Age-appropriate is Inappropriate

Age-appropriate admissions and special “make-up” training for those who have missed schooling are a part of  India's Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act. However, just because they are a part of the Act, it doesn’t mean that the notion shouldn’t be subject to critical comment. A great many of our laws contain provisions that are illogical, unreasonable or unimplementable. When this is the case, suspending criticism, as seems to have happened in the case of this provision, can make the eventual (but perhaps inevitable) correction take longer.

Let us, first of all, acknowledge the nobility of the intention. An unconscionably large number of our children finds it impossible to pursue schooling consistently for reasons ranging from homelessness and poverty to migrant parents and lack of adequate academic support. They have “fallen through the cracks” as an education system, almost designed to promote inequality, has turned its back on them. The “age-appropriate admission” provision of the Act seeks to remedy this disability.

When a child can’t attend school for any reason, the obvious consequence is that he doesn’t learn what is being taught in the school. The Act requires that in such cases the child be given a special training for a period of three months to two years (maximum) to bring him on par with the others in his “age-appropriate” class.

The most obvious question that arises is also the most damning: is the education that is being imparted in schools so worthless that eight years (or six, depending upon how you interpret the Act) worth of “learning” can be made up in two years? In fact, the most sensible response to this system would be to spend the eight years outside school, learning valuable craft, connecting with the world, working together with others, failing and succeeding. You would then make a dash to the school for two years, take the special training and gain that much-beloved school-graduation piece of paper.

The other question is also interesting. The Act makes the mandatory nod, for this day and age, to constructivist and child-centred approaches to education. But the “special training” provision is quite effective in revealing what this education is really intended to be. It is not a gradual formation of understanding by the child through questioning and engaging with learning opportunities, which can only happen in real time. An education that is capable of being summarised in a quarter of the time and injected into the child through previously-constructed modules produced by a remote state agency can scarcely be constructivist, or even broadly child-centred.

Then there is the question of teachers who will perform this miracle. By common consensus, our teachers need a huge amount of support, extending perhaps over a decade or more, to simply help children access eight years’ worth of learning in eight years. The current dismal state of educational outcomes is a testimony to that fact. If there ever is a teacher who can distil eight years of learning into two, she would have to be super-human and certainly well beyond the capabilities of practically every teacher in the current system.

There is also the question of the state agencies who will prepare the “modules” both for the children on “special training” and the “modules” for the teachers who are to be trained as special teachers. These are the very agencies who have been responsible for preparing the curricula, the text-books and the teacher education that have led to the quality of learning we witness in today’s classrooms. It would take another miracle for them to figure out how to facilitate this “learning on steroids”.

These questions do shine a light on the conceptual soundness of the RTE Act. However, the more immediate concern is this: what is so sacrosanct about age as the basis for forming a cohort? We know different children learn different things at different rates and at different ages. For schools, we have a huge amount of evidence that child-centred practice practically mandates children of different ages learning similar things, whether it is through multi-grade classes or through small sub-groups of a single-age cohort doing different things.

If we want to really make a difference to the lives of children who have been, and may continue to be, deprived of opportunities to learn what schools teach, the notion of age-appropriateness in RTE Act must be dropped. Instead, room needs to be made for the notion of a child being allowed (and fully supported) to take as long as she needs to develop a sound understanding of what needs to be learnt. The Act needs to ensure that all children are supported in reaching an acceptable level of learning, not merely in attending eight years of school. This will require radically different ways of approaching admissions, learning, assessment and granting of diplomas. But until this is done, RTE Act will only be a reminder that we are more interested in the cosmetics of school attendance, not real learning among our children.

Social Change and Child-centric Practice

This is the unedited version of a post  submitted to Solution Exchange, a site initiated by the UN Country team in India, where the education community discusses questions of interest. This post addresses the question of agendas for social change that schools are often expected to serve.

In the conversation we have been having on child-centric education, some participants have pointed out that many cultural contexts, including our own, may be inhospitable to the child-centric ideal. It has been suggested that, in such cases and for some areas, it may be necessary for the school and the community to be “not in harmony with each other”. This, it seems to me, implies that someone other than the community (presumably those who decide policy on educational matters) decides what community practices the school should contest.

We can empathise with this. All of us have, at one time or the other, wished ardently for all children to be taught the horrors of the things we personally hate or the blessings of things we count as virtue. But when these emotions have the potential of informing policy, it is worth-while to explore them more deeply.

