Topic: Draft national Education Policy 2019.
Polity: Governance.
A draft National Education Policy coming out decades after the second National Policy on Education was promulgated in 1986 and distilled through five years of several draft panels and national consultations naturally carries expectations. However, the 2019 draft seems to only air some loud and naive thinking, some well-intentioned but unsubstantiated ideas and some smartly crafted statements on contentious intended action. The reform suggested in the policy is creating a foundational stage as the first stage of school education. This reform proposes to bring the three years of pre-primary and the two years of Grades 1 and 2 into a composite unit with “a single curricular and pedagogical phase of play and discovery-based learning” between the ages of 3 and 8 years. The draft’s eponymous chapter on ‘foundational literacy and numeracy’ describes a severe “learning crisis” and warns that the country could lose “10 crore or more students — the size of a large country — from the learning system”. It then goes on to resolve that this cannot be allowed to happen. “The cost is far too great— to crores of individuals and to the nation. Attaining foundational literacy and numeracy for all children must become an immediate national mission.
The Committee for Draft National Education Policy (Chair: Dr. K. Kasturirangan) proposes an education policy, which seeks to address the challenges of:
- Access
- Equity
- Quality
- Affordability and
- Accountability faced by the current education system.
- The draft Policy provides for reforms at all levels of education from school to higher education. It seeks to increase the focus on early childhood care, reform the current exam system, strengthen teacher training, and restructure the education regulatory framework. It also seeks to set up a National Education Commission, increase public investment in education, strengthen the use of technology and increase focus on vocational and adult education, among others.
Why it is a best investment?
The proposal’s implications need to be understood from two perspectives.
- One, this implies that Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) for 3- to 6-year-olds will become an integral part of the organised school structure, and thus become the responsibility of the education department. It should also make ECCE a justiciable right of all 3- to 6-year-olds. The committee considers ECCE to be “among the very best investments” that India could make in education since neuroscience evidence indicates that “over 85% of a child’s cumulative brain development occurs prior to the age of 6”.
- Secondly, the curriculum for Grades 1 and 2 will be developed in upward continuity with the pre-school curriculum, in terms of both content and pedagogy. If implemented well, this can have a positive impact on children’s learning as it would ensure a play-based, developmentally appropriate curriculum for children up to not just 6 but 8 years, which would give them a stronger foundation. This upward extension will further smoothen the transition from pre-school to the primary stage and consolidate the foundation for future learning.
However, two significant concerns identified from collaborative research by Ambedkar University and ASER Centre need to be addressed in implementation. The preschool curriculum was observed to be primarily a downward extension of the primary curriculum. Children were engaged for most of the time in copying or rote learning of alphabet and numbers, a practice which is developmentally inappropriate and can be counterproductive from the perspective of a sound foundation.
Play based learning:
- Children at this stage require a curriculum which emphasises play-based learning opportunities that promote engagement with play materials, picture books, building blocks, puzzles, etc. and include teacher-led storytelling, conversations, rhymes, emergent literacy and numeracy activities, outdoor and indoor play.
- These opportunities will enable children to acquire not only the right foundation for development of skills prioritised for the 21st century, i.e. creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration and self-confidence, but also an abiding interest in lifelong learning.
- The second issue is the rigid structure of the primary grades’ curriculum, which changes annually with every grade, thus providing little or no opportunity for children to revisit the previous year’s curriculum.
- This rigidity comes possibly from a mistaken assumption made by curriculum framers that all children enter pre-school or a school grade at the prescribed age and move annually into the next grade, so that each grade is age-wise homogeneous; the reality is very different.
- Children tend to follow multiple pathways in these early years and it is difficult to predict at what age a child will be in which grade. Participation trends tend to stabilise only by the time children are around eight years old, when most come into the primary stage, often still in different grades.
- This leads to multi-age, multi-level composition at each level. Since age is a significant factor in learning, this diversity creates incompatibility with the given grade-wise curriculum and creates learning gaps for many children. This rigidity of the grade structure leads to cumulative learning deficits in children over time.
Hiding behind terms like ‘fun’
- It asserts that early grade schooling does not lay emphasis on reading, writing and speaking or on mathematical ideas and thinking, but moves quickly on to rote learning. In actual fact, ‘rote’ learning frames all of schooling, its expectations, syllabi, texts, teaching and assessment at all levels, as has been recognised and discussed by all the earlier policies.
So how does this policy acknowledge, understand or face that systemic challenge?
- It does not, but continues with “If and when rote learning is used, it will always be pre-accompanied by context and motivation and post accompanied by analysis and discussion”
- Moreover, it adds, “If students are given a solid foundationin reading, writing, speaking, counting, arithmetic, mathematical and logical thinking, problem-solving…then all other future lifelong learning will become…more enjoyable.”
Enumerating counting, arithmetic and mathematical thinking as different elements of foundational numeracy indicates a lay understanding of ‘learning’ that runs through the document, often hiding behind the repeated use of terms such as ‘flexible’ and ‘fun’.
- Contrary to theories of learning, it recommends harnessing the “extremely flexible capacity” of young students, from pre-school onwards, who would be “exposed to three or more languages with the aim of developing speaking proficiency and interaction, and the ability to recognise scripts and read basic texts, in all three languages by Grade 3”.
- It also states that during grades six to eight every student will take a ‘fun course on the languages of India. Multilingualism and an understanding of diversity are important aims but not done in such an ad-hoc manner.
- It adds that puzzles or competitions to write on a topic without a given sound/alphabet can offer a “funway to understand and play with language”.
Incidentally, such ideas have been used in NCERT language or mathematics textbooks, but not as arbitrarily and definitely not for ‘fun’, as they seem to be listed in the policy.
Lack of focus on how students will imbibe skills
A crucial theme on integrating work and education, not for a vocation but as a medium of learning from life and for life, which has been implemented by the Zakir Hussain Committee (1938), has not been seriously discussed at all. The draft claims that “exposure to practical vocational-style training is always fun for young students” and recommends, without any modalities, that every student will take a fun year-long course on a survey of vocational skills and crafts, sometime between grades six and eight, with some hands-on experience of carpentry, electric work, gardening, pottery, and so on.
Conclusion:
The foundational stage can address this rigidity, but for this the requirement would be to develop a progressive curriculum upward from pre-school to primary stage. Further, it has to be in a spiral, not linear, mode with adequate flexibility to enable children to revisit concepts and learn at their own pace. Most importantly, basing the curriculum on play-based, developmentally appropriate content and pedagogy will help children to develop holistically and enjoy the learning process, an imperative for not only school learning but learning for life.
Probable question for mains:
Draft National Education Policy 2019, is in the news for its observations and recommendations. what are the possible outcomes from the drafted policy and discuss how it is different from its predecessor. Also, suggest measures about what are the areas it need to focus?