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Inclusion, Equity and Elementary Education
For education to be truly inclusive and
equitable, a strong political will and greater efforts are required on part of
the government to ensure that all children are not just in school but receiving
an education which they can relate to, which represents their experiences and
enables them to make sense of their lives and things around them
Universalisation of Elementary Education (UEE) has been unequivocally accepted as an
objective in all countries which have still not been successful in bringing all
its school going children into the fold of a formal system of education. As an
integral part of ‘right to life’, a life of self-respect and dignity, ‘right
to education’ was recognised as a fundamental right by the Supreme Court
in 1993 itself (Unnikrishnan Vs State of Andhra Pradesh) but it took almost
16 years for the Constitution to be amended and the Right to Education to be
enacted as a justiciable right in 2009. Despite its limitations, one of which
is the most obvious exclusion of children under six and those above fourteen,
it needs to be celebrated and mechanisms put in place to ensure that all
children get good quality and meaningful education that they rightfully
deserve.
It must be noted that ‘inclusion and
equity’ have several meanings in the context of education- all children,
irrespective of their age, gender, region, religion, caste and class etc are
able to access education (complete school cycle) of a formal type as against a
part-time, short-term or non-formal education; all children receive an
equitable, uniform and good quality education and; there is adequate and proper
representation in the curriculum, syllabus and textbooks of the lives,
experiences and worldviews of children studying in those schools. While the
myriad meanings that ‘inclusion and equity’ imply are acknowledged by almost
everyone, there are still innumerable challenges in translating them into
reality. India on one hand revels in its rich geographical and cultural
diversity and on the other hand, moans its deeply divided and hierarchical
nature. With its multiple social contexts, a child has several identities and
not all of them are a matter of pride to him because of the social placing of
pegs (class, caste, gender, religion etc) onto which those identities are
hinged. For instance, being an upper class, upper-caste, urban male is
certainly considered to be superior to being a female, or belonging to a working
class, low caste or tribal. While it is well known that there are complex ways
in which these multiple identities actually interact with each other in real
lives of these children, what is disturbing is the perpetuation of these social
inequalities in the education system.
replica hermes
This essay looks at the exclusion of not
just those children who are outside the school system but those who are within
it as well. In the end, it also discusses the attempts of the National
Curricular Framework (NCF) 2005 and the debate surrounding private-public-
partnership model to address some of these challenges.
Children
Excluded from School
In consonance with the
hierarchical nature of the Indian society, the education system is also unequal
and as a basic rule, the rich send their children mostly to private or
better-off government schools and the poor to low fee-paying government or low-
cost private schools.
There are various reasons
why children remain outside school or drop out even after joining school.
Poverty is an overrated argument which is often given as a reason for parents'
unwillingness to send their children to school. This has important implications
for not just understanding the causes of low enrollment or high drop- out on
part of children but also for finding suitable solutions for addressing these
problems. If poverty is accepted as the central reason for children's exclusion
from schools, then one conveniently overlooks the nature and kind of schooling
facilities actually available to such children. While, it cannot be denied that
a large number of parents in our country both in rural and urban areas do not
send their children to school as they are unable to bear the cost of schooling
of their children or unable to bear the loss of additional income which their
children earn or can potentially earn, this is primarily true in circumstances
of extreme poverty. Research in this area also shows that poor parents are
quite keen on sending their children to school and in fact, find the inadequate
and shoddy schooling facilities available to their children, resulting in lack
of learning on their part, quite discouraging and frustrating.
There are several other important factors
which have less to do with people- their economic inabilities, cultural,
religious inhibitions or reservations but more to do with the availability
of schools, distance from home, presence of adequate teaching staff and basic
infrastructural facilities etc, which are instrumental in either preventing or
pushing the children out of school. For instance, it is well known that
there are still many schools in India which do not even have proper classrooms,
teachers to transact the curriculum, or teaching-learning aids as basic as the
blackboard. Some of these schools do not have boundary walls or facilities
like, clean drinking water or toilets with stored or running water arrangement
for children, leave alone separate toilets for boys and girls. This poses huge
constraints for children, especially young girls who spend a considerable part
of their day in schools, often travelling long distances to reach school. The
question of playgrounds, laboratories or libraries in such schools does not
arise. In the same country, we also have schools which have air-conditioned
classrooms/buses, state of the art laboratories, modern technological
teaching-learning aids, qualified and competent teachers and even banal stuff
like skin-sensor water taps. Though this by no stretch of imagination means
that such schools are more successful in giving good quality education to its
students, except perhaps provide for a comfortable teaching-learning atmosphere
with possibilities for better curricular and pedagogic transactions, