Letting the Pandemic Educate Us

 

This is a slightly edited version of an earlier post.

 

In terms of the disruption to social and economic structures that COVID-19 has caused, it is probably the most consequential event in the life of the 70-year old Indian Republic. While we wait for its full impact to become clearer, it unfortunately appears from their pronouncements that most people, including political leaders and policy makers, are simply waiting for “when this is over”. That may be short-sighted, a misunderstanding of what “being over” might really mean.

That is because COVID-19 has brought lessons in its wake that we will ignore at our peril. In a societal sense, the pandemic has laid bare the fragile and counter-productive assumptions that underpin the way we have organised ourselves. In particular, education, as the primary mechanism that drives long-term change in a society, must respond to protect and strengthen children today and the nation tomorrow.

Three important mechanisms of social organisation that have been taken for granted in education during recent decades are institutionalisation, urbanisation and globalisation. If COVID-19 is not a one-off event, and there is no reason to assume that it is given how exploitative our engagement with our environment continues to be, each one of them must be reassessed for worth, especially for how they affect the future of our children.

Institutionalisation of Education

Institutionalisation has promoted the idea that the only learning worth our children’s time and our money is the one that is provided in schools, colleges and universities. Across most of the world, this has made learning information-centric and uncritical. It has packed children into rows and columns in classrooms and made them unfamiliar with their surroundings. It has taken them away from productive use of their hands and bodies and valorised “brain work”, creating an artificial crisis of periodic unemployment (even before the unimaginable destruction of employment caused by COVID-19). It has snapped their connections with their land, their environment, their culture and their communities, replacing them with words in ink on paper or, more recently, typeface on a computer screen. In India, a mindless pedagogy has further ensured that institutionalisation fails even in its own objectives, as student achievement on its “learning metrics”, mainly focussed on literacy, numeracy and irrelevant information, has kept falling.

By shutting down its pre-school centres, COVID-19 brings India’s attention squarely to the role of parents in the holistic development of their young children. (We started Sajag, a programme for coaching caregivers in nurturing care in April 2020. It now reaches over 1.5 million families and is set to expand further. Many others have started similar programmes.) By forcing the closure of schools and colleges, COVID-19 presents us with the opportunity to explore what exactly is being lost when schools close. It also creates the possibility that we will discover how much there is to learn in communities, on land, in relationship, and in discovery and invention, even when schools are closed. It has the promise of suggesting a radical overhaul of what we value in school education.

Urbanisation of Communities

Urbanisation has caused us to believe that ghettoization of people in cities is inevitable as we “develop”. With economic and social policies in most countries oriented towards this shibboleth, we have seen unhygienic living grow exponentially in the cities, even as rural communities have been devastated by loss of populations. Mental health challenges in urban communities have become alarming, accentuated simply by the inhuman stresses that accompany urban living. For our young, it has meant few physical spaces for wholesome growth and play, little opportunity for meaningful community engagement and a social landscape tragically barren of nurturing experiences.

By attacking densely-packed urban communities disproportionately, COVID-19 has laid bare the fallacy of organising ourselves solely for economic efficiency. It asks us to reconsider how physical communities should be laid out, how large they should be, how they should harmonise into the surrounding landscape and how their cultural, economic and political sinews should function.

Globalisation of Society

We have also been fed the inevitability of globalisation, almost as a primal force. It is true that it promises economic efficiency, but we have, in the process, lost much. Diversity is the essence of risk reduction and long-term survival and thriving, whether at the level of an organisation, a community, a nation, or indeed, evolution of life itself. In a few short decades, blinded by the promise of economic efficiency, we have traded diversity away for massive inequality and loss of local skills, trades, crafts, self-reliance, agency and autonomy. Our text books, the only source of information promoted by our policies, have consistently failed to ignite an examination of the underlying assumptions and their all-too-visible outcomes among our children.

