus raising learning levels overall.

In order to work on

· belief systems of teachers and others, and

· to create and implement TPD through a ladder or progression of performance indicators,

we need to urgently develop our SCERTs and DIETs, a process just initiated by MoE. In these institutions, it is important to place funding within the institution rather than with SPOs. Otherwise, we will be stuck with a situation where the institution is responsible for implementation and accountable for it, but does not have access to the funds needed for the same.

Along with this, if it do not work on CRCs and BRCs, then we have a cutting edge that is not cutting! We need to revive the supportive supervision mechanism of CRCs and BRCs around performance indicators as mentioned earlier.

The performance indicators could also be used as a basis to create a cadre of teachers for sectors where we are in short supply. This includes ECE where we need lakhs of trained personnel within a very short time, and ongoing TPD with assessment of performance on basis of indicators could offer an authentic pathway towards professional qualification.

And lastly, in order to improve classroom processes, we actually need to strengthen administrators at all levels. When I began working, there were only 28 lakh teachers in India. Today there are 98 lakh teachers. However, the number of administrators has hardly gone up. You might recall when you were young that there used to be something called ‘school inspections’ undertaken by administrators in order to assess quality of learning. That is no more possible because there is neither the staff nor the facilities to do so. Apart from being strengthened through staff and facilities, administrators also need to be supported in moving beyond a command-and-control approach towards transformative leadership.

While all these steps are much needed and also possible as they build on what has already been done in the country at different times, they cannot be implemented without a solid core of experienced resource persons working with the MoE and state education departments and institutions (in addition to those already in place). We need, in fact, to create a national pool of resource persons for this purpose, as a task force rather than a permanent ‘standing’ group.

3. Moving towards higher order learning

On the third challenge, preparing the ground to attain the higher-order learning that NEP 2020 repeatedly emphasizes as being a key aspect of ‘quality’ education.

First, if we aim for the basics, we are likely to achieve less than the basics, which means that the overall learning level will remain low. We need to aim high in order to get somewhere. While the curriculum often provides for this, it is in classroom processes that these get ignored, often because teachers do not know exactly how children who find it difficult to master the basics can go to higher order aspects.

To move towards higher order learning, therefore, it would useful to recognize the fund of knowledge and experience that students bring into the class. Every student is an expert on something or the other! A tribal child may know a great deal about plants and animals, while a slum child in a city might know a lot about materials because he's worked as a rag picker. How can that knowledge and that capability, which they display outside the class actually be part of what happens inside the class? In fact, in a recent paper on street maths versus class maths, Esther Duflo points out how well children are able to handle the maths outside. So, we have a treasure of student capabilities, but it lies unutilized.

Similarly, community too can be a knowledge partner. For instance, a truck driver may know a great deal about the geography of India. An ironsmith may know about how to separate impurities from metal, which is high-level chemistry. Or a farmer may be well aware of weeds or a community health worker can enlighten students on many aspects of the human body. It is worth asking: How can the community emerge as a knowledge partner to enable deeper learning to happen in the class?

Finally, it is only when the assessment too starts looking at higher-order competencies and learning outcomes that these will become part of the normal process of the class. Hence, creating and implementing appropriate assessments, keeping in mind key areas emphasised in NCFs, would go a long way to enable higher-order learning to happen, ultimately contributing to the improvement of quality.

4. Finally, a fourth ‘basic’

While the three strands I have talked about address the critical basics we need to sort out, there is one overarching aspect too, which is of enabling continuity in the reform efforts. As we all know, whenever leadership changes, especially at the state level, there are disruptions in what is underway. Consequently, many good efforts do not see implementation over the duration that is needed for them to have an effect. As has been said, we have many beginnings, but not enough middles and endings.

In order to overcome this, it might be useful to consider creating a ‘educational quality protocol’. Just as there is no drastic change in administrative or financial procedures when leadership changes (because these have ‘protocols’), similarly, educational quality too needs to spell out a protocol. This could help ensure that random, sudden, or unexpected changes do not take place. For example, no ongoing project may be stopped without a sufficient evaluation conducted in a specified manner, or no annual work plan and budget may be changed in such a way that it contradicts a perspective plan that is put in place or that unnecessary piloting of what has already been piloted will not be undertaken. Such a step would ensure that there is continuity and reduced wastage.

Similarly, when any new leadership comes in place, a detailed briefing by the MOE on what has been done in the state and what needs to continue, would also be of great help.

2024-10-10T08:00:00.001+05:30

The Evolution of Children’s Literature as Learning Materials – A Personal Journey

Subir Shukla

In the beginning

In 1986, I began working in Eklavya to develop and field test a primary stage curriculum appropriate for children in government schools. It naturally led to exploring the children’s literature that existed at the time (in English and Hindi) and looking for ways in which it could be used best with children. It soon became clear that:

• Despite having a very rich collection, there was very little material (other than books from NBT, CBT and a few ‘classic’ publishers) that could be considered child-friendly – that is, created and designed keeping in mind children’s ages, developmental stages and context. Many had very poor print quality too, with the ink rubbing off on to your hands (and hence actually toxic for children).

• There was a plethora of myth and religious stories, or ‘moral’ literature whose purpose was to edify and ‘mould’ children into desired moral beings. Often stories would begin with what they were going to teach: ‘Children, greed is a really bad quality, and to explain that I’m going to tell you this story of….’

• There were plenty of ABCD type of books or garishly produced fairy tales, ripped off from some source that was never mentioned.

• Other than NBT and CBT books, none of the other publishers paid much attention to illustration and design. Font sizes were desperately small, with little relief for the eye.

• The few children’s magazines that existed were mainly full of stereotypes, anthropomorphic versions of animal tales, again with the morality that was often acquired through some violent consequence of giving in to one’s desires.

Overall, it was a grim and depressing scenario. What was missing in much of the literature was to see the world from the child’s perspective, or the effort to enable her to see things differently by engaging her in a process that encouraged reflection. Certain forms were generally absent or much less in evidence – whimsy, fantasy, nonsense or sound-based texts, and drama. Creative non-fiction, too, was comparatively rare. The situation was better in Bengali and Marathi (in which some of the great writers of literature for adults also wrote for children) but as I needed to work mainly with Hindi (and to some extent English), it was disheartening.

One aspect that seemed to be completely missing was that of trying out draft material with children. That is, field testing or getting children’s feedback in order to re-work and refine emerging material for children, including stories, poems or other forms. It thus fell to me to test the literature that existed, for suitability for its use in the textbooks we would create. Within the first few weeks it was apparent that there was a very limited number of works that could be effectively used with children. An overwhelming amount of dull and didactic material dominated the few that made and effort to connect with children.

While the NBT and CBT books were useful in generating oracy, they did pose a problem in that children from the poorest sections of society, including those in the tribal area where I was located, could not always connect with the visuals or the contexts presented. When it came to introducing literacy, it was worse – most available literature did not lend itself to use in our emerging curriculum and textbooks that would be field tested. Texts that tried to be ‘simple and easy’, usually by not using ‘matras’ ended up sounding distorted or extraordinarily insipid and off-putting, making it more difficult to teach children. E.g. – अमर उठ, घर चल, पानी पी, मत रो.... One of the keys to generating literacy is that if the material you struggle with is promising – that is, it arouses curiosity or holds relevance or feels like it is going to be interesting, fun or worthwhile – then the effort is worth it. Instead, we had material that was actually deterring children by being boring, disconnected and irrelevant, thus defeating the very purpose of trying to introduce literacy.

Creating the new

This then led to the situation where, over the next six years, I ended up creating or adapting – and field-testing – hundreds of texts across various genres for different age groups. Of these, around 200 emerged as ‘successful’ with children – that is, they loved (and demanded) listening to these again and again, or would happily engage with their written form or try to extend their own efforts into the exercises included and, most satisfyingly, even be heard singing or narrating these on their own, after school hours. A great deal of such material found its way into our textbook, Khushi-Khushi, for classes 1-5. Despite the fact that it was printed in black and white and had only line drawings as illustration, children loved to carry these books around with them, in the fields or sitting on a buffalo’s back.

Some lessons I learnt from these years of creating and field-testing material are as follows.

• Children love sound based materials or pieces that involve word play, alliteration, rhyme and rhythm. (For instance, the poem एक था खटखट, बहुत ही नटखट, or the rhyming story छोटा सा मोटा सा लोटा, now in its 20th edition as an NBT publication. Surprisingly, there was not enough of this, and much of it needed to be created.

• While adults may not be able to relate with ‘nonsense’, children do. They seem to understand it intuitively and connect with it quite well.

• Children love it if they are able to participate in a story by responding or adding something. In poems that they can easily extend, their excitement and participation is really high. For example, the poem क्या है काला, क्या है सफेद or पांव अगर पंखे के होते.

• It is important that children and their lives are represented in the literature. Tribal children or children who ‘don’t wear shoes’ – their world and their perspectives must find place. Thus a story about a child who’s gone with a bullock cart across a forest to buy fodder, or about looking for root vegetables in the hot period after the monsoon (when the earlier crop has been consumed and the next one is not yet available), or not having clothes to wear to school because there’s only one dress and it’s not yet dried – would foreground the world children knew, but would also prepare them with the literacy skills to unpack other worlds that were less familiar.

• Action matters, in poems and stories. It was incredible how much literature spent far too much space on description and not enough on action. Thus a poem about a हरे रंग का तोता would focus on what the parrot was like, instead of what it did. This made it difficult to visualise or communicate through actions and gestures in a class full of children whose first language was not Hindi. And it was also difficult for illustrators to show!

• Children can think and debate on what stories contain. Grey works better to generate moral-ethical understanding than black and white, especially when children themselves have to figure out which options are the right ones to take. For instance, in a story on बन्नो का चांद, about a little girl who laughs at the moon, hurting it so much that he goes away to the night (and is still there!), children were able to argue that it’s OK for friends to tease each other and the moon need not have run off in a huff.

