Relevance: GS-2: Issues relating to the development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health, Education, Human Resources.

Key phrases: lack of education, illiterate, ill-equipped, design, public expenditure, weak capacity, lack of basic learning, school drop outs, learning gaps.

Why in News?

• We must address a wide range of factors that prevent kids from learning what they should in school.

Context:

Reasons for the children not learning properly:

• Flawed design’ of our schooling system: We made a choice a few decades ago that each habitation must have a primary school within 1km to ensure access for little children. It has been a key reason why most children in that age-group are now in primary schools. But it has created a few intractable problems. Like Each primary school, since it serves one habitation, has a small number of children across classes 1 to 5. Because of the small student group, there is often only one teacher, or perhaps two. They teach five classes simultaneously, and also all three subjects. Teaching is complex and challenging as it is. But multi-class teaching of many subjects increases difficulties manifold. Also, with so many single- or two-teacher schools, teachers are isolated and hard to support.
• Inadequate investment in public education: It results in either inadequate or poor-quality resources. With roughly 3% of gross domestic product (GDP) as our public expenditure on education, we have been well short of our commitment of 6% for decades. This underlies many of the other problems. An inadequate number of teachers and (in some states) a large number of teachers with short- term contracts and low remuneration. Inadequate staffing for other needs, such as community outreach. A lack of basic facilities in schools such as toilets, running water and electricity, alongside poor maintenance. Deteriorating nutritional standards of the mid-day meal across years.
• Dysfunctional teacher education system: We have one of the world’s worst and most corrupt teacher education systems. The National Education Policy 2020 confronts this problem head-on. But the current reality is that most of our 9 million teachers have undergone a B.Ed or D.Ed programme of very poor quality, if they’ve done one at all. There are also many ‘colleges’ that just sell degrees, without students even attending classes.
• Design and culture of our education system: It makes it rigid and centralizing rather than flexible and empowering—which is what’s needed for effective schooling and learning. Uniform norms or diktats across the state, cookie-cutter training for teachers irrespective of their actual needs, an ‘inspectorial’ regime rather than a problem-solving one.
• Leadership and management of the system.: Whatever the design of the system, leadership makes a difference. In many states, under good leaders, the difference they make is visible. But too often, the leadership is shoddy. Or just incompetent and indifferent. But even more often, it is a lack of understanding that all administrative actions have educational consequences, which must be assessed by the appropriate educational principles, and not by what is administratively expedient.

Steps to increase learning outcome:

• The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 rightly focuses on the learning challenge in the classrooms. However, in order to attain universal foundational literacy and numeracy, which the NEP proposes, we have to work simultaneously on three fronts:
  • Change the structure of the curriculum and assessment so that it moves away from rote-learning;
  • Work with primary teachers intensively to enhance their capacities and pedagogic practices; and
  • Make sure there are no dysfunctional, single-teacher/ two-teacher/ teacher-less schools in the country.
• Now that the first stage recommended by NEP of five years foundational learning goes up to Class 2 (three years pre-primary and two years primary), the government can seriously consider consolidating small upper primary schools into one viable school at a cluster level. Then a student will not need to travel long distances if she can attend Class 3-12 in one cluster school.
• There is enough qualitative evidence to show that composite secondary schools retain more children. When children have to shift schools — especially girls — the problem of transport and the safety of transport/cycling acquires a momentum of its own — pushing more children out of the school system.
• The next challenge is upgrading/merging schools to make each school resource-rich in library/laboratories/sports/vocational education; and ensure there is a teacher for every class and every subject.
• The most challenging task would be to ensure teachers believe that every child can learn, and teach children at the right level. This may sound simple, but my work with government schools and teachers has convinced me that this will not be easy to achieve.
• Teachers need greater autonomy inside the classroom and they should not be tied down to curriculum-related time-tables. At the same time, they need to unlearn rote-learning practices and teach every child to understand and internalise basic concepts in mathematics and reading with comprehension. What a teacher believes in influences her attitude towards students, the pedagogy, and how she manages time to reach out to every child. A teacher’s prejudices, biases and attitudes can be a barrier to learning.
• If a teacher believes that some children cannot learn, she is most likely to ignore them and focus on others. If a teacher believes that girls cannot learn mathematics, she will communicate it to the students, and girl students may feel afraid to ask questions. .
• To improve the learning levels, India has to ensure that the education system focuses on what and how much our children are learning, and how we can support, encourage, and facilitate new teaching methods.

Way Forward:

• Children from well-to-do families don’t have these obstacles. And it should also not escape us that this ‘lack of basic learning’ is a phenomenon found overwhelmingly with children from homes in poverty or near-poverty, rarely with children from affluent or comfortable families.
• Pointing out that access to education, school drop outs, learning gaps especially for children from marginalized communities have always remained major challenges in education, the academic disruption due to the pandemic and subsequent to online learning becoming the safe and prominent mode of learning, it aggravated the existing digital divide and thus access to education.
• In this Scenario government has to enhance its role to provide quality education to its people.
• In the last five years, the Delhi model of education has caught the attention of people in Delhi and beyond. Other states government has to learn from this and should provide a good government education system in their state.

Source: Live Mint

Mains Question:

Q. Discuss the factors that prevent kids from learning what they should in school. What should be the measures to tackle these issues? Critically Analyse.