To do so, I would like to pose the following questions:

• ·        Granting that injustice and oppression are present in society, is the classroom an appropriate tool for contesting them? What are the implications for the child’s well-being of such a contest?
• ·        In a milieu where dominant and non-dominant groups of the society have starkly different view-points, should the school be a microcosm of the society or a platform for one or the other view-point?
• ·        How does the child-centric ideal deal with this conflict, inherent in practically every society?
• ·        What processes do we use to decide which community practices, values and traditions the school should contest?

I would also like to present my views of these questions and hope that members will take the conversation forward.

We must remember that a contest between the school and the community is not an impersonal face-off between bloodless institutions. Children are involved, and such a contest can be deeply unsettling. It can cause a deep sense of alienation among children, either from the parents, or the system of education or both. It can also lead to confusion about how moral choices are to be made. It is difficult for this confusion to be addressed, because the issues are being framed not as an exploration, but as given ethical imperatives. It is also difficult to address because the adults in the schools have typically not been equipped to help resolve it.

It seems to me that this is potentially so damaging to the child as well as the community that it can be justified only if it is immediately relevant to the children, their families, the community and the teacher. And, both in equity and in the interests of child-centredness, they are the only ones who should decide whether it is so relevant.

When a teacher encourages her children to question real events and attitudes in their environment, it does more than shine a light on the particular problem. It helps the children learn the art of enquiring into the questions of their times. It helps them learn to encounter the varied narratives that exist in their midst, through dialogue with one another. That, in turn, makes it possible for them to engage meaningfully with the challenges that will arise tomorrow, for they will certainly be beyond the challenges that may be prescribed for study today.

I remember being thrilled by Neil Postman 35 years ago as I read his plea to turn teaching into a subversive art. It had the distinct flavour of the individual teacher engaging his students and his community in an exploration of the questions that they needed to ask. At no time did it seem to require the teacher to focus attention (his own or the children’s) on a subversion agenda that had been decided by someone other than the children, the teacher and their immediate neighbourhood.

It seems to me that, as the content of a curriculum, there is a big difference between “questioning” and “questioning a particular practice”. And even the latter is very far from a straight-forward proselytisation of a particular cause into the forming minds of children. Surely, that is violence.

And in this context, it must be said that RTE significantly enhances the possibility that such violence will be visited upon children. By centralising curriculum content, school recognition, teacher certification and teacher development almost completely in the hands of the state, RTE makes it much more likely that individual agendas of people in power, rather than community perspectives, will decide what social issues children will discuss in classrooms. Ironically, while it claims to reach for a child-centred system, it takes a giant step away from it.

This is not a groundless fear. I remember how we, as school and college students, during the Emergency, were expected to memorise and recite the twenty points of Indira Gandhi’s programme as evidence of being patriotic good-boys. And I am sure we can all point out other, more current as well as more remote, instances. The fact is that, among the decision-makers in education, there has been little interest in engaging the community to decide what is worth learning and indeed, contesting, in the school.

It would be wonderful if we recognised that teachers need to learn the art of helping children look at their surroundings, raise such questions as are important to them and be catalysts of a broader questioning in their families and the community. They can then ensure that the process of education plays its part in moving the community to make wholesome changes. That is where child-centric practice will meet the need for social change.

We have all met teachers who have caused such changes in the lives of their students and the community. What we need is a focus on developing many, many more such teachers. That may well be one of the most worth-while tasks educational planners could address themselves to for many, many years to come.

A Movable Feast

This is the unedited version of a post  that appeared in Solution Exchange, a site initiated by the UN Country team in India, where the education community discusses questions of interest. It addressed some of the questions raised by Rohit Dhankar, a noted educationist, regarding child-centred education. He asked, among other things, what child-centred education meant to us, how we knew what the child's needs were, and whether all that children were interested in was in their best interest.

Rohit’s questions are each one like the Arabian Nights magic umbrella. They can be carried in one hand but expand to cover an entire army. Therefore, in this post, I am going to try to restrict myself to just one or two of the questions.

Like all catch-phrases, child-centred education (CCE) is a peg to hang our favourite cloak on, with little regard to what other cloaks hanging there look like.

As we listen to various people involved with children talk about CCE, we quickly realise that, whatever it may have started out as, it is a socio-political notion (not psychological, not even ethical), masquerading as a pedagogical principle.

