Towards a Coherent Vision of Education

As many of you know, I serve as the Director of Centre for Learning Resources, based in Pune. We recently released our Annual Report for the year 2012-13 and I felt the need to share the note I wrote in introduction to it. I have reproduced it below.

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CLR has been, and remains, wedded to work towards improving the delivery capacity of public education systems, especially those addressing children from birth to about 14 years. We have done this for a simple reason: an overwhelming majority of India’s children will receive their entire educational inputs from the public system. If we wish to bring their voices and contributions into greater prominence in our society than has been the case so far, we must address the problem of effectiveness of the public education system.

Even as India makes big advances on several technological frontiers, its progress in making the public education system more effective must be judged grossly inadequate. More than three years after the law on right to education came into force, a distressingly large number of pointers suggest not only that the intent of the Act is far from being achieved, but that its implementation is actually resulting in a worsening of the quality of education in India’s public schools.

The cause of this is not, as superficial analyses often claim, that the Indian education system lacks high quality teachers. That is undoubtedly the case, but it is more a symptom of the disease than the cause. The pervasive loss of effectiveness among teachers must be put down to poor management – a distressing lack of attention to hiring, induction, skill building, assessment and personal and organizational growth paths of teachers, supervisors, and other officials within the education system.

The lack of vision is not confined only to the management of the human resource aspects of the education system. In preparation for the introduction of RTE, Technical Support Group of SSA advocated strongly for the “harmonisation” of six key pillars of the education system: curriculum formation, syllabus preparation, preparation of text-books (and other) materials, teacher training, evaluation of children and community participation. Today, nearly five years later, it is hard to say that there has been meaningful progress anywhere in the country towards taking such a systemic view.

A concerted push towards developing a coherent vision of good quality education must rank among the most pressing needs of the country today. There is, of course, the so-called demographic dividend that its favourable population structure, strengthened by good education, can provide. Much more importantly, if we pay sharp attention to what is worth learning for children in today’s world, what organisational structures we need to ensure it happens and what resources we need to make available for that to happen, we will have a good shot at weakening the oppressive, highly-unequal structures of our society that sap hope, promote violence and deny the largest numbers of our people a real voice in community-building.

Accordingly, at CLR, our work increasingly seeks to build educational leadership capacities among those who are responsible for providing leadership. In our projects, we seek to demonstrate, on a small yet replicable scale, the possibilities of building these capacities. We do this through active engagement with the day-to-day tasks of the leaders involved – by locating these tasks in larger, systemic concerns, a more meaningful vision of education and a more compassionate understanding of the children involved. At the same time, we seek to expand our advocacy efforts, directed both at the communities involved as well as the government. With this, it is our hope that we will help build both the public demand for quality services and the capacity on part of the government to respond to that demand.

These are complex challenges. We hope that our efforts will continue to receive the enthusiastic support that all of you have provided in the past.

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If you wish to read the whole report, which provides highlights of our work last year, please see it here.