• Coincidences are unsatisfactory ways of characters attaining their goals, and make the lessons learnt seem even more random. This tends to communicate a fatalist perspective, wherein you wait for your kismet to rescue you from whatever dire straits you find yourself in.

• Fiction and poetry work very well in subjects other than languages too. Stories involving aspects of science or maths or social science are quite successful, as long as they respect the requirement of being good children’s literature first and not message-dominant.

• Non-fiction is where children’s own fund of experience, environmental knowledge, and the community’s knowledge heritage is best tapped. This works well if there are openings in the material where children can add from their own environment.

At the National Centre for Children’s Literature, NBT-India

This experience was of great help as I joined the National Centre for Children’s Literature (NCCL) at the National Book Trust, India in 1993, as Editor (Training and Promotion), under the amazing Mala Dayal. The Nehru Bal Pustakalaya series flourished and we were able to make significant improvements in what was published. The NCCL brought out a magazine for its Readers’ Clubs, with a country-wide appeal, deceptively called the Readers’ Club Bulletin – but actually containing high quality children’s literature in a variety of genres, again illustrated in black and white. The basic tenet was that it would speak with children rather than at them. Some of India’s biggest writers wrote for this, including Mahasweta Devi, Arup Dutta, Khushwant Singh, Pushpesh Pant and many others. However, even they were asked to revise or refine what they had written in keeping with guidelines for what made for age-appropriate, context-appropriate and child-friendly literature. A new benchmark was set for the kind of non-fiction made available to children. With some of India’s best illustrators chipping in, the black and white format was again very popular with children, as the large number of post-cards received from them showed. These learnings also carried through into writers’ workshops we organised in Odisha or the North-East or Punjab.

On the largest possible scale, across states

During this time (1994), when DPEP was being conceptualised, the MHRD would occasionally ask me to review research designs developed by the NCERT, e.g. for examining the readability of Indian textbooks. I was also asked to do a gender analysis of textbook contents (which showed appalling discrimination against girls, in the texts, exercises and illustrations). By this time, we had also put together in the NCCL’s library a collection of award-winning children’s books from across the world, many of which included material designed specifically for learning. This served to set the framework against which the textbooks could be seen, especially the children’s literature they contained.

What these exercises brought out was that:

• In a way, the ‘real’ children’s literature could be considered to be that which existed in textbooks. The stories, poems and non-fiction that these contained were the only children’s literature that an overwhelming majority of our children accessed, especially in rural areas. In fact, the largest print runs of children’s literature was (and still is) actually in the form of textbooks – often in lakhs of copies over several years whereas ‘best-selling’ children’s literature remains in thousands.

• The material that textbooks contained then was uniformly disappointing – age inappropriate, didactic, usually information dense, focused more on the needs of the subject than children, and representing only a middle-class universe.

• Stereotypes and prejudices abounded. Not only against girls but also the poor (e.g., ‘he was poor but honest’).

By the time I got the opportunity to work as Chief Consultant (Curriculum, Pedagogy and Textbook Development) in DPEP, it was clear that those creating materials for children needed not only inputs towards understanding the craft and the subject, but required an understanding of children and their world view, how they engaged with their environment and with learning, and the role of material in the process of their overall development. It was for this reason that textbook writers, who would also be creating or collating stories, poems and non-fiction texts were required to go through:

• A Visioning Workshop where they understood how children learnt, their contexts, and envisioned the qualities they would generate in them.

• Discussions on the beliefs and assumptions that inform our understanding of children and learning, and the implications of these for the materials we create.

• Exposure to some of the best children’s literature from across the world (here we got help from the embassies of many countries) and draw from these the kind of benchmarks they would set themselves.

• And finally, agree on and implement a process of testing what they created by spending time with children, narrating or reading out or giving the drafts to children to observe their responses and getting feedback from them.

This process would yield detailed guidelines and specifications for different kinds of texts for various age groups. Combined with inputs on the actual writing process, these efforts led to a dramatic impact on the kinds of texts that the textbooks developed in DPEP contained.

Implemented across more than 10 states, this process led to the development of some of the most interesting, child-friendly, best illustrated and well-designed textbooks. The field-testing experience provided authors a deep understanding of what was needed. For instance, after a number of stories were tried out with Class 1 and 2 children, it emerged that ‘high emotional content’ of relevance to children led to them asking to hear the story again and again, which then acted as a trigger to engage them in making drawings, doing role play, trying to read the text or identify words/letters, and even use ‘pretend writing’ to create their own stories emerging from this input.

Very often, it turned out that the ‘classic’ children’s literature of a state tended to contain stereotypes or discrimination, and violated other key principles. In comparison, ‘folk’ material, especially with its repetitive elements, was liked more by children and generated greater learning. Some states found that ‘tweaking’ existing (non-copyrighted) material was a good option, considering that writing new texts at the desired level of quality was not always easy. At the same time, for specific purposes such as generating literacy or an environmental understanding, it was better to create new material.

An important theme across states was to develop ‘contextualisable’ or ‘localisable’ material. Thus, Kerala’s EVS textbooks (1998-99) had exercises leading children to record information such that by the end of the year, each child developed a book about her own environment. In UP (2001-02), the class 3 Hindi textbook used a blank page as a lesson, where children could fill in any song they like and answer the questions on this ‘text’ given in the facing page (e.g. which are the rhyming words or verbs, when/where is this song sung, etc.). Gujarat (2012-13) made 'shell' books that could be completed only with district-specific material developed by local DIETs. All this was not always without its controversy. In Kerala, the introduction of a single line containing words from a tribal language led to an uproar in the state assembly.

An aspect that often gets missed out is that these processes had an enormous impact on production. In many states local illustrators were selected and trained over months – and many of them still continue to contribute to material for children and have even won awards. The work with production personnel, including the staff of the state textbook presses (where they had them) created not only the ground for timely supply of material but also laid the grounds for India to be able to provide free textbooks.

However, the best feedback came from Haryana after its new, integrated textbook Hanste-Gaatey had been implemented for a year in DPEP schools. Teachers working with the poorest children in reported: 'Earlier, when it rained, children would cover their heads with textbooks, but since these have come in, now they hug them instead.'

Why Digital Content May Be Its Own Enemy

2020-04-17T09:33:00.001+05:30

Many of us are feeling gratified that we have now provided a great deal of digital ‘content’ to students of various levels. Apart from issues of access (who has a smart phone, whether the network speed is OK, etc), it is also important to realise that much of this content is about explanations, examples, depictions and assessment. In other words, not necessarily very different from what a fair number of teachers already do in class – and find students not paying attention, not learning and, if learning, not applying that learning when the situation demands.

This is because the overall assumption is that it is a student’s duty or compulsion to pay attention to what the teacher is presenting. Shift this to digital content and it becomes even more apparent that an overwhelming amount of content just assumes that students need it.

Well, they don’t.

Because the same or similar thing is in many sources and most of it fails to arouse the student’s interest. In fact, this is an extension of the problem that ed tech faces, that it is a solution in search of a problem. (The other word we have for unwanted solutions being thrust on us is ‘spam’).

So, if we want our content to be used because students want to rather than have to engage with it, here are a few things we could do:

1. Try to make the question interesting rather than presenting answers (that is something students have to work towards, and use the hints and supports your material provides to come out with their own answers). (E.g., What is a good way to know how many times we blink our eyes? And incidentally, why do we need to blink?)

2. Help students discover a world that appears to be different and interesting because the new things they are learning are applied to it. (E.g. Why does the marigold leaf help prevent a cut or abrasion on our skin from getting infected? / Did you know that there are more than 20 different kinds of bread that are baked in our tandoors, and that some of them cannot be baked without a specific kind of yeast? / This story happened to an individual who is completely different from all of us - yet we always feel that it could easily be our own story. How do you think the writer does this? // These are then followed by possible areas of information to be explored by the student and fill in a framework that adds up to an understanding of the learning objective at hand.)

3. Create a reason for students to return to every instalment of your offering. (Tomorrow, we will talk about how these shapes were combined and used to make one of the most unique towers in the world.)

4. Be humble. Know that the student can switch you off, look away, stop paying attention or look at something else even as you are presenting what you think is the most important thing for your student to know. You have to earn that attention. One way to do that is to stop trying to set the agenda and instead let the student decide what she wants to learn, how much and how quickly. In the days when schools ran ‘normally’, teachers noted students who had access to technology both in school and at home would be far more animated when using their own devices outside the classroom – because on those, they were setting the agenda. Can you design your offering in such a way that the student ‘invests’ in it by taking certain decisions about her own path and progress, which then makes her a committed stakeholder who wants to use your material?

Coming out with engaging digital material is not rocket science – but giving up our general notions and buy-in into the mythical powers of ed tech is!

Do we even know what we assess when we assess learning?

2018-01-26T22:09:00.000+05:30

‘It took me quite some time to get the little girl to let me know what was bothering her,’ said Prof. A. K. Sharma, the former Director of NCERT. The year was 2000 and he was telling me about an incident from a class 2 maths period in the model school in the NCERT campus. The teacher had just completed teaching children subtraction of two-digit numbers with ‘borrowing’, and he had found two children hesitating over the problems they had been given to solve.

The first, a girl, had made a ‘mistake’ as she had failed to borrow from the tens side. Being a grandfatherly and kindly figure, he was able to cajole the girl to speak up. Very softly, looking down and away from him all the while, she said, ‘We learnt in the moral science class that borrowing is bad.’

Reeling from this, he approached the other child, a boy, and discussed why he had not completed his work on the problem. After much exchange, the boy said, ‘But why should I borrow 1? I want to borrow 2.’