This is not unreasonable. Eventually, what will manifest as child-centric behaviour is what the teacher believes is child-centric behaviour. (Do we really believe that the teachers who used the cane liberally did not think they were being deeply concerned about the interests of the child)? And so, either the teacher will come to the child with a view of what child-centredness is, or she will have been instructed to exhibit a behaviour that someone else believes is child-centric. It is usually postulated as something self-evidently good, but it goes unacknowledged that it is a set of preferences of someone in some position of authority.

As an example, consider the enormous emphasis (rightly) placed on eliminating physical cruelty in class (e.g. corporal punishment). We hear far less about the many forms in which a child can be traumatised without physical punishment, because there are so many different ways to list and each one would require so many caveats. So, in lists of child-centric practices, it is unusual to come across prescriptions against excessive competition, subtle boycotts or use of rewards as a means of enforcing behaviour, even though they can mark a child much more dramatically than a dozen cane strokes.

This is a general problem with all list-based approaches. They emphasise some practices, and deemphasise others, often reflecting the preferences of the one who is listing, but also as a result of the ease or otherwise of the listing itself. Really important concerns might get left out, simply because it is too difficult to articulate them.

Either way, in most discourses on the subject, there seems to be little space for acknowledging that CCE might be a movable feast, to be discovered in the actual teacher-child relationship, and tested for validity, salience and effectiveness right there. Which, of course, means that the teachers need to learn not the five ways in which to be child-centric and the six reasons why child-centricity produces good results, but the art of being in a meaningful relationship with the child. It also means that as the teacher seeks to understand the child’s learning processes and struggles to find adequate responses, she is, in fact, being child-centric.

The responses of such a teacher will, inevitably, continue to be conditioned by her own background, the “child-centric training” she has received, the community that she, the child and the parents are a part of, and a host of other influences that operate in all our lives. Not only is there no way around it, it is the most desirable way it could turn out. It is only in that authenticity that any meaningful relationship can develop between the child and the teacher. Only in that relationship is there any possibility that the teacher’s behaviour (and the teacher herself) is actually modified to be responsive to the needs of the child. In that relationship is it possible to test, on an on-going, here-and-now basis, whether indeed the child is competent to decide what he should learn. And, in that relationship, the specific question of the right of the child to do so disappears, simply because that right operates throughout the relationship, and is conditioned by the teacher’s understanding of his needs.

If we pursue this, we also see that to ask if children are really interested in what is in their best interest is itself problematic. In the best interests of the child from what perspective? The need that he should become a part of the “productive work-force”? Or that he should be a free soul, who can write poetry and paint? Or that he should turn out to be a top executive, capable of negotiating the treacherous corporate waters? Or that he should contribute to a peaceful, cooperative and mutually-supportive community? Or, most wide-spread, that he should memorise well enough to get past the ritual of the examination.

We see that every debate on this question is suffused by the alternative perspectives, frequently unstated, and assumptions about skilful means for achieving the objectives, mostly untested. I don’t see how we can get away from that. But I would certainly rather that those decisions be made by someone close to the child rather than someone who is far away, who has lots of degrees but no contact.

I have heard it said that adults should not foist their perspectives upon children. In some way, we should allow the natural genius of the child to reveal itself without contamination from the adult. Even in places that claim this, I have never seen an actual case where I could say that this was happening.

And I am very glad that I can say that, because the alternative would rob the teacher of a role in the relationship, and thereby make the relationship itself meaningless.

If we accept this, then we arrive at a very different notion of child-centricity. First, we acknowledge that, because teachers and children are different, it is not going to look the same everywhere, thank God. Second, we see that teachers need support of a very different kind from what is currently provided in the name of child-centric pedagogical education. They need to learn, essentially, what it means to be in relationship to the child. Third, we learn, because it becomes essential for systemic integrity, to foster an on-going dialogue across various parts of the system, a dialogue about the effectiveness of different actions, assumptions and preferred frames in meeting the child as an authentic human being.

It is often said (in both the government and private systems) that there is little possibility of actually developing teachers to be sensitive in the way that this approach requires. My experience suggests that it is not at all difficult for a teacher to reflect upon the bond that she has with a child in her class, and what happens when she treats it with affection, concern and responsiveness. It is certainly much easier (and much more rewarding) than to get her to put into practice a set of prescriptions which are someone else’s idea of good education. Unfortunately, in teacher development, the on-the-ground effectiveness of the development programmes is rarely considered. So, of course, it seems much easier to read out a received list of child-centric practices to a roomful of teachers. 

It is. It is also useless.