The globalising impulse has led to entire education systems being un-moored in authentic experience and unresponsive to local needs. As a result, it has fostered and valorised the creation of an alienating and alienated elite. The reaction to that is a distressing level of anti-intellectualism throughout the world. That, of course, creates the fodder for the assembly line that is perhaps the holy grail of the globalising philosophy in the first place, but it also creates a dangerous level of instability and irrationality in society that can eventually only tear everything apart. This is not just a possibility. It is happening now, around the world.

COVID-19 has alerted us to the downsides of these Faustian bargains. Its dramatic spread is certainly a result, with air travel having been the primary vector. The heart-breaking spectacle of tens of millions of migrant workers walking hundreds of kilometres and sleeping on asphalt roads in India’s scorching summer, is another. They discovered that they had no means of support, no community, no fall-back when their employment away from home ceased. COVID-19 has also awakened us rudely to the reality that having the world’s fastest GDP growth rate is no protection against ending up with the world’s steepest fall in GDP and widespread misery.

To the extent that we continue to regard globalising as self-evidently good, we create the potential of damaging our children, inhibiting their learning and creating a world that is less fit for them. Time has come to drop the fiction that local wisdom is somehow inferior and to engage in a meaningful dialogue that hasn’t foreclosed on the alternatives.

The Need for Dialogue

Pandemics have ravaged humanity fairly regularly, but the last decade and a half has seen a large number of concerned voices talk about the urgent need to reassess the social, economic and environmental systems we have created. They have warned about the high likelihood of their causing “zoonotic health threats”, diseases that migrate from animals to humans, exactly as happened with COVID-19. As long as they were just scientific papers or rarefied symposia, the common man paid no heed. Today, we know better.

We know, in particular, that none of these questions is trivial, yet none has an obvious answer, either. There are good reasons why these systems have taken such a hold in our collective psyche. These should be the subject of widespread dialogue including, perhaps especially, in our schools and colleges. The sensibilities that arise from such deliberations must inform our liberal education as well as the conduct of professions such as engineering, town planning, medicine, economics, sociology and, indeed, education. As of now, there seems no evidence that any of that is likely, or India wouldn’t have had a National Education Policy, passed in the middle of the pandemic, with exactly three sentences referring to it.

Crises are opportunities. Our response to this one may be the difference between thriving and perishing. COID-19 has much to teach us, but education must be paid for with the currency of attention. Will we pay heed?

India's NEP 2020 - Not Paying Attention

 

It was instructive that probably the most consequential event in the life of the Republic merited nothing more than three pro-forma single-sentence references to “epidemics and pandemics” in the National Education Policy 2020. The Policy must have been discussed and agreed by the Union Cabinet while dressed in masks, a clear and present reminder of how much has changed. Yet, the document they approved acknowledges COVID-19 only to exhort higher education institutions to undertake epidemiological research and advocate greater use of technology in delivery mechanisms.

That is a pity. COVID-19 has brought lessons in its wake that we will ignore at our peril. In a societal sense, the pandemic has laid bare the fragile and counter-productive assumptions that underpin the way we have organised ourselves. Education, as the primary mechanism that drives long-term change in a society, must respond in a way that protects and strengthens children today and the nation tomorrow.

Three important mechanisms of social organisation that have been taken for granted in education during recent decades are institutionalisation, urbanisation and globalisation. If COVID-19 is not a one-off event, and there is no reason to assume that it is given how exploitative our engagement with our environment continues to be, each one of them must be reassessed for worth, especially for how they affect the future of our children.

Institutionalisation has promoted the idea that the only learning worth our children’s time and our money is the one that is provided in schools, colleges and universities. Across most of the world, this has made learning information-centric and uncritical. It has packed children into rows and columns in classrooms and made them unfamiliar with their surroundings. It has taken them away from productive use of their hands and bodies and valorised “brain work”, creating an artificial crisis of periodic unemployment (even before the unimaginable destruction of employment caused by COVID-19). It has snapped their connections with their land, their environment, their culture and their communities, replacing them with words in ink on paper. In India, a mindless pedagogy has further ensured that institutionalisation fails even in its own objectives, as student achievement on its “learning metrics”, mainly focussed on literacy, numeracy and data, has kept falling.