Taking part in a recent session on ‘error analysis’, I was reminded of Prof. Sharma’s advice to engage with children to understand their ‘errors’ rather than rely on their work on paper. In numerous assessment experiences since, I’ve seen children who are otherwise very competent falter because of an issue at home or a fight with a friend or because they are being bullied. In open-ended questions in language, teachers are hard put to identify if there really is an ‘error’ or if the child’s view is a valid, logical interpretation. (And asking only close-ended questions is hardly sufficient to understand children’s abilities.) It becomes even more difficult when it comes to children from marginalized backgrounds – as they encounter discrimination and even denigration (of their background, language or culture), they often resist by ‘not-learning’ or do not answer out of fear of being ‘disciplined’.

As the evaluation industry expands in the Indian context with more and more professionals taking in rigorous analysis of children’s responses and analyses of their ‘errors’, the tendency is to interpret these within the framework of the subject for which the test was conducted. But do we know what we really assess when we look closely at children’s responses? What if it’s not a maths or language issue but something else altogether?

What happens when you seriously try to empower children, teachers and community through large scale education initiatives?

2016-05-04T18:55:00.001+05:30

The pervasive notion that 'nothing has been done in education in India' could not be further from the truth. In fact not only has a great deal been done, but its consequences have been faced over decades. In particular, what follows applies to introducing educational designs based on local context, using the experiences and strengths of the stakeholders, creating a situation where they play an active role in determining and implementing processes.

Though obviously much must have been done over the decades till the 80s, my experience ranges from mid-80s, when I was part of a team working on such classroom practices, textbooks and educational designs from 1986 onwards. Implementation of the programme called Prashika (Prathamik Shiksha Karyakram) focused on marginalised groups, with the team living in a tribal area as well as in a rural, deprived pocket and introducing the innovation in government primary schools. The work in Prashika was pathbreaking in many, many ways (integration of 5 subjects at the primary level, incorporation of multiple local languages, a hugely localised textbook/workbook that could only be completed with each child contributing, called Khushi-Khushi - still not matched anywhere, I believe). It provided hope that much was possible despite the difficulties faced and informed many of the later efforts that followed, both in the government and the NGO sector.

Later in DPEP - particularly Kerala, Assam, Karnataka, Haryana, UP, Bihar, TN, Nagaland and later with SSA Gujarat further work was done. Localised training, contexualisable textbooks (some really brilliant stuff still not matched anywhere - and that's a professional opinion), teacher determined assessment system, involvement of community knowledge, children constructing local histories / local environment books, peer learning and assessments, textbooks that would be 'complete' only along with a set of 50 district-specific books kept in the school library.... many, many innovative and large scale measures were conceived and actually implemented using a strategically developed implementation plan.

In each first five states we were able to see 2-3 years of implementation, development of hundreds / thousands of teachers who implemented contextualised learning, a high degree of in-class practice backed by supportive, localisable material. These states changed their position in the national achievement surveys too, with Kerala rising to the top (it had been fairly close to the bottom before this, below Bihar in the first national survey). In the case of Gujarat, field testing was done in 630 schools, researched by MSU Baroda with very encouraging findings.

However, as long as we were not visibly successful there were no problems. When change began to be visible on some scale and a palpable sense of energy was witnessed among teachers and communities, alarm bells began to ring. in each of these states, the powers that be - especially at state level, state institutions, administrations, political parties - found that this went against the command-and-control structures conducive to them being able to assert their authority. Schools didn't want to be told what to teach when and how - they had their own plans. Empowered teachers / school heads / even some VECs refused to kowtow to mediocre ideas or corruption oriented bosses - leading to huge conflicts all over the place. Unfortunately these never got reported, recorded or researched. The results were mass scale transfers, cases against state project directors who encouraged this (Kerala SPD was charge sheeted, Karnataka SPD given punishment posting in North Karnataka, Assam SPD sent to conflict zone during worst riots, Bihar SPD transferred to PHED and later kept without posting), the re-casting of State Resource Groups from those selected for tested capabilities to those stocked with ex-officio positions, the emasculation of the BRC-CRC structures from genuine teacher support institutions into data collection centres (believe it or not, we did have functional BRCs CRCs at one time!), the centralisation of powers away from the VECs and re-casting into SMCs with a different function, and major shift in recruitments away from districts to states (in one state the Education Minister held a Recruitment Mela in a stadium to personally appoint 3000 para-teachers).

Interestingly, Prashika in MP faced a similar adminstrative backlash and was closed down.

Yes, like it or not, this is what ideas of empowerment through education come up against - and they fall short not because of lack of any purity in the idea itself or absence of rigour, but because after a point when it goes into implementation an idea is something else, and not its original pure self. You might look at the actual work and find it is not 'up to the standard' - yet when trying to create it for those who need education the most, other aspects need to be taken into account. Basically, empowering the weak is clearly seen by the strong as disempowering them - and the empire strikes back! One of the outcomes is that a few years later, it appears as if nothing has been done, and people gear themselves up to again come up with 'innovative' ideas, often weaker than might already have been tried, uninformed by the past.

HOW TO DISCUSS NATIONALISM WITH YOUR STUDENTS

2016-02-21T20:10:00.000+05:30

Why do it

Whether on the TV or in newspapers or on social media sites – we are today surrounded everywhere by strong views on nationalism. Groups of people are getting angry and upset, calling each other names, being violent. Your students too are caught in this, though they may not fully be aware of it. They will be absorbing views from different sources, all of which may not be reliable. And they may end up adopting strong opinions (or even what you consider misguided ones) without giving them sufficient thoughts. For this reason, we have prepared a discussion guide. It is important that at this crucial time, when they might be making a choice, you, their teacher, reach out to them and help them think things through.

So here are some hints. Use them in the way they work best for you. Drop them or change them or add to them according to your need and situation.

Preliminary – setting the ground

For such a discussion, it would be best to prepare the ground gently rather than rush into it. Here are some questions you could ask.

Have you been hearing or seeing the news or reading the newspapers?
What are some of the big issues being discussed?
What have you read or hear about the ‘nationalism debate’?

Provide background

Briefly give a background to the issue. It is possible many may not have heard it or may not have a clear idea of what happened.

Discuss the issue

As students the following questions. Make sure you get everyone’s views, especially those who often don’t speak up. [Some hints are given in the brackets.]

So what do you think it means to love your country? [taking care of the environment? Looking after those who are not able to take care of themselves? Singing patriotic songs? Joining the army? Being polite to others? What else? Especially in our daily lives, what do we do (or can do) to show our patriotism?]
What are the best ways to show your love for your country? [you can use the list from the previous question to identify 2-3 of the ‘best’ or ‘most important’ ways and discuss why students think they are the best.]
What are some of the things you would not do if you love your country? [e.g. spitting everywhere as it spreads disease, not dirtying or vandalizing the environment, not jumping a queue or try to take an undue advantage…]
Even in a family everyone is not able to agree on everything? Have you seen any example of this? What happens in such a case?
So if someone does no agree with you, is it a good idea to beat him or her up? Why?
What do you think are the best ways to deal with disagreement?
And what if on the issue of loving your country, someone says something you don’t find pleasant? What should you do?
What are the best ways of finding out more deeply why people think the way they think? And how can you use that to help them see things differently?

Afterwards

Of course, this discussion will not end here. Give students some materials to read. Organize one or two follow up events. Suggest that the students have their own discussion group and contact you for help if needed.

All the best!

Detention For Adults?

2015-03-10T17:59:00.000+05:30

To all those who are convinced that the non-detention policy is harming education…

Children’s apparent lack of learning becomes an issue mainly because it is easy to see that they have missed out on something. The fact that at a younger age learning is very fast and that clear milestones are available helps us perceive this – and therefore apply all kinds of expectations, tactics, at times even coercion to ‘ensure’ learning – one such being the detention system which, many believe, is needed in order to maintain ‘quality’. By making children lose a year because we couldn’t ensure their learning (and blaming them for it), we feel we can generate the fear required to make them ‘serious’ and learn.

If we are convinced about this, why should it apply only to school education? What if we could lay out clear benchmarks for adults to learn and grow – in general as well as in the work they do. Certainly it is possible to have a life-long ‘curriculum’ with two-year benchmarks (over their entire careers, and even post retirement) for educationists and curriculum developers, teachers, HMs, government officials, managers, businessmen, fathers and mothers (and grandparents), journalists, artists, municipal staff, auditors, accountants, administrators, intelligence agents and politicians. What if there was a ‘detention system’ (in terms of not being allowed to be promoted or get a pay increase or being sent back to some lower ‘grade’)? Yes, in some government jobs there is an ‘efficiency bar’ and the supposed HR policies and internal competition are expected to sort this out. But do they?

Can we as a nation claim that we have, every year, demonstrated the improvement required to declare ourselves ‘promoted’ to the next level (whatever that is)?

And what happens when police are unable to reduce crimes, leaders are unable to ensure the welfare of the poor, systems are unable to deliver basics such as electricity / water / education / health, or societies are unable to get men to have basic respect for women?

Who should be ‘detained’?

So, What Now? Knowing the 7 Myths of Highly Ineffective Education Systems, What Do We Do?

2015-01-01T04:43:00.000+05:30

See Myth # 7 of 7 here.

Continuing to live with these myths is to deny ourselves the opportunity to succeed, especially for those who need education the most. The first step is to accept that these notions have indeed affected our work in trying to bring about better education. Acknowledging this is not a sign of defeat but of learning.

After acknowledgement, however, come reflection – and small steps.

