Subject: Indian Society

Context

The gap between jobs, needs and knowledge, and the absence of role models, could be turning India’s demographic dividend into a nightmare.

National curriculum and problems with it

• What is in our national curriculum? It is a fixed set of topics prescribed in all subjects — from physics to geography, and engineering to planning.
  • And it is taught in English at our elite MHRD institutions.
• Designed by professionals: It has not been designed by politicians but by our elite professors and bureaucrats: It is what they believe the nation really needs to know.
• Issue of imposition: It is imposed on ordinary students and parents through competitive exams and on colleges and universities through various central regulatory agencies, most egregiously, through the UGC-NET, an objective-type multiple-choice (!) exam that decides who is fit to be a college teacher.

Issues with the engineering curriculum

• Doesn’t address the regional needs: We already know that the national engineering curriculum fails miserably in meeting regional needs.
  • No regional variation accounted for: Engineering for Himachal Pradesh needs to be different from that in Maharashtra or Kerala.
• Not in sync with the demands of the industry: It must address the needs of core industries, local enterprises, the provisioning of basic amenities such as water and energy.
  • None of this is in our national curricula or practised at the IITs.
  • Moreover, there is no mechanism for engineering colleges to work with their communities.

Issue with the social science curriculum

• No interdisciplinary courses: Let us look at the UGC-NET curricula, which is largely what is taught in our elite institutions.
  • At the BA level, it is divided into several disciplines — for instance, political science, sociology and economics.
  • This is unfortunate since much of life in India is interdisciplinary.
  • As a result, many activities such as preparing the balance sheet for a farmer, or analysing public transport needs, and development concerns such as drinking water or even city governance, are given a miss.
• Example of economics curriculum: The UGC-NET curricula in economics has 10 units, the very last unit is Indian Economics. Unit 8 is on Growth and Development Economics, where the student must know Keynes, Marx, Kaldor, and others.
  • There are various mathematical models, for example, the IS-LM macroeconomic model, whose validity in the Indian scenario is questionable.
  • Absence of important sectors: The study of sectors such as small enterprises or basic economic services such as transportation is absent. The District Economic Survey, an important document prepared regularly by every state for each district, is not even mentioned.

Sociology curriculum and issues involved

• Absence of certain important items: There is no preamble nor a list of textbooks or case studies.
  • Under “Social Institutions”, we have a list of timeless words such as culture, marriage, family and kinship.
  • Peasant occurs two times, but there is no farmer. Here is a sample question: “Who uses the phrase ‘fetishism of commodities’ while analysing social conditions?” followed by four names.
• No mention of important data: There is also no mention of important data sets such as the census or developmental programmes including MGNREGA in either curriculum.

Conclusion

• National curricula divorced from the community: The training at our elite institutions, and consequently, in the national curricula, is not to empower ordinary students to probe their lived reality. Or to contribute professionally and constructively to the development problems around us. Rather, it is to perpetuate a peculiar intellectualism which is divorced from the community in which these institutions are embedded.
• Need to rethink the one-nation-one curriculum: One-nation-one-curriculum certainly has some advantages in enabling mobility of some jobs, especially in the national bureaucracy and a multinational economy.
  • Cost to the developmental needs: But one-nation-one-curriculum comes at the cost of the developmental needs of the states and the emergence of good jobs there.
• Turning demographic dividend into a nightmare: The above-stated asymmetry is behind the aspirational dysfunction in higher education. It is this disconnect between jobs, needs and knowledge and the absence of role models, which is slowly turning our demographic dividend into a nightmare on the streets.

Context

The draft NEP (National Education Policy) document points out that close to five crore children currently in elementary school do not have foundational literacy and numeracy skills. 

Severe learning crisis: The document cites several possible reasons for this crisis.

• First reason:  Many children enter school before age six.
  • Lack of options: This is partly due to the lack of affordable and accessible options for pre-schooling.
  • Therefore, too many children go to Std. I with limited exposure to early childhood education.
  • Consequences for the poor: Children from poor families have a double disadvantage -lack of healthcare and nutrition and the absence of a supportive learning environment on the other.
• Second reason: Lack of developmentally appropriate activities by age and phase.
  • The misplaced focus of ICDS: School readiness or early childhood development and education activities have not had a high priority in the ICDS system.
  • Acting as an extension of pre-school education: Private preschools that have increased access to preschool but are often designed to be a downward extension of schooling.
  • Thus, they bring in school-like features into the pre-school classroom, rather than developmentally appropriate activities by age and phase.

Three clear trends in ASER-2019 data

• First trend: Scope for expansion of Anganwadi network.
  • Expansion network: There is considerable scope for expanding Anganwadi outreach for three and four-year-old children.
  • All-India data from 2018 shows that slightly less than 30 per cent children at age three and 15.6 per cent of children at age four are not enrolled anywhere.
• Second trend: Under 6 students in class I.
  • ASER 2018 data show that 27.6 per cent of all children in Std I are under six.
  • It is commonly assumed that children enter Standard I at age six and that they proceed year by year from Std I to Std VIII.
  • The Right to Education Act also refers to free and compulsory education for the age group six to 14.
  • However, the practice on the ground is quite different.
• Third trend: There are important age implications for children’s learning.
  • Association with learning output: ASER-2019 indicate the higher learning output associated with age in the same class.
  • In Std. I, the ability to do cognitive activities among seven-eight-year olds can be 20 percentage points higher than their friends who are five years old but in the same class.
  • In terms of reading levels in Std. I, 37.1 per cent children who are under six can recognise letters whereas 76 per cent of those who are seven or eight can do the same.
  • Age distribution in Std. I vary considerably between government and private schools.
  • Private schools in many states have a relatively older age distribution.

Way forward

• Understanding the children: Understanding the challenges that children face when they are young is critical if we want to solve these problems early in children’s life.
• Providing for developmentally appropriate skill: Instead of focusing on the pre-school years as the downward extension of school years there is a need for providing developmentally appropriate skill in these years.
• Pedagogy: On the pedagogy side reworking of curriculum and activity is urgently needed for entire age band of four to eight.