By closing anganwadis, COVID-19 has brought attention squarely to the role of parents in the holistic development of their young children. (We started Sajag, a programme for coaching caregivers in nurturing care in April 2020. It now reaches over 1.5 million families and is set to expand further. Many others have started similar programmes.) By forcing the closure of schools and colleges, COVID-19 presents us with the opportunity to explore what exactly is being lost when schools close. It also creates the possibility that we will discover how much there is to learn in communities, on land, in relationship, and in discovery and invention, even when schools are closed. It has the promise of suggesting a radical overhaul of what we value in school education.

Urbanisation has caused us to believe that ghettoization of people in cities is inevitable as we “develop”. With economic and social policies in most countries oriented towards this shibboleth, we have seen unhygienic living grow exponentially in the cities, even as rural communities have been devastated by the loss of populations. Mental health challenges in urban communities have become alarming, accentuated simply by the inhuman stresses that accompany urban living. For our young, it has meant few physical spaces for wholesome growth and play, little opportunity for meaningful community engagement and a social landscape tragically barren of nurturing experiences.

By attacking densely-packed urban communities disproportionately, COVID-19 has laid bare the fallacy of organising ourselves solely for economic efficiency. It asks us to reconsider how physical communities should be laid out, how large they should be, how they should harmonise into the surrounding landscape and how their cultural, economic and political sinews should function.

We have also been fed the inevitability of globalisation, almost as a primal force. It is true that it promises economic efficiency, but we have, in the process, lost much. Diversity is the essence of risk reduction and long-term survival and thriving, whether at the level of an organisation, a community, a nation, or indeed, evolution of life itself. In a few short decades, blinded by the promise of economic efficiency, we have traded diversity away for massive inequality and loss of local skills, trades, crafts, self-reliance, agency and autonomy. Our text books, the only source of information promoted by our policies, have consistently failed to ignite an examination of the underlying assumptions and the all-too-visible outcomes among our children.

COVID-19 has alerted us to the downsides of these Faustian bargains. Its dramatic spread is certainly a result, with air travel having been the primary vector. The heart-breaking spectacle of tens of millions of migrant workers walking hundreds of kilometres and sleeping on asphalt roads in India’s scorching summer, is another. They discovered that they had no means of support, no community, no fall-back when their employment ceased. COVID-19 has also awakened us rudely to the reality that having the world’s fastest GDP growth rate is no protection against ending up with the world’s steepest fall in GDP and widespread misery.

To the extent that we continue to regard globalising as self-evidently good, we create the potential of damaging our children, inhibiting their learning and creating a world that is less fit for them. Time has come to drop the fiction that local wisdom is somehow inferior and to engage in a meaningful dialogue that hasn’t foreclosed on the alternatives.

To disregard such fundamental questions in an education policy adopted in the middle of the pandemic makes little sense. These should be the subject of widespread dialogue, including in our schools and colleges, before and after the adoption of the policy. The sensibilities that arise from such deliberations must inform our liberal education as well as the conduct of professions such as engineering, town planning, medicine, economics, sociology and, indeed, education.

An education policy that doesn’t even consider the questions relevant to how our education system should be structured has surely not paid attention.

 

The Century of Shifting Sands

This is the note I wrote for the 2016-17 Annual Report of Centre for Learning Resources as its Director. I hope you will find it interesting. (To see the full Annual Report, please click here).

A senior IT industry official, while speaking recently to a group of university students, laid out a vision of how banks would look ten years from now. Most of the jobs that we currently see in the industry would be gone, replaced by a new set which he described in considerable detail.

I thought he was absolutely correct about the kind of jobs that would be gone. And mistaken in even attempting to predict what the replacement jobs would look like in ten years.

