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.

QUOTE

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.

UNQUOTE

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

At Harvard

This is an edited and somewhat expanded version of my comments in the education panel of Harvard India Conference 2012. The topic of discussion was "Education in India - Opportunities and Challenges in the Next Decade".

We are considering what challenges and opportunities in education await us in India over the next decade. I would like to share with you three lenses I look at the question through — from the perspectives of the individual, the community and technology.

For me, the highest purpose of education for the individual is simply this: to cultivate attention, the state of being where one can engage with the question at hand with clarity, care and affection, bringing all one’s resources, physical, intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual, to bear. Only then does the individual begin to approach that holy grail of education, being a self-learner, who can allow the scaffolds of school, teacher, books and accumulated wisdom to fall away without undermining their importance in bringing him where he is.

How do education, and educators, meet that challenge? It seems clear that as long as indoctrination, as opposed to creative inquiry, remains the goal of organised education, we have a task at hand. That task is both discovering how that higher purpose is to be approached, and how to engage with the sensibilities that do not lay the same emphasis on it. We are not very good at it, having pursued rather vigorously the other kind of education for several centuries, first in the service of a colonial master and then in the cause of nation-building. To move away will require a patient but persistent dialogue with various parts of the society as well as actual demonstrations of what such an education can mean for the individual.

One interesting example of this problem, though by no means the only one, is the increasing vocationalisation of education. It is hard to find anyone at all, at even the highest policy-making levels in India, who does not act as if the only goal of education is to produce a well-adjusted work-force for the industry. That is a worthy goal, but scarcely enough by itself for any of us to flourish.

My dialogues in villages and towns with parents and other community members often involve people discovering that they want their sons and daughters not only to become good doctors or engineers, but also good husbands and friends and neighbours; they want them to be not just good workers, but good co-workers. They do want them to be people who have an eye for beauty, a capacity to engage with the unknown, a sense of their connection with the larger world. But it needs drawing out, simply because we have for too long believed that education needn’t concern itself with those aspects.

At the level of the society, two key issues occupy my mind. India has seen dramatic changes in the way the society is organised over the last few decades. Nuclear families in India today account for over 70% of all families, compared to just over a half just a generation ago. This is a seismic change, which has imposed extraordinary stresses on the way the community educates its young. The family support systems are less in evidence, the parents are less able to spend time with their children, and a huge loss of institutional and cultural memory is occurring every day.

This is problematic from the educator’s point of view, but it is especially troublesome for the less affluent, the less privileged and the less well-connected. That, unfortunately, is about 70%-80% of the children in the country. As a result, the education system has turned into a giant engine for what Anthony Carnvale of Georgetown University calls, in the US context, the intergenerational reproduction of privilege, scholar-speak for “the mighty get mightier, the poor poorer.” It is even truer for India, where the application of both public and private resources is highly skewed in favour of the more privileged.

The inequality does not only create social stresses and potential violence, issues that should rightly concern any educator. They also impose a large cost in terms of the society’s creativity, productivity and its capacity for joy. While perfect equality is dysfunctional utopia, gross inequality is an invitation for a community to disintegrate.

The other challenge that concerns me is the lack of involvement of communities in the education of their children As we stand today, organised education, whether public or private, pays practically no attention to contextualising education, respecting local traditions or inviting the community into the classroom. For a country with the diversity of India, this is extremely problematic.

The Right to Education Act of 2010, with all the noble intentions which marked its conception, is a huge step backward on the path of empowering communities to become a part of the education of the young. It implicitly vests, in the state, all authority and wisdom about what is worth learning, how and where it should be learnt and who should teach it. As a result, a large number of innovative education practices that have flourished in quiet nooks and under village trees are threatened with closure.

The challenge for educators here is to discover ways in which feedback from communities about what is valued and relevant to them gets incorporated into the curriculum as well as the teacher-student relationship. This involves the educators acknowledging both the limitations of the models under which they operate, and the value of the wisdom of the community. The makers of the constitution, mindful of this, made education a state, rather than a union, subject but even that is not enough. In my work, we come across cases daily where a state capital-mandated educational practice is grossly inadequate for, even unfair to, the children being subjected to it.

And finally, I want to talk about two challenges of incorporating technology into education. The first is comparatively straightforward. Most technology initiatives, at least at the school level, at the moment seem to be a set of recipes, either as delivery mechanisms for existing content or for new tech-related content. We see little anchoring of it in genuine enquiry, or a framework of meaning-making. Without an embedded organising principle, it is hard to see such technology making more of learners than technicians.

And yet, technology has an enormous potential for enhancing the skills of enquiry and deeper reflection. It can dramatically reduce the repetitive drudgery in a number of tasks and free the mind to focus on the creative tasks. The challenge for the educators is to use technology so that it harnesses this creative energy.

The other challenge is somewhat subtler. Technology has been hailed as the educator’s panacea, helping solve the problems of access for the poor, uneven teacher quality, and lack of interesting learning materials in the classrooms. In reality, available data suggests that we must be very mindful of the inequality enhancing effects of technology.

By its nature, technology serves to improve the output-input ratio of existing production processes. The wheel made it possible to haul a larger load over larger distances using the same effort. A networked computer gives the one who knows it access to a much larger volume of information compared to one who doesn’t.

This, of course, enhances the overall welfare of the community using the technology. However, as it does so, it inherently also amplifies the existing processes for manufacturing inequality in a society. We don’t know if there was a name for some people not having access to the wheel. We do have one for uneven access to the computer network. It is called digital divide and it is something that rightly concerns educators and leaders around the world.

We can point to a lot of cases where use of technology seems to have evened out existing inequalities. However, we discover, mostly, that new technology has simply created a new set of winners who are now on the way to becoming more than equal. The identity of those who are unequal changes, the fact of inequality doesn’t.

This is not to say, at all, that technology should, therefore, be shunned. The challenge for us is to be aware of the many ways in which use of technology might exacerbate inequalities and, as a society, take steps to mitigate it.

Challenges, as the Chinese say, are opportunities. The ones we see around us today are, potentially, a ladder upwards.

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.