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.
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