We just don't know.

Toys R Us, the storied toy store, beloved of generations of parents, just filed for bankruptcy. People still buy toys – they just don't need the skills Toys R Us employees have. They order from Amazon instead.

A generation ago, we would hear of the demise of a particular business model once in several decades. Today, it happens in a few years.

A Kodak engineer invented the world's first digital camera in 1975. Kodak commissioned a study of the impact of film-less photography in 1981 and chose to do nothing to move away from film. As late as 2007, they had fallen far enough in public perception that they released a marketing video claiming they, too, were on the digital bandwagon. In 2012, they filed for bankruptcy. From 1975 to 2012, it took 37 years for the reckoning to come for being stuck in the past.

Engineers at Xerox invented the world's first computer with a window-based graphical user interface in 1973, a full decade before Apple would do so. But Xerox was so blinded by what it was already doing that it could see little potential in the new invention. Devastated by the oversight, it went to the edge of bankruptcy in 2000 and has flirted with it ever since, breaking up into two in 2016. It took four decades for the lack of insight to come home to roost.

M Pesa, a money transfer service, was launched by a mobile phone service provider in Kenya in 2007, and by 2011 had already demonstrated that traditional banks were not needed for efficient payments. In 2015, Reserve Bank of India issued eleven licences for “Payment Banks” to entities not one of which was a traditional bank. In 2017, a bare ten years since the M Pesa revolution in Kenya, it is universally agreed that banks' profitable payments business is dead.

Uber was founded in 2009. In eight short years, it has upended traditional taxi services in 633 cities around the world, caused consternation among regulators and survived thousands of efforts to shut it down. When City of London announced a few days ago that Uber's licence would not be renewed, more than 500,000 people signed a petition protesting the decision. Even if Uber fails to keep its London service alive, it will not be replaced by traditional taxis, just other more culturally-attuned app-based operators.

And when Elon Musk, who has given the venerable Toyota a run for its money by using disruptive technology in automobiles, implores governments around the world to set up task forces to pay attention to what Artificial Intelligence may do to our society, it is time to sit up and pay attention.

Not just business models, social models are shifting at increasingly rapid speeds. Relationships are being mediated through digital channels, opinions are being formed and un-formed with completely new types of inputs, and cultural values have far shorter lives than we have been used to.

It is in this world that our politicians, bureaucrats, social activists and the occasional educationist are seeking to define what our children should learn. They have been quarreling over which centuries should get space in our children's minds. Depending upon the prejudice, the bias, the preference, it could be anywhere from 10th century BC to 20th century AD.

But not the 21st century AD.

21st century AD is the century of not-knowing, the century of shifting sands, the century of uncertainty and ambiguity. This is the century of creating knowledge, not receiving knowledge. It asks for fluidity, movement, understanding and dialogue.

What kind of knowledge will prepare our children for this century? The honest truth is that, like much else, we do not know.

But it may actually be easier to answer the related question: What kind of education will prepare them for it?

It seems to me that this question will require educators to think about two seemingly contradictory impulses.

On the one hand, there is the urgent need to develop skills to engage with change. The importance of the faculties of presence, critical reflection, creative inquiry, and rejection of dogma has long been talked about among educators but, perhaps because the pace of change was so glacial, its need has never before been so acute. Today, however, we are at a point where every child who grows up without these skills will be at grave danger of being, at best, irrelevant to the world around him and, at worst, fodder for increasingly sophisticated schemes for subjugation of the mind. The need today is to create a new education based on the science of attention, inquiry and presence.

On the other hand, in a world that provides so little by way of moorings, there is a deep psychological and social need for meaningful anchors. An education that cannot provide insights into morally validating and emotionally satisfying bases for living is not just incomplete, but dangerous for coherence and well-being of our communities. Education today requires the fostering of a sense of dialogue, of interdependence, of dedication to others. While, traditionally, organised religions were tasked with this responsibility, they have clearly failed to create a more just and coherent society. The need today is to create a new education based on the religion of togetherness, respect and larger purpose.

