India has enrolled more children in secondary schools than ever before, but is failing to teach them what they should be learning, while the most vulnerable are falling further behind the rest, as IndiaSpend reported on September 20, 2017.
The Annual Survey of Education Reports (ASER), brought out by the education advocacy Pratham since 2005, have corroborated this fact. Rukmini Banerji, Pratham India’s chief executive officer, says policymakers set unrealistic educational goals for children, and argues for more meaningful outcome indicators. Focusing on the school experience is more important than measurable outcomes, she says, adding, “If I look back, I don’t remember the maths that I learnt but I remember many other things which presumably have gone into shaping who I am.”
In this interview, Banerji, a Rhodes scholar who trained initially as an economist but shifted to education for her PhD at Chicago university, discusses the demographic dividend, pedagogy, teacher training, children’s own aspirations, and the role of the central government in improving the quality of education. Here are some edited excerpts:
Until 2016, ASER surveyed children up to the age of 16. ASER 2017 focuses on adolescents. Year after year, your surveys have shown children in higher grades have a poor grasp of skills taught in lower grades, including adolescents, as we reported on January 16, 2018. These are the children expected to deliver India’s “demographic dividend”. Have we lost the battle already?
The Right to Education Act (RTE) makes education mandatory for children up to age 14, that is, Grade VIII. But our usual survey covered children till age 16 because there are still a lot of students in that age group who are finishing Grade VIII. Those surveys showed how children move into higher grades without having learnt the requisite reading and writing skills.
However, this year we focused on adolescents above that age and out of RTE’s ambit. The motive was not to underline the same failures in learning but to go beyond--that’s why we called it “Beyond Basics”--and ask what children are doing in real-life settings, outside the classroom.
Our usual ASER is very basic and fairly straightforward--you could say ‘academic’ in some sense: the maths is numerical, just like in textbooks. This year’s ASER was an attempt not just to explore what adolescents can do but also to get a sense of what they are thinking, what they want to do, what they feel capable of doing and so on, so that their ability to do certain things is placed in a larger context of how they view what lies ahead. Several results were very interesting.
One is that many children continue after Grade VIII--beyond which RTE does not apply--and there is no big drop in enrolment. It’s clear that the push for more years of schooling continues well beyond the compulsory stage. That is probably coming from both the supply side (there are more schools) and from the demand side (people’s aspirations are higher). Faith in education or, I would call it, in years of schooling, is quite deep.
More kids staying on beyond Grade VIII is an opportunity because if young people are still enrolled in educational institutions, it’s easy to reach them. If, for example, we think that some skills still need to be taught--English, for example, as most students’ level of English is below what is expected as per textbooks--we can reach the kids who are still enrolled somewhere.
To Be Continue - part-2
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