Quality Education in Contemporary India

Assertions of mechanically memorising decontexualised bits of facts and in for mation from prescribed textbooks with the primary objective of clearing examinations abound and are often found to be true. It is also recognised that there is a skewed emphasis on the cognitive (and that too, memory) and an exclusion of the affective and other domains of a child’s personality.

Children with multiple identities (caste, class, religion, tribe, gender etc) are hierarchically placed in our ‘not just diverse but unequal’ society and there is a synch between children’s social locations and the schools that they go to. There are schools which have the finest state of- the-art technology, adequate infrastructure and qualified and highly competent teachers to teach children from privileged socio-economic backgrounds. Parallely, there are also schools which are struggling at all levels- inadequate infrastructure, incompetent and de-motivated teachers and unwilling and irregular students.

The issues of quality, equity and social justice go hand in hand and quality education cannot be restricted to a few children in limited pockets. The term quality, in its various manifestations/foci (ranging from curricular concerns to teachers to infrastructure, etc) needs to have a universal meaning for all children and all school spaces. It needs to be inclusive in character inclusion of a kind which needs to integrate all with dignity and not exclude/separate a large majority by offering them a few sops.

Right to Free and Compulsory Education for children (RtE)

Most importantly, in a country like ours, the primary responsibility of providing equitable, good quality education needs to lie with the government and not the private players who venture into education to seek profits. Right to Free and Compulsory Education for children (RtE), which made education a Fundamental Right in 2009.

• This Act ensures free and compulsory elementary education for all children in the age group of 6-14 years. While it has several provisions relating to the meaning and implementation of different aspects of the Act, a few which are particularly important with respect to ensuring quality education in schools are- laying down of norms and standards relating to Pupil Teacher Ratios (PTRs), buildings and infrastructure, school-working days, teacher-working hours; provision of prohibition of deployment of teachers for non-educational work, other than decennial census, elections to local authority, state legislatures and parliament, and disaster relief; provision for appointment of appropriately qualified and trained teachers and prohibition of physical punishment and mental harassment, screening procedures for admission of children, capitation fee, private tuition by teachers and running of schools without recognition.
• The Act also recognises the importance of a contextualised, vibrant and meaningful curriculum, which accepts the agency of the child and a pedagogy and environment where children can learn without fear. It stated upfront that the issue of quality needs to be centrally linked with the educational experiences that children have in schools and efforts should be made in the direction of ensuring an all-round development of children and building on their knowledge and experiences.

Other initiatives

• Govt has also been launching several schemes to enhance the quality of education across all stages of education-primary to higher. These schemes are comprehensive and address the needs of students from socio-culturally-economically challenged backgrounds, including those with special needs; improve access and bring about curricular and pedagogic reforms. For instance, under the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao Abhiyan, an award is being instituted to those School Management Committees which achieve 100 per cent transition of girls at different levels of education.
• Similarly, UDAAN is an initiative of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to enable disadvantaged girl students and other students from SC/ST & minorities to transit from school to post-school professional education specially in Science and Maths.
• Recognising the geographical isolation of the North Eastern region and its fallouts, there are schemes for students residing in that region as well. To reach out to a wider group and make the pedagogic transaction more dynamic, technology is also now being leveraged to facilitate learning opportunities for students.
• Under SWAYAM (Study Webs of Active –Learning for Young Aspiring Minds), Professors of centrally funded institutions like IITs, IIMs and Central universities will offer free on-line courses to citizens of our country. This is certainly a positive attempt to break the exclusivity of such Institutions which have traditionally favoured only a selected few.
• Similarly, National E-Library has been envisaged as an on-line portal that will democratize access to knowledge by ensuring that quality content developed in central universities and other premier educational institutions is available in a digital format and easily accessed by variety of stakeholders through laptops, smart phones and tablets, etc.
• Similarly, National Scholarships Portal has been envisaged as a one stop solution for end to end scholarship process right from submission of student applications to its disbursal to the beneficiaries for all the scholarships provided by the Government of India.\
• In the field of school education, the Human Resource Development Ministry proposes to conduct annual National Assessment Surveys (NAS) through the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT); develop an expenditure portal to centralise various sources of school education data in India, which is a much required necessity and launch a portal for Teacher Education Institutions which will ensure transparency and grading of their functioning. A system which tracks around 200 million children across the country is also being initiated, which will be used to monitor the students’ progress from one class and identify drop outs.
• The MHRD has set up the Rashtriya Avishkar Abhiyan (RAA) - a convergent framework aimed at nurturing a spirit of inquiry and creativity, love for Science and Mathematics and effective use of technology amongst children. NCERT’s e-pathshala- a novel idea, addresses the question of free and easy access to quality teaching-learning resources to all school students.
• Likewise, in a diverse socio cultural context like ours, technology can at best play an enabling role. Expecting tablets and smart phones to replace teachers and schools, especially at the primary level, for children who need much more handholding, will be more damaging.
• While each of these schemes is inherently worthy, they should not be mistaken for certain concerns, fundamental to the questions of equity, quality and social justice. All children have the right to good quality, equitable education and therefore, all efforts must be made to create an enabling environment in schools, where both teachers and students are supported to simultaneously partake in meaningful teaching-learning experiences.

By: Mona Kaushal