Here are some small steps that all of us can take:

Discuss these ‘myths’ and related issues with as many people as you can. Question and contest them, or support them, with your experiences, facts and data from your sphere.
If you are in any way connected with education – as a student, parent, teacher, CRC-BRC, official or resource person, NGO worker or decision-maker, make one small change every month which in some way empowers children or teachers or HMs. (Our team, Ignus PAHAL, will soon be producing a poster presenting a graded list of these small, doable changes at the school level.)
Talk with as many stakeholders as possible and within reach (and in the limited time available) about what they would like. They might suggest things they could do – and a small beginning may be made to a partnership in bringing about improvement that is gettable. It may be a better way to help children wash their hands before the mid-day meal, or managing to start the school 10 minutes earlier so that learning time increases, or ensuring used textbooks are circulated better, or working out how you may share your expertise with children or teachers.
Find something interesting you can share with children. It may be a news item (e.g. did you know that for some reason, the MHRD – and some of the other ministries of education in the country – face a problem with monkeys troubling them?), or an interesting story you’ve read or know (but no moral tales please!) or a suggestion for something they can try out (e.g. making a paper plane turn in a predicted direction) or find out (e.g. why the inner margin of a textbook page is wider than the outer margin – okay, that is too easy but you get the idea).
Find a way to convert complex educational ideas into simpler forms so that a person with no background in education or no access to ‘high’ language may understand it. E.g. ‘non-detention is not the same as non-evaluation, and that by detaining children we are making them pay the price for the system’s failure and also supporting the idea that it is fear which leads to learning’. Can you find a way to make this idea easy to understand for millions of teachers, parents, SMC members and others? (You can guess why this statement was selected as the example…)
Use your mobile – call up a teacher, or text her an idea or send your appreciation. With children, use the stop-watch, camera and calendar in your phone to do activities. If you know an official and have a good enough relationship, make him or her uncomfortable by reading out sections of this article (don’t get into a bitter argument – a gentle, understanding approach may be more useful!).
Finally, please add to the discussion on these 7 Myths and, perhaps more importantly, to the list of suggestions.

But all these are very small things, you might say. They can’t achieve much. Well, not if many, many, many of us are doing them! Perhaps it’s a myth too that only when some large government programme is in action can change take place. This ignores local ingenuity and the sheer numbers that can make government efforts look feeble – or boost them to make them actually succeed. Towards this, your views and ideas may be more powerful than you imagine. And that’s not a myth!

What The Education System REALLY Exists For - Myth # 7

2014-12-31T22:57:00.000+05:30

The Seven Myths of Highly Ineffective Education Systems – Myth # 7 of 7

The Seven Myths That Make Education Difficult To Improve

See Myth # 6 of 7 here.

Myth # 7 – The education system exists to improve education

Systems tend to lead double lives – at a conceptual level they might be brilliant, with wonderfully competent and committed people leading them. Yet at the ground level, what is in operation may be entirely different. Thus despite terrific policy and capability at policy/decision-making levels in the health sector, what common people might be heard saying is: “It is better to pay through your nose at a private clinic, than to die for free at the government hospital.”

For the people, the ‘system’ comprises of those representatives they meet at the district, block, cluster and village level, and occasionally those at the state levels. To understand the situation, try asking a group of educational administrators about the finer aspects of TA-DA rules and how they apply them, and you will find they can animatedly discuss them for about two hours. But raise the issue of why children are not learning (which is actually their real responsibility) and you will get a different response… (It’s true, isn’t it?)

This is what tends to happen to any system (or even organization) over time – ultimately it’s own nuances, requirements, procedures, structures and powers (or power) become its main concerns, with the reason for its very existence slowly dimming in the memory of its functionaries. Thus:

teachers/CRC-BRC must spend more time collecting data even at the cost of teaching or improving learning, or
every school must follow the given framework for its School Development Plan (because the need to compile the plans at the block level is more important than the need for it to be appropriate for that school), or
every HT must maintain records for the officials 'above' even if it means she will not have time to support her teachers in improving the classroom process.

It is as if children, teachers, HTs, SMCs all exist to feed the machinery ‘above’ which has to ‘control’ them, and ‘give’ them resources (from mid-day meals to teachers to textbooks to in-service training, from which often a ‘cut’ may be taken), ‘allow’ them to take decisions such as which would be the most convenient time for most children to attend school, ‘monitor’ the work of teachers, ‘test’ the learning of students, and ‘grant’ the privilege of education.

What the RTE implies is that it is those who get their salaries because of children who are the real ‘beneficiaries’ – which includes all the administrators, supervisors, inspectors, monitors, institutions, departments, ministries. It is they who are accountable to children and teachers, or would be if they really existed for education.

As mentioned, give them enough time and systems end up existing more to perpetuate themselves - and the status quo within - rather than the purpose for which they are created. Try making a change in the way things are organised within a system and you might find it responds with a kind of ferocious energy it fails to display when similar urgency is required in its primary objective. For instance, if it were declared that an educationist rather than an IAS officer will head the Department of Education, you will get a lot more activity in the system (to prevent that) than if you declared (as is well known) that most children are failing to attain grade level learning across the country.

Finally, systems exist to preserve the hold of the powerful. Issues that affect the middle classes or those more privileged get inordinate attention in the system. Thus nursery school admissions in private schools in Delhi are a big issue, or the allocation for poor children in elite private schools is endlessly discussed, or the class 10 board exam being needed (by children from better off families)... but the death of a 100+ children in a mid-day-meal from a poor section of society, or the low levels of service in deprived areas or chronically low learning levels despite much money being invested - fail to receive that kind of attention.

For those seeking to make a dent in the system, it would be healthier to have a more 'aware' notion of what the education system really exists for. The puny strategies we use to make things better are unlikely to serve as even pinpricks to the system.

The Big Myth that Educationists hold - about others: Myth # 6 of the 7 Myths of Highly Ineffective Education Systems –

2014-12-31T08:11:00.001+05:30

See Myth # 5 of 7 here.

Myth # 6 – Stakeholders are concerned about education (as educationists understand it)

Curriculum developers, educationists, policy makers, thinkers on education, many ‘NGO types’, reformers and other highly respected people often talk of the ‘aims of education’ – be it in terms of creating a more democratic society or a more evolved person etc. Somehow, those who are actually affected by education are unable to get this. For the masses at large, the purpose of education is to make life better, go up the social ladder by getting a job or being able to earn a stable livelihood. This is nothing to sneer at or term as a ‘wrong’ or ‘limited’ expectation. In fact, this is what millions of parents are slaving away for, sacrificing a bit every day so that their next generation may attain a better life. By looking down upon this view, by treating the situation as if ‘we are doing education to them’ instead of with and for them (or perhaps us), those who design education tend to marginalize the very people education is meant for. They also end up with curriculum, textbooks and processes that do not build on the experiences that children from less privileged backgrounds bring, something that is an enormous resource being wasted, which then continues the cycle of marginalization.

Like parents, teachers too have their own idea of what they would like. Despite what is often said, most teachers do want to succeed – what they would like is some practical (not philosophical) advice on how to handle the really difficult situation they face – increasing diversity, the changing nature of student population as more and more ‘left out’ groups join school (in Delhi slums, migration is leading to 7-10 home languages in the classroom, including Punjabi and Odia which are not contiguous in the ‘normal’ world), changing curricular expectations they haven't had time or support to absorb. Even after attaining the PTR norms mandated by the RTE, we are going to have well over 50% schools with around 80-100 children, with 2-3 teachers handling 5 classes – that is, a very large proportion of teachers already are and will continue to work in multi-grade settings in the foreseeable future (while curriculum, pedagogy and materials continue to assume a mono-grade situation). Given that we are still short of 14 lakh teachers (the number was reported to have come down to 10 lakh, but with increased enrolment, is up again, the situation being much worse at the secondary level), the effect is felt by the 56 lakh who are there. As mentioned, educationists may want high levels of learning to be attained using their policies and curriculum, but teachers just want to survive the day and, if possible, succeed in generating some learning.

And what kind of school would children want? Exercises on this have been few and far between. Most of the time children end up having to manage with whatever ‘we’ give out – from mid-day meals to ‘child-friendly elements’ to colourful books or whatever else. It is in the nature of children to find interest in whatever is made available, which is why there is a tendency to assume we have an idea of what they need. But engaging with them on the issue might reveal a lot more. For instance, talking with secondary school girls in a remote area in UP, we were discussing the need for toilets – but the girls said, “We can manage without the toilets, but what we can’t accept is that we are forced to choose Home Science and are not offered Mathematics.” This is surely something the authorities are not working on.

Simply listening to stakeholders might be a good idea. It would be revealing and educative for 'experts', helping reduce their arrogance and bringing their relationship with the stakeholders on a somewhat more equal footing.

What would you say if an expert approached you? And if you are an expert, how would you approach the stakeholder?

Tomorrow, Myth # 7 of 7

The Seven Myths of Highly Ineffective Education Systems – Myth # 5 of 7

2014-12-30T07:40:00.000+05:30

The Seven Myths That Make Education Difficult To Improve

See Myth # 4 of 7 here.

Myth # 5 – Teachers can improve by following instructions given to them by their seniors

This is an extension of the previous myth, except it operates between officials/supervisors and teachers. The notion is that the teacher is merely a cog in the wheel, lower down in the hierarchy, and the best way to get him to improve is to make him comply with instructions from above. Apart from the fact that the instructions from above often tend to be problematic, it is also true that many of them don’t get implemented at all. At best, teachers can be made to comply with rules such as coming on time, or turning in a certain amount of work – but they can’t be made to like children, or smile at them, or feel like coming to work every day and radiating this enthusiasm to students and colleagues. That is only possible if the system seeks a partnership with teachers, treats them as fellow stakeholders and engages with them on a more equal footing.

As the experience of RTE shows, instructions, rules and even laws that make lack of compliance justiciable – are insufficient to bring about the required change. They are simply the wrong instrument for the purpose. (I’ve written about coercive and generative power elsewhere.)

So what is the way in which teachers change?

Tomorrow, Myth # 6 of 7

The Seven Myths of Highly Ineffective Education Systems – Myth # 4 of 7

2014-12-29T07:13:00.000+05:30

The Seven Myths That Make Education Difficult To Improve

See Myth # 3 of 7 here.

Myth # 4 – Students learn mainly by listening to the teacher.