While the first tends to valorise the abilities that reside in the individual, the second requires careful, loving attention to our context and surroundings. Tensions between them have played out throughout our history, but never before has there been a greater need to do both together.

The stark challenges before humanity may provide the perfect opportunity for us to move beyond this long-standing debate. It can be done, but it requires of us impulses more worthy than colonisation of young minds.

Proselytisation Posing as Policy

This is the note I wrote for the 2015-16 Annual Report of Centre for Learning Resources as its Director. I hope you will find it interesting. (To see the full Annual Report, please click here).

The big education policy event of 2016 in India is the making of … well, the National Education Policy, 2016 (NEP). Or is it?

Governments the world over have sought to control what passes for education in schools. Many have called schools an institution for brain-washing young minds so that they subscribe to some particular idea of a nation. Others, more charitably, call it an exercise in nation-building, especially necessary for “young” nations to help build a sense of togetherness. They usually mean the same thing.

One wouldn’t think that India, the land with a civilizational footprint millennia long, would need to invent the idea of its nationhood afresh. One would imagine that the rich cultural, spiritual and intellectual legacy of this land would provide a sufficiently nuanced and complex bed in which to seed a variety of ideas and positions without anyone feeling threatened. One would believe that the dominant sentiment that would arise in this country would be: “I contain multitudes”.

However, the on-going debates around NEP suggest that one would be wrong.

Most of the voices, on either side of the debate, have tended to operate from the “how to convert them young through education policy” paradigm. Like their predecessors over decades, the protagonists mistakenly believe that they will transform a whole generation or more of citizens if they can only grab control of the school curriculum.

After independence, this was perhaps inevitable as we chose the unfamiliar motif of a written constitution to be the new object of our allegiance. Insecurity around the success of that project, especially given the horrific violence that accompanied freedom, would have been enough for a determined proselytisation effort. Unfortunately, as it became the default, unquestioned objective, each successive generation of education policy makers has sought to find ways in which to imprint their particular notion of India on the young minds.

Such fond wishing flies in the face of much evidence to the contrary. The truth is that children’s attitudes and beliefs are moulded by a lot of different environmental factors. The preachy way in which schooling tries to do so is among the least effective of them all.

Regardless, the “catch them young” approach continues to be replicated in the current formulation of, and debate around, NEP. Over the years, that obsession has created an education system that specialises in preaching and shoving information down the throats of the children. It gives little regard to whether what they are taught integrates with their lived experiences, little regard to whether it builds skills that might be useful to live a full life, little regard to creating attitudes for living peacefully together. Most damagingly, it ensures that children never learn the art of questioning the stories they are told, of enquiring into the true nature of things, of challenging prejudices constructively and doing so with consideration, respect and the need to understand. So even though few today buy into the notion that big dams are the temples of modern India, they lack the resources or the skills to meaningfully enquire into what might be actually worthy of such an appellation. And India’s anointment as a plastic surgery pioneer may draw sniggers or applause, depending upon the prejudice, but rarely a deeper look into the ontology of such claims.

As the ability to discern, to parse, to evaluate disappears from the classrooms, it is possible to tell the young any story, true, false or slanted, without fear of challenge. Those who seek to plasticise the young minds in hopes of leaving them with their own imprints forget, and are often dismayed to discover, that such minds are putty-like in face of competing ideologies as well.

It takes only a little thought to draw the line from poor development of these faculties to the pervasive fracturing of our society today, the entrenched injustice and oppression, the ease with which narratives of violence take hold and the lack of meaning our young struggle with. A generation schooled to not use reason in day to day engagements will not use reason when faced with serious challenges of life. A school day that doesn’t help children learn respect through experiencing it (as opposed to being preached at) will create individuals who have trouble respecting others. If schooling prepares children primarily to serve as foot soldiers in the cause of advancing technology, as the draft NEP seems weighed down by, they will fail to recognise, and act from, their value to their communities when they grow up.

