Last night I had a particularly strange dream. I dreamed
that I was in an exam hall, holding a pencil in my hand, staring at what looked
like a blurry piece of paper before me. I remember being nervous, sweaty palmed
and truly worried about the results. Clearly, it wasn’t an exam I was prepared
to write! But then when I woke up, I couldn’t shake off the thoughts about the
dream. I realized that throughout my school years, I had always found post-exams-waiting-for-the-results
phase nerve-wrecking and strangely unsettling. It got me thinking about the
exams we were all made to write as children in school and how I now think those
exams could have been better tailored to measure my understanding in the
subject, rather than just testing me on my ability to memorize what was in the
text books. I think about how much the “syllabus completion” aspect was more
important than me knowing what the subject was about. I think about how I was
made to study history, civics, geography when I had difficulty following what some
words meant in the text book. I think about how I had difficulties in picking
up English during my early primary school days and how insecure that used to
make me feel. I think about my slow math days and how I used to hate homework.
I’m lucky I had help then, else I wouldn’t have certainly grown up to be a
confident person that I am today.
That gets me thinking about the state of education and
students in India today. ASER Center
releases The Annual Status of Education report every year. The below infographic
are some quick takeaways from the ASER 2016 & 2017 report.
The Wire’s analysis on the state of enrolment over the years
shows the following:
This disturbing piece of information about how the quality
of learning has deteriorated over the years despite the increase in the rate of
enrolment shows us that the government policy which does not allow schools to
fail students until grade 8 is clearly responsible for this sorry state of
affairs. But I am not writing today to comment on those policies. Reading about
all this got me thinking about another article I’d read about the other day. It
was about how India aims at becoming a 6 Trillion USD economy in 10 years and
how this is mostly driven by the digitization initiative. As vague as I think
this plan was and how the goal wasn’t more well-defined, I thought this was commendable.
But the truth is no matter how we hard we try to accelerate our current economic
growth using technology, this goal is a myth if we don’t take the importance of
quality education earnestly.
By 2030, India will have 600 million youth. This is nearly
7.9% of the world’s population. India is set out to have the highest youth
population in the world when other countries like China and the US are
estimated to have the elderly population outnumber the youth. While this is surely
a promising statistic in India’s favor and how our productive section of the
society is set out to grow in the coming years, multiple blogs, news reports
about the concerns of employability of the youth paints a dark shade of worry
to this issue. The rate of youth leaving India has seen a 225% increase between
1999 to 2015 for education, work or permanently. There are discussions and programs
in place for better quality higher education and this is a step in the right
direction. However, it’s also of grave importance to open up more discussions
about primary education. Who are we helping if we cannot get more students to
stay enrolled after 8th grade? By just focusing on improving the
higher education sector, we’ll end up increasing the inequality gap and leave a
large section of the society feeling marginalized. Leaving a section of the
society neglected, is not just an economic issue, but also an issue of national
security. It’s dangerous to not focus on both the issues at the same time and
take incremental steps to make structural reforms to both primary and higher
education at the same time. While still battling with the issue of keeping children
in school, we also need to adopt better tools for performance measurement at
primary level. While organizations like Educational initiative have been doing an
admirable job in ensuring students learn with understanding, we need more initiatives
in this area.
First step to identify the gaps is to be able to have enough
data to carry out these analyses on. ASER 2017 report was built on highly
complex data generated at district level (24 states, 26 districts, 23,868
households and 28,323 youths). Collecting data in more granularity will
help us understand the picture in greater detail and help fix broken policies
such as RTE. Though the intentions of most such policies have been great, the
outcome doesn’t quite show us the sort of positive impact we were promised it
would have.
Yes, I do not have all the answers here. And I have way too
many scattered thoughts about this subject since it is dear to me. Well, I hope
that there is a silver bullet that would fix all these issues. Till we all find that silver bullet, here's what we need to do - have a dialogue about this. Till then, we need to brainstorm new ways
to fix this problem. Till then, we need to be brave to accept the fact that our
children have indeed fallen behind and it’s time to help them launch themselves
into being more self-confident, curious adults.