Listening is seriously valued – you must listen to your elders, pay attention to your teachers… as if major wisdom is dangling on their lips and will be lost if not caught by the ears that very instant. Now that you can not only look up information but actually hear lectures on all conceivable topics on the internet, this is one notion that is already past its sell-by date. In fact, it should never even have been available in the ‘sell’ category. Ultimately, it is what we reflect on, try out, adapt and work into our own understanding that emerges as learning, something the ‘constructivist’ thrust of the current NCF keeps emphasizing. By continuing to practice ‘listening-to-teacher-explaining’ as the core pedagogy, we ensure our students don’t get around to learning in the manner and at the level they are capable of.

One reason why this continues to prevail is due to the notion that teacher must ‘control’ the class – and the class can be controlled only if the teacher has something to offer that can be held back at will – namely, explanation-giving talk. By treating themselves as the ‘source’ of learning, adults in general, and teachers in particular, manage to hold themselves in a position of power vis-à-vis children, choosing what and when to offer – and emaciate children (mentally). All this talk of ‘developing our human resource’ and the ‘demographic dividend’ will bear fruit only if adults seriously make an effort to give up this kind of ‘power’.

In many ways, therefore, this myth is a bigger blockage than you might anticipate, since it operates to defeat the purpose of our efforts after we have succeeded in bringing the teacher and the student into school for a duration that is long enough to enable learning. This is the hole in the bucket, or one big explanation of the continuing low levels of learning across the board.

Unfortunately, it is proving really difficult to deal with. Despite the enormous amount of resources and effort spent on teacher development, practice continues to revert to the listening mode. Part of the reason may be cultural - after all the concept of the guru 'giving' his knowledge to the disciple orally is three thousand years old, runs in our blood and makes it difficult for us to believe that teaching can be anything else.

One of the ways to address this might therefore be societally - it is only when parents, communities, society itself start expecting teachers to something different that it might happen...

What do you think?

Tomorrow, Myth # 5 of 7

The Seven Myths of Highly Ineffective Education Systems – Myth # 3 of 7

2014-12-28T06:35:00.000+05:30

The Seven Myths That Make Education Difficult To Improve

See Myth # 2 of 7 here.

Myth # 3 – There is one form of knowledge and it belongs to the ‘educated classes’

What do they know – after all, they’re only poor people. And real knowledge is that which is written in books and taught in universities, which of course they don’t have access to, isn’t it?

By now I’m sure you’re well aware of the vast variety and depth of knowledges that non-literate people bring – only it doesn’t get the recognition it deserves and is sentenced to remain marginalized and often die out. By not respecting the knowledge heritage the vast majority of our students bring, we certainly deprive them of the one strength that can be used to learn ‘school’ knowledge – but we also lose out on the great contribution the diverse community knowledge heritage could make to the country. (I’ve written on this elsewhere in this blog hence not elaborating it further.)

Tomorrow, Myth # 4 of 7

The Seven Myths of Highly Ineffective Education Systems – Myth # 2 of 7

2014-12-27T08:42:00.000+05:30

The Seven Myths That Make Education Difficult To Improve

See Myth # 1 of 7 here.

Myth # 2 – All children must attend school every day

If you’re from a poor family, there’s a lot more to life than just attending school! Siblings and domestic animals have to be cared for, parents have to be helped, essentials such as water or firewood have to be fetched, birds and animals kept away from the farm, you may need to migrate with your parents…. It’s not necessary that all this is a waste – in fact, despite the shadow child labour, a lot of this is also learning for life. Children who are in a position to attend daily too might learn a lot if they spent a day or two every week doing things other than school – such as tending to gardens, pursuing a passion, trying to earn something by putting their learning to use, solving a neigbhourhood problem, helping their siblings and parents, making things…. Or helping their underprivileged classmates so that they can spend more time in school.

The kind of focused (and therefore limited) scholastic learning our ‘advanced’ children end up doing has resulted in several luminaries pointing out that (even from institutions such as the IITs) our graduates are ‘unemployable’. One might add they haven’t developed many other aspects of their personality – including civic consciousness.

However, what this requirement of daily attendance does is to marginalize great numbers of children, since the teaching-learning process tends to be sequential (rather than re-iterative). If you miss out an earlier part, you can’t ‘keep up with the class’ and slowly head for being left out or pushed out or dropping out. Effectively, the school is saying: if you are poor and cannot attend regularly (as the we require), you shall not learn. Instead of: attend when you can, we’ll find a way to support you and make sure you learn (which is what the business of the school really is).

There are a few walk-in centres in the country (though of course only for poor and/or working children) and some of them do manage to attract and keep children for a long time even though there is no compulsion to attend. That kind of flexibility is perhaps too much to hope for in the school system. Enabling the school to be more responsive to children’s real living situations, though – that’s both possible and desirable. It needs a spiraling rather than linear flow, a variety and range of materials, and providing children engaging activities in many of which they will work on their own, and the use of a tracking system to keep record of progress. This gels with every provision of the RTE, with expectations put forward in our National Curriculum Framework, and much that contemporary understanding of pedagogy tells us. However, to make it happen what we need is not methods and materials but a way to get rid of this myth and the fear that everything will fall apart if the school seeks to respond (by adapting to children’s needs) rather than coerce (by making children adjust to its needs).

Any suggestions?

Tomorrow, Myth # 3 of 7

PS - Here's a response to a reader that might be of use.

Sundara Velavan Could you please elaborate on the origins of this myth, sir and the underlying attitudes and beliefs from which this myth stems forth?

43 mins · Like
Subir Shukla Sundara Velavan, I'm not really a historian of education, but from what little I know, for centuries formal learning took place in terms of the school room or gurukul. These were places where children of different ages came together, the teacher set the curriculum (i.e. decided who would learn what and how much, and when they had completed their studies), different students did different things, and sometimes advanced students were in charge of those beginning.

It was in the military schools of Prussia that the notion of dividing children into year-wise 'class' came about - it was a means of 'disciplined' learning leading to later military discipline, and offered a predictable means to knowing when a certain number of soldiers/officers would be available.

By putting all the children of the same age together and making them all learn the same thing over given periods, it seemed so organised, appealing, and management-friendly that the idea spread like wildfire. The practice is not very old, having originated (I think, but can't be sure at this time) in early 19th century. In about 120 years, it became so widely established that the it appears to most of us as the only valid mode of teaching children. It was also widely adopted by the church, which set up the earliest schools in most part of the world, in the wake of colonial powers. In some ways, the way the church was education - as preparation for later life of a certain kind - it was not very different form the military view.

In the military academy, the focus was not so much on education as on training. Conformity, cooperation, being at the same level as others was obviously highly needed for the kind of military that was emerging. With the growth of industrialization, this way of organising children into learning groups naturally became more common, as most of them were being prepared for certain limited forms of professions, where following instructions given the industrialist was the key expectation. The later use of assembly-line as a means of 'efficiency' served to re-inforce this further. People still talk proudly of themselves as being 'products' of certain institutions. (In the elite schools such as Eton or the Doon School in India, the real differentiation was - and is - outside the class in the range of activities to choose from, as well as the variety of subjects students could choose - such choice not being available to their less privileged peers. The tutorial system they use also provides a way to address the diversity of needs.)

Not surprisingly, this same-size-fits-all approach has carried over in the name of preparing children to be citizens (following orders, being 'disciplined'), being social (listening to elders, obeying rules, not being different from others), and seeing themselves as the vehicles for fulfilling their 'superior's' wishes (which is why 'yours obediently' and 'please tell me what to do sir and I will do it' are considered highly desirable traits). Because this is convenient to adults/elders and those in positions of power, the myth continues

The Seven Myths of Highly Ineffective Education Systems – Myth # 1 of 7

2014-12-26T19:31:00.000+05:30

The Seven Myths That Make Education Difficult To Improve

Have you ever had the experience of failing to open a lock till you discovered that you were using the wrong key? That's a little like discovering after years or decades of work that perhaps some of the things we've been taking for granted all along don't necessarily hold true. There are probably many such notions, but here are what seem to be the seven most crucial ones. Each one of these is elaborated upon in a separate post, and followed by a note on what we can do - all over the next eight days.

The Seven Myths:

1. Children are homogenous

· All must learn the same thing, in the same way, with the same material.
· All must learn the same amount

If someone falls behind, something must be wrong with them – they don’t conform to the norm!

2. All children must attend school every day

3. There is one form of knowledge and it belongs to the ‘educated classes’.

4. Students learn mainly by listening to the teacher.

5. Teachers can improve by following instructions given to them by their seniors.

6. Stakeholders are concerned about education (as educationists understand it)

7. The education system exists to improve education.

Myth # 1 – Children are homogenous

· All must learn the same thing, in the same way, with the same material.
· All must learn the same amount

It’s quite amazing, isn’t it? What daily observation and commonsense (backed by vast, vast amounts of in-depth research) tells us is that children are very different from each other. That it is indeed difficult to expect all of them to learn the same amount in a year, that all ‘averages’ are mere guess work, certainly in terms of subject-related expectations after the early years. In fact, even the idea of putting children into classes or grades may not have sufficient basis – it is more management friendly than learning friendly. The question is not ‘How can the teacher teach if all children have to learn differently?’ but ‘How can naturally diverse children learn if the teacher teaches the same thing and in the same way to all?’

As a result of all this, if some children fall behind, it is assumed something must be wrong with them – they don’t conform to the norm! The ones falling behind are actually often those from under-resourced backgrounds – because the ‘norm’ and design of education is such that you are likely to do better if you are from an economically better background. Which is why it is actually news if a child from a poor family does well in a board exam!

And of course if you happen not to be able to learn the way in which you are being taught (you might be from a privileged family) even then something is wrong with you (though less wrong than if you were poor). You may not like school, but you can be sure the school does not like you too.

This myth is so common, so prevalent that it’s hard to imagine there might be other ways… what do you think?