The current debates on the NEP have largely failed to challenge it on the basis of how we really need to change our education system. Today, we need a dialogue that rejects both the tendency to dwell a thousand years in the past on the one hand and to craft an unmoored identity by denying our traditions on the other. We need a policy that privileges a curriculum fostering deep enquiry, creativity, engagement and respect. However, this can only happen if we step back from the fruitless attempts of trying to mould our children in our images.

Of course, we can just go on doing what we have for the last 70 years and make the NEP a non-event. Unfortunately, we probably will.

Thinking Strategically

This is a note I wrote for the 2014-15 Annual Report of Centre for Learning Resources as its Director. I hope you will find it interesting. (To see the full Annual Report, please click here).

In May, 2010, I met the CEO of a district panchayat in India. He asked me if we could help improve the teaching of mathematics in the schools of his district.

Delighted at the possibilities, I quickly outlined how the several thousand teachers involved could be provided effective training, coaching and teaching-learning materials to deepen their understanding of the subject as well as pedagogy, what organizational commitments and structures would be necessary and how we would assess whether the programme was progressing as desired. I suggested a five-year time frame, with capacities being built at various levels within the department and resource groups being formed in several geographies.

He was not impressed. He said he wanted the teachers to begin teaching the new programme in classrooms in June (this was already May), and wanted the entire intervention to be completed within one year. He said he couldn’t wait that long for the quality of Maths teaching to improve.

I politely declined. We didn’t have the capacity to create that miracle, I admitted.

Five years later, the district has had ad hoc trainings now and then for maths teachers. No improvement in student learning seems visible, and anecdotal evidence suggests that teachers have not developed any new skills in teaching Maths.

The five-year strategy we had outlined would have been fully implemented by now. While its impact on student learning and teacher capacity can only be hypothesized, it would have been based on a strategic vision of how change happens and what resources are necessary to foster it.

The public education system in India is in a crisis of capacity. Teachers, supervisors and officials at practically every level need better understanding of pedagogy, better teaching-learning tools and better assessment guide-posts for delivering desired outcomes. They are not getting them because of a pervasive lack of attention to systemic strategy.

Strategic thinking for improving educational outcomes is not a rocket-science, but it does require discipline. Even back-of-the-envelope strategising would require attention to the following:

·        A credible, well-established theory of change. 

    What is the basis for imagining that a particular initiative will lead to desired results? Far too often, projects are initiated merely on a whim, anecdotal evidence or incomplete analysis. Desired outcomes are poorly articulated, if at all, and their desirability often based on little more than some individual preferences. Grounded in little reality, they fail to deliver and are quietly abandoned after the initiator has moved on.

·         A grounded understanding of needs and context. 

     A particular theory might have worked well elsewhere, but what leads us to believe that it will work well for us? Adults and children will learn new ideas when they build on what they have already learnt, what they need to learn, what they want to learn and what they feel equipped to learn. Moreover, the actual organizational context will provide powerful cues for learners to either incorporate new learning into their lives or reject it as unprofitable. Unfortunately new initiatives are rarely designed based on such understanding. As a result, most learners, whether adults or children, simply learn by rote if they must, and discard the training if they safely can.

·         Coalition-building.

     We might design an effective-looking plan, but how will we know whether everyone who is going to be affected is in agreement? Ideal plans thought up by someone, no matter how brilliant, are rarely ideal for all the stake-holders.  Meaningful and effective interventions are almost always co-created. Unions, parents, communities, civil society organisations all have legitimate interests to protect and objectives to advance. Far too many well-meaning initiatives have been wrecked by either silent saboteurs or vociferous objectors or both, simply because not enough attention was paid to building coalitions. It is messy, it takes time, but something eventually gets done, rather than nothing.

·         A detailed process-map. 