Tomorrow, Myth # 2 of 7

The Real Issue With Tech In Ed

2014-12-14T06:21:00.001+05:30

If doctors' interest and ability in diagnosing and helping patients improve were limited, if the medicines themselves were not always known to work, and if the patients didn't have much ability to pay - how much do you think 'tech' would work? Moreover, if 'tech' took over the mistakes usually made by teachers, it would work even less, isn't it?

This is what is happening in the case of 'technology in education'....

Vendors can be excused for touting their 'solutions' as real solutions - educators and decision-makers are the ones to be blamed for willingly falling into the trap of believing that technology will motivate teachers, overcome corruption, deal with the hierarchies that operate at the point of learning and perpetuate the hegemony of a few, tailor education to the needs and the experiences of the marginalized, solve the issue of huge and increasing diversity that teachers face, and overcome the indifference of the political / administrative establishment to poor educational performance.

A common finding in an analysis of most tech in ed efforts would likely show that after the initial enthusiasm and perhaps even use, the actual interaction / utilisation declines - eventually, it lies locked up or disused or misused (teachers use computers as a means of keeping children busy while they do something else). Sometimes a new wave of tech in ed displaces the old one but then neither end up making a sufficient difference.

It's not as if technology cannot make a difference, but it needs to be thought through differently. Usually, the thought process is - 'what can we do with tech'? This is like saying: 'now that we have a car, where should we go?' You might end up going somewhere you didn't want to go. Instead, the question should be - 'what do we desperately want to do / need to do (and why), in which technology can play a part?' Examples of this are relatively rare!

What does ‘Education For Freedom’ mean to You?

2014-08-31T06:07:00.000+05:30

Usually, it seems to mean: to become free from want. In the sense of being able to stand on one’s own feet, by being able to earn a livelihood or having a job (much more the last, in our case). But what education seems to be doing, in our context at least, is to create wants.

Just because a person has crossed, say, secondary education, ‘traditional’ work no longer seems to be enough for him, whether he has been prepared for any other career or not. And of course if a person does get a job, the desire to be more and more like the ‘educated’ and upwardly mobile – leads to more and more and more wants…

At the other end of the spectrum of views on this, freedom from want is seen as getting rid of the wants! When education is more religious and ‘environmental’, it helps a person realize that his wants are really few and that he is at his most free when helping others, and reducing from the earth the burden of bearing him. A nation of ascetics is an interesting idea but probably not a very desirable one!

So that leaves us the vast space in between the two extreme views (of ‘want more’ and ‘want nothing) on ‘education for freedom’. Where do you find yourself on this? Is this the lens from which to look at ‘education for freedom’? Is this even a worthwhile question in our times? What do you think?

The Three Simplest, Least Expensive Ways To Improve Learning In Children

2014-03-26T20:06:00.001+05:30

What's the simplest, least expensive way to improve learning in children? Here are three such. They cost you no money, and are entirely in your control. They do involve technique, but not technology. However, they don’t involve working extra hard (just changing what you do, slightly).

1. Smile more!

This has to be the least expensive and most effective. Smile. Look at children and smile a happy smile. You’re lucky to be with them. And smile the one that glows in your eyes – all children have an inbuilt ability to know when you’re only pretending.

And what should you do after smiling? Well, nothing special, just keep on doing whatever you were doing – teaching or taking children out or organizing the morning assembly or the mid-day meal or asking them to come back into the class. Smile.

And let me know after three months about the improved learning in your classroom. As they say, you need neither money nor orders to do this.

2. Talk with children. And listen more

We have so much to tell children – instructions, information, questions, answers. But all this is not equal to talking with children. Real conversation requires taking an interest in the lives of your students, interacting with them about things that matter to them, and above all – listening to them. If you are the kind of teacher that children can relate with and say what is in their minds, you’re well on your way to improving learning in the classroom.

3. Ask yourself what you would like if you were the child in front of you

We were all born as babies and spent a fair amount of time as children. Unfortunately, we grew up and became adults. We forgot that delight which gripped us when something new or challenging or interesting was put before us. We lost track of that person in us who would not give up something engaging, no matter what. And of course we fail to recall how much we enjoyed learning something, especially when we did it on our own, whether it was cycling or reading a book to figure something out or in the sports field.

Now that you’re a teacher, it will really help if for a moment you put yourself in your students’ place. What would you really enjoy being engaged in most? What way of presenting or unfolding the learning objective under consideration be most involving? How could you get children themselves to do and think more?

This is neither as difficult or crazy as it sounds. In fact, it’s much simpler than taking the usual role of doing all the work yourself – explaining, showing a picture, using the blackboard, thinking of examples to give – while children are simply sitting around watching you! In fact, this is also what you are supposed to do – i.e. use activity, exploration, projects and other similar means.

How difficult is that? Not so difficult that it can’t be done. There are many, many sources for you to draw upon, as there are many in-service training and materials available for you. And just in case there aren’t, do let me know.

In the meantime, I hope you’ll make vigorous use of these three simplest, least expensive methods – and really boost learning among your children.

Why Measuring Learning Outcomes Does Not Improve Accountability in Education – Or Outcomes

2014-03-06T17:39:00.001+05:30

In the last few years, the clamour for measuring learning outcomes and using that as a means to ensure accountability has grown louder. In fact the current Five Year Plan insists that learning outcomes be measurable and be measured. Corporate houses funding various foundations and NGOs are big on learning assessment and look to it as a means of bringing about improvement. Many sensible people are voicing views to the effect that if a teacher is unable to generate learning outcomes, he should be shoved aside and replaced by someone better. And, of course, the feeling persists that we are not measuring the quality of learning enough.

This is unfortunate. Not because measuring outcomes is not important or somehow wrong but because the present formulations of the issue are simplistic to the extent that they prevent underlying issues to be addressed. Here is how.

First, it is not as if the quality of learning is not being measured, or has not been measured in the last 20 years. The first all-India survey of learning levels was conducted by the NCERT in 1995, and there have been many since. Several large-scale independent studies of students’ learning levels have been run, including ASER and surveys of Education Initiatives. Small-scale learning assessments have been conducted for innumerable research studies (e.g. of 1 lakh children in Tamil Nadu to assess the state’s Activity Based Learning Programme) or pilot projects (for instance, several states have piloted their textbooks and used learning achievement as a benchmark). And of course at least hundreds (if not thousands) of NGOs/NGO-run programmes (often in government schools) have incorporated assessment as an effectiveness measure.

There are thus any number of assessments available – and they've been telling us for the last twenty years that our children are not learning. Only, this doesn’t seem to have resulted in improved learning, thus questioning the assumption behind the clamour for measurement.

This is a little like weighing a child to assess the level of nutrition – unfortunately, merely weighing the child will not lead to better nutrition... Something else is clearly required, and that doesn’t seem to be happening.

Second, insisting on having 'measurable' outcomes is hugely misleading – just because you can measure something doesn't make it more worthwhile (e.g. we do want students to be creative or considerate or civic though there are no easy measures for these). Several of the assessments mentioned suffer from this. Thus an Adivasi child who displays great resourcefulness, knowledge of the environment and concern for others would be called poorly educated since the ‘tests’ measure only basic literacy and numeracy.

Measuring outcomes would be useful only when we measure what matters most to us. Not whether a child can read something aloud but whether he can form an opinion on it and give the reasons behind them. Not whether a child can do calculations but whether she can apply it in real world contexts to solve problems or take a decision. Some of these may be hard to measure, but it would be useful to remember that it is not the purpose of education to be assessable, but the purpose of assessment to measure what is considered most worth learning.

Third, measuring outcomes does not account for contexts and tends to disadvantage (and label) those facing adverse conditions. Which then makes it even more difficult for them to improve. There are many teachers who work very hard in difficult conditions – but don't attain the kind of outcomes expected because the curriculum assumes children will be able to attend daily or speak the school language at home (and several other such notions), which don't apply to the children they work with (some 60-70% in India). We'll end up shoving these teachers out if we take the advice to replace them – instead of overhauling the system which has designed itself in such a way that marginalized children WILL fail.

Fourth, there is a danger that the present focus on outcomes is actually obfuscating – instead of increasing – accountability. India's challenges now arise from its success in rapidly expanding the school system to bring in so many children. The consequence is that we now have students (at all levels) who traditionally never attended schools - working children, migrant groups, girls from various communities, children with disabilities, socially excluded communities…. the list is endless. What this means is that while the nature of our students has changed, the curriculum, pedagogy and assessment remain as they used to be and so, the DESIGN ITSELF leaves these learners out.

At a second level, when it comes to implementation, there is a tendency in those responsible to ignore laxity on the assumed ground that it is only happening to those who do not matter. (Just as it is easier to ask a poor person to push a stalled car rather than a well-dressed one, similar prejudices operation in all facets of our society, including government officials.) Even now, therefore, it is mainly those from better-resourced families who continue to succeed, and we continue to have poor education for the poor. So the accountability really needs to be demanded at the level of the system (NCERT, MHRD, Departments of Education) and state / district / block officials.

As long as people keep pointing fingers at teachers as the main villains, the really responsible will continue to escape accountability. For instance, when the NCERT's own national survey shows low levels of learning, why does nothing happen to anyone at any level, including the NCERT itself (whose curriculum has been taken by many states now performing poorly)? How come officials at various levels continue exactly as they have been for decades with impunity when every measure brings out dismal levels of learning in their watch? Recently, when our group, IgnusERG assessed class 9 students in a district we found 68% of them to be at class 4-6 levels, 7% below class 3 level, and only 4% at the class 9 level where they were expected to be. When this finding is shared, everyone finds a way to blame some one else!