    A programme might be well-designed and co-created, but what attention have we paid to ensuring effective implementation? Identifying motivational drivers of learners rarely figures on the radar of planners. They seem to trust the power of official orders despite personally-experienced evidence to the contrary. Physical conditions play a great role in determining how much new learning will take place. Monitoring, when it is not explicitly supportive, is most often experienced as punitive, dramatically reducing new learning among learners. On-going coaching is practically indispensable for ensuring that new learning is welcomed by learners into their lives. Integrating these concerns into implementation design makes the difference between success and failure.

·         Programme Assessment. 

   How will we know whether our assumptions about what causes improvement were right or not? Educational projects deliver outcomes over much longer time periods than, say, building a road. This mean that it is both more complex and more important to have a coherent set of criteria by which to judge the success or failure of a particular initiative over a long period of time. Not only does this enable mid-course corrections for the particular programme, it generates valuable knowledge that can be used in other initiatives.

A huge proportion of our population is at and below school-going age, making us one of the youngest countries in the world. This means that in as little as 40 years, we are likely to be one of the oldest countries. The much-touted demographic dividend that the young population promises us can only be realised if our young today receive meaningful, high quality education. For us to have a prosperous and happy country in 2050, we need to think strategically about education. Now.

Regulating Itself

A year has passed since I last posted here. Time has been in short supply and my offering this time is another note I wrote for the Annual Report of Centre for Learning Resources as its Director. I hope you will find it interesting.

QUOTE

Government is by far the largest provider of education in India. Between 50% and 80% of children depend on government schools for their entire education. The figure is much larger for the poorest and the most disadvantaged segments of our population, for whom government schools remain the only affordable way of getting a conventional education.

The government is also the sole regulator of the education system, and its powers of regulation have become far more codified and pervasive after the passage of RTE Act. At the higher education level, there are autonomous bodies such as UGC and AICTE for such regulation, but primary and secondary education is regulated departmentally.

The poor quality of education in India’s schools has generated some comment in recent years but, by and large, it has not been at the centre of attention it deserves. RTE Act reinforced the trend by devoting so little space to quality that it requires considerable effort to find the relevant mentions tucked away in Sec 29. And surveys like ASER, which have for years highlighted the distressingly low levels of educational proficiency among India’s children, now seem to only provoke yawns among the educational establishment.

It is time to ask whether the dual hats that the education departments around the country wear, as dominant provider of education as well as its regulator, are serving the nation. When a provider is its own regulator, efficiencies are likely to be low, quality compromised, innovation undervalued, competition stifled, and cronyism fostered. In India’s case, this is not just a reasonable supposition; we have empirical evidence that it is so. The yawns are no surprise; they are the inevitable response of a provider that has no external regulator to answer to.

The public has responded by voting with their feet. Enrolment in government schools has declined continuously over the last several years. However, in the absence of a high quality regulator, the alternatives available to most children are almost equally pathetic – the large majority of private schools do little better on quality measures. The public can express a vote of no-confidence; they can’t replace a professional regulator who has the ability to conceptualise, demand and guide.

Unfortunately, UGC and AICTE provide little comfort that the presence of an external regulator in education makes a positive difference. However, they were both installed at a time when the quality concerns hadn’t become as pressing; their organisational structures and philosophy reflect the priorities of the times. They have failed to change from there, but there is no reason why an institution created to respond to today’s challenges should be similarly ineffective.

Telecommunication sector provides an instructive example. For the first few years of mobile telephony, DOT was entrusted with regulation of the sector. Short-sighted self-interest led to a spate of litigation and, for a while, the sector came to a stand-still. The government showed great sagacity in installing the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) which has shown an exemplary grasp of key issues and a deep concern for public interest. Today, India has among the lowest telephone rates in the world and a service that reaches some of the remotest parts of the country.

We already have regulation of the education sector. Now let us have regulation that serves. It is time for institutionalising independent education regulators.

UNQUOTE

If you wish to see the full Annual Report which describes in some detail the work we did during 2013-14, you will find it here.