Finally, let me leave you with this – in the current form, knowledge of outcomes attained does not help bring about improvement. Most states will be implementing SLAS (State Learning Assessment Survey) in the coming months. But once a state finds out it is performing poorly, say, in mathematics, that will not inform it of the reasons why this is so. It could be the poor curriculum (e.g. overambitious expectations) or weak syllabus (less time allocated than required), or inappropriate pedagogy (no use of concrete materials at an early age) or bad textbooks (poorly sequenced or giving discrete rather than contextual examples) or demotivated teachers or insufficient teaching time (because the state continues using teachers for non-teaching tasks even after RTE and court orders to this effect) or home vs school language issues or at least 10 other problems that can be named, each of which can seriously lead to poor outcomes. So where will the improvement begin?

The point, as mentioned earlier, is: do ask for outcomes, but don't keep it simplistic, or we'll continue to get the poor outcomes we've been documenting over the last 20 years.

Have You Been Un-Hindu Today?

2014-02-12T10:10:00.000+05:30

Once in a while I recall that I am born a Hindu. This is usually around times when a whole lot of people are suddenly finding the need to defend Hinduism.

1. This is a little ironic. Why do you need to protect that which cannot be destroyed? Can the words or images of another person kill or harm your religion? To those who believe in God/s: even if all the people who believe in God should cease to exist will God/s cease to exist? Similarly, does Hinduism need the acceptance and support of all those being fought against in order to exist and flourish? It seems very reductionist and belittles Hinduism for anyone to say that the religion needs protection.

2. This business of religious sentiments being hurt is even more ridiculous. Why are Hindu religious sentiments hurt only by words and images but not by un-Hindu actions such as rape, murder and the racism being practiced against people from the NE in Delhi, or the displacement of Muslims in Muzaffarnagar or a thousand such atrocious acts? We are a religion that believes in the whole universe being a family, isn’t it? Why are we not religiously wounded by such major offences that hurt millions of the universal family but hugely traumatized by minor pinpricks such as a book that will be read by a few thousand people?

3. Being the transcendent religion that believes animals and trees and various forms, animate and inanimate, have the element of the Divine running through them and are therefore nothing but mere manifestations of the Unified One, how can we even distinguish between ‘ourselves’ and ‘others’? Surely the distinction is impossible and the very idea of ‘not tolerating’ someone or some view would be inadmissible – for even the so-called offender is nothing but another manifestation of the same ONE divine. So the idea of ‘getting upset’ so militantly at someone’s view is, in my view, very un-Hindu.

4. In an ecological worldview that goes well beyond the physical world, the notion is that every component have a just and fair place, the justness and fairness of which is determined by the degree to which it links with others and desists from eating into others’ space and resources. Which is the idea behind being ‘content’ – to occupy that which fulfills your need without competing with another’s, thus maintaining the ecosystem. Wanting more than this justifiable space and resource takes you into the realm of that which does not (because it should not) exist – maya. And we are taught not to want more than our remit for this reason. This is a key principle by which the universe maintains its balance, and disturbances take place when this balance is upset. Every time we seek to dominate or attribute to ourselves the right to determine others’ activities in their spheres (such as what they may think or write), we are guilty of going beyond that which is justly ours – and again, being very un-Hindu!

5. And finally, like all great religions, Hinduism too believes that real victory is one that is over oneself. No matter how much you ‘defeat’ your enemies, if you are unable to overcome yourself, that is, your own limitations and the un-divine aspects of yourself, you cannot be considered a victor. So if anyone is claiming victory at having ‘vanquished’ something offensive, do desist, for you have not won.

Five Questions to Ask Your Election Candidate (English Version)

2013-11-22T20:05:00.002+05:30

This is the English version of the flyer circulated a little before the last general elections. As mentioned, it got results, but was a little late in the campaign.

IGNUS-PAHAL

The one who fights for children’s rights! Is the one who will get our vote!

Five Questions On Our Children’s Rights

This election may affect your children. Especially if your would-be representative in legislative assembly keeps the following in mind.

· Education – good / quality education – is everyone’s right. Especially after the RTE, education in every government school should be such that everyone finds it good. But even very poor parents are removing their children from government schools and making sacrifices to send their children to private schools.

Ask your would-be representative – Question 1: What will you do to ensure appropriate and quality education in government schools?

· Teachers’ salaries have gone up. They now get training from time to time to enable good education for children. There is provision for mid-day-meals, school uniforms, play equipment, learning material – all free. But there is demotivation among teachers. They feel neglected. They feel as if they are not being respected.

Ask your would-be representative – Question 2: What will you do so that teachers take interest in their work and are committed to the good education of their children?

· According to RTE the responsibility of running/managing the schools will now be with community and panchayats. But the community and the panchayats feel: how can we give any advice to the school? They do not find themselves capable of advising / supporting schools. And they feel this is not even their work.

Ask your would-be representative – Question 3: What will you do to enable the active involvement of community and panchayats in improving education in our schools?

· Community and parents both expect that education will ensure children’s development as well as employment. But now people say: All this education is going to lead only to unemployment, so it is better that the child be engaged in some wage-earning work right away.

Ask your would-be representative – Question 4: What will you do so that every member of the community is aware and committed towards the education of their children?

· If we look at the money spent on education, most of it is used for salries, infrastructure and maintenance. Crores of rupees are spent every year on this. Even then our schools and education offices look dirty and disorganized compared to private institutions. And the people responsible for improving education for children cannot even be heard talking about it.

Ask your would-be representative – Question 5: What will you do so that government schools and education offices look attractive? So that people in the system not only think of children’s improvement but also do what is needed?

Your views will have an impact, won’t they? But only if you raise these questions! Give your vote only if you get an answer! So go ahead, ask questions, get others to ask, and let us know!!

Our contact: ignuspahal@gmail.com

Five Questions To Ask Your Election Candidate!

2013-11-21T22:15:00.001+05:30

With elections not so far away, here are five questions you can encourage people to ask of their prospective representatives. We used these in the last general elections, and had encouraging results. They were re-printed by others and spread over a fairly wide area in Varanasi and Lucknow regions. Many candidates and their party heads had to touch upon these issues. Unfortunately, we got the idea fairly late during the campaign season. This time though we need not be so late!

Inviting everyone to take a look and use what they find fit. Right now, these are in Hindi (and not a good reproduction of the original flyer) - will put up an English version as well.

The REAL Reasons Why Change Is So Difficult In Education

2013-10-27T14:00:00.000+05:30

If you're not in the government but are working to bring about change in education in India, you're likely to be using one or a mix of the following strategies:

1. Protest against whatever is going wrong

2. Provide data and evidence that things are not working (and occasionally, for what is working)

3. Intervene in policy and decision-making to the extent possible

4. Develop working models and ask the government or others to take them up

5. Actually take over or supplement the delivery function on behalf of the government

(As of now I can't locate any other strategy in use - but if you are using another one, do let me know so it can be part of this list.)

Here's a quick look at what each of these strategies involve and the kind of impact they seem to be having. (This is only a broad overview and not a nuanced analysis.)

 Strategy 1: Protest against whatever is going wrong

From small village committees carrying their demands to block/districts officials, to state-wide forums of NGOs as well as the national RTE forum/s (there seem to be a few of these), various pressure groups have exerted themselves to protest against much that is not being done by the government.

 The general notion seems to be that if you criticize the system or are able to make a serious protest - the system will somehow listen and start improving. As of now, there is no evidence that it really does. (It's very good in showing that it does, though! Look at all the advertisements issued by state governments where they list their achievements, including in education.)

Results: Unsure impact. Getting a decent hearing is not easy, and even where there is a hearing, there is no guarantee that there will be an impact.

 Strategy 2: Provide data and evidence that things are not working (and occasionally, for what is working)

The assumption is that if the system and decision-makers realize how wrong things are, or evidence is provided on what works and what doesn't, there will be appropriate changes and things will improve. Or that investment will be made on what is known to work. Partly based on this, a large number of think tanks have emerged (mainly comprising of western educated professionals) and produce a number of evidence-based documents every year. INGOs, donors and now VCs/similar funding agencies also take this view and back such efforts. The expansion of CSR and corporate supported initiatives all bring in this emphasis on 'in data we trust'.

Unfortunately, there is not enough data to show that our education system ever pays serious attention to data on student learning, or classroom processes - and makes a difference accordingly. (That it should is another matter - the fact is that it doesn't.) Though a huge amount of data is collected, and the system itself does a great deal of the collecting, its impact on actual functioning is extremely limited. (For instance, which curricula or textbooks in any state have been influenced by such evidence-based approaches? Or by the NCERT's own data from country-wide surveys of learning levels, or even by ASER?) Where the data is used to some extent - as in the case of DISE - its actual reliability is in question. Attendance data, for example, is routinely manipulated to ensure that others can also get to 'eat'.

The system has a way of being blind to facts right before its nose. For instance, with a PTR norm of 30:1, in the foreseeable future (i.e. next 30 years), the 'typical' school in India will be the small school multi-grade (with 90-100 children in 5 classes, with 2-3 teachers) - implying that a majority of teachers will be teaching in multi-grade situations. Yet all curricula and training presently assume a mono-grade situation and believe that multi-grade will only be an exception.

Result: Data flows off the system, usually like water off a duck's back. "That's not how decisions are made" - is a commonly heard statement in government offices, which indicates that there are other reasons why things are done the way they are done!

 For those NGOs, donors, VCs and others hoping that 'evidence-based' and 'data-driven' strategies can actually persuade the system to bring about changes, especially those that make a real difference to the lives of the marginalized and the disempowered, there is a serious need to re-examine this strategy.

Strategy 3: Intervene in policy and decision-making to the extent possible

If you've worked hard to reach a position where you can impact policy or decision-making, this is the strategy you would use. The late Vinod Raina is a good example of this, being part of CABE and involved in drafting of the RTE. Not everyone can achieve the status of being an 'eminent' invitee to important bodies and hence this is an option only a very few can access. (And even if invited, having an actual say is very difficult - in typical 'high-power' meetings, participants speak turn by turn, and the Chairman then winds up the meeting!) Most people/organizations trying this route reach only the point where they are part of certain committees or perhaps even the various groups related to the Planning Commission, such as the Steering Committee, etc.

Results: As the fate of some of the crucial RTE provisions shows, the more things change, the more they remain the same! I know this is not exactly true - sometimes, some of the things improve. And sometimes they worsen, as the total mis-communication on CCE indicates. Policies, decisions, projects and programmes all run the risk of being hijacked by mediocre implementation, corruption and deliberate diversion to benefit certain groups. Overall, this strategy definitely gives less than optimal results in today's context (everybody cannot be a Vinod Raina!). The primary reason is that it is governance itself which is the key issue, which often fails to get addressed here.

 Strategy 4: Develop working models and ask the government or others to take them up

Eklavya, Digantar, Bodh, Srujanika and hundreds of other organizations and projects have implemented pilot projects, started schools, even initiated small interventions within the government system -- with a view to generate models that will hopefully be 'replicated' or scaled up within the government set up. In fact, government programmes such as DPEP and SSA also incorporate an 'innovation' budget head that enables the setting up of such models that might eventually be expanded to the larger system.

Results: The history of upscaling shows that powerful models often lead to

• conflict (as was the case with the Hoshangabad Science Teacher Programme in MP, or the DPEP pedagogy upscaling in Kerala), or to

• a major reduction in quality of the original (as in ABL in TN, where only 22% children reached age-appropriate learning levels, as shown in a state-wide study facilitated by me when the programme was at its peak; or in the case of KGBV models that initially started well when run by NGOs)

The rest of the efforts don't really reach scalability, or if they do, they somehow fizzle out without leaving much impact. (Take Digantar's schools in Jaipur, Srujanika's effort in Odisha or the 'Active Schools' of Latur, Maharashtra, or the 'Kunjapuri' model in HP or indeed the various 'Model Schools' set up by the government itself in many states. This is really an endless list.)

 Strategy 5: Actually take over the delivery function on behalf of the government 

Several organizations are actually working on the ground with the government to improve the service delivery. They could be corporate houses who are taking over the management of schools (as is the case with the Bharti foundation running hundreds of schools for the Government of Haryana) to Azim Premji Foundation, which is creating its own channels (district schools up to the Education University). [As of now, I'm keeping vendors - such as those IT companies implementing Computer Aided Learning on a Build-Own-Transfer model - out of this discussion, as they see themselves more as 'solution-providers' rather than change facilitators.]

Results: The jury is still out on the kind of strategy being implemented by the two organizations mentioned above. However, large-scale efforts of the kind where a group/programme actually took over the government's functions -- such as Lok Jumbish (funded by SIDA initially) or Shiksha Karmi, or APPEP in AP (funded by the then ODA of UK), or Janshala (run by five UN agencies) in some 20+ districts in the country, or the Child-Friendly Schools project of Unicef in many parts of the country -- all generated a great deal of energy in their time and people talk of them with much fondness even now, but those areas still struggle with quality of learning in government schools.

Even in the NGO sector, many programmes / projects that appeared to have achieved a great deal, now do not show the expected dramatic improvement still surviving on the ground. Take the case of all the areas where Pratham ran its Read India project. If Pratham has stopped working in an area over three years ago, the levels of reading in that area are now likely to be of concern (even if they had improved earlier), and are a part of the 'declining levels of learning' being documented in ASER.

In the early days of DPEP, when it was seen as 'different' from government, states such as Haryana, Assam, Karnataka, UP made radically different textbooks and training (taking over the functions of the SCERTs and DIETs), actually implementing high-energy, high-quality training over 2-3 years across the state. Yet today many of these states are at the forefront of the quality crisis.

Bottom-line: you can bring about change as long as you are there, but things go back to what they used to be once you're not there!

So what is it that makes change in education so difficult?

Perhaps we need to face up to what really lies behind things being bad in the first place. We tend to assume that there's an inability to make things better. But what if it has more to do with the ability to keep things as they are? This might a little more deliberate than the systemic 'inertia' we're used to talking about (though not necessarily as a conscious conspiracy). To begin 'appreciating' this, take a look who loses what if education, especially in the government system, actually improves.

• TEACHERS will find their income from private coaching reduced/lost altogether (this is starkly clear in secondary education, which is one reason why improving classroom processes in secondary schools is very difficult).

• PRINCIPALS and OFFICIALS will not have control over teachers/SMCs who teach well and have community support. (Wherever quality improvement efforts have succeeded, conflicts of this kind have increased. Eventually, the more powerful section 'wins'. Several state governments - or rather the education ministers - have had VECs or SMCs reconstituted since they didn't find them 'convenient'; another example: look at how the provision for SMCs to select books for their school libraries is being subverted through various means.)

• OFFICIALS will also find academically strong teachers/HMs/SMCs and even students do not easily 'comply' - corruption will be difficult to practice. (When more teachers start teaching well, school inspectors always end up making less money. When anyone 'lower' in the hierarchy is empowered, those 'above' have a problem. And as everyone knows, whenever students ask questions, they're told: 'shut up and don't act over-smart!')

• POLICY-MAKERS will have to create a whole lot of new jobs for the large numbers of the newly educated. (This is clearly not an easy thing to do - and one way to deal with this is to keep people in education for longer, as appears to be the case behind the recent shift to a FOUR YEAR graduation programme in Delhi University, despite various other claims being made for it.)

• The POLITY will have to face voters who can think and ask questions of them. (In 2000, one political leader actually stopped a state curriculum from being implemented on the grounds that 'if this is what children learn, who will ever vote for us?')

• Since the majority of people are in some way of the other 'under' someone, the questioning of authority will mean that all kinds of HIERARCHIES will be under threat if education really improves - age, seniority, caste, class, gender, ethnicity, religion! (When young girls refuse to get married, or children ask for reasons behind what they're being told to do, or groups raise voice against discrimination - you can be sure that someone powerful has a problem, and usually manages to find a 'solution'. From rising wages for domestic labour to resenting the 'lower' classes accessing 'higher' levels of goods - such as mobile phones - the middle class too is not comfortable with the spread of education.)

All of which is sufficient to ensure the quality of education will not improve, isn't it? Sure, buildings will be built, as will handpumps and toilets, books will be printed and teachers appointed - since these are opportunities for 'side' income and asserting control over resources and people, or appearing to hand out largesse and thus earning 'gratitude'. However, the actual change in the nature of teaching learning processes, a shift in the kind of relationships practiced, and the levels of learning outcomes attained, especially for the marginalized - does not take place at the same pace at which the provisioning grows. In fact, it is much, much slower, if not actually negative at times.

The "system's" strategies

And how is this ensured? Why does increased provisioning not lead to desired change? As anyone familiar with implementation at the field level will know, a number of powerful strategies are used to to ensure that the 'others' don't get what 'we' have today.

• neglect (take the case of DIETs, which continue to be ignored even after the new Teacher Education Scheme; or the case of hard to reach groups such as street children, working children, migrant groups, or those with disability; or how the north-east itself is missing from our history books; or how the knowledge of women is not reflected in the curriculum)

• selective poor performance (the same government machinery that can do a fairly good job in conducting elections somehow fails at ordinary execution in education; an analysis of which files take the longest to move as against their expected time, will provide a good insight into this)

• siphoning off inputs meant for the needy (from mid-day meals that kill children, buildings that need to be abandoned within ten years due to poor construction, textbooks on poor paper - name an input and you'll find that what reaches children is well below what should; this includes the teacher's time, which is the minimum the state should be able to guarantee, but is not able to due to the absenteeism that is allowed)

• wasting time in doing things that appear to be important but are not (such as organizing 'functions' or 'attending' to a visiting officer or collecting data on a whole range of issues, which in turn is not used much either),

• rewarding the mediocre (as is common, officers 'attach' certain teachers for their administrative chores, thus relieving them from teaching; and of course everyone knows that the way 'up' the system hierarchy is not mainly through good work...)

• demonizing and harassing the committed (anyone who works sincerely is usually called 'mad' by others; those who stand up for children and community are often hounded, as can be seen by the number of allegations that they face)

• creating designs that ensure perpetuation of marginalization (e.g. expecting children to attend school every single day no matter how poor, deprived or ill they are; or using only 'state' language instead of mother-tongue) - and many other such 'devices'.

Supplementing all this is, of course, the common strategy of deliberate discrimination in the actual teaching learning process, something far too well-known for it to be elaborated upon...

In many ways, such strategies are used in the larger community and society as well, to ensure that that those who have been put in their place, remain in that place. As I was recently reminded by a Facebook comment, ‘If everyone gets educated who will till the fields and who will pick up your trash?’ As anyone above the age of 20 will recall, when mobile phones became cheap, many of the then chatterati were dismayed that ‘even plumbers, vegetable sellers and maids now have mobile phones’. And as can be seen in the middle class response to the admission of children from economically weaker sections in private schools under the RTE (‘they will spoil our children’s education’) – the word ‘system’ should perhaps include the larger society and its network of exploitative relationships in which everyone is complicit.

Thinking ahead

You already know all this very well, of course, and in repeating it here the intention is not to imply that nothing can be done or to mount a raving critique of how bad things are. Instead, in the interest of children, especially those from marginalized backgrounds, this is an appeal to recognize that the 'system' has far more powerful strategies than those seeking to do 'good' are able to put into practice - and the results are visible everywhere.

Should we stop using the five strategies mentioned earlier? No, but it would be better to take a longer, deeper view than we tend to take at present. Perhaps we need to stop underestimating the difficulty of the task and take into account that it is not the system's incompetence at making things better but its competence in keeping things the way they are that needs to be addressed.

What this calls for is a better understanding of the situation, of our own unwitting involvement in perpetuating it – and far, far smarter strategies.

So exactly what IS CCE, and what it is NOT!

2013-06-23T18:58:00.002+05:30

Take a look at the video here. Do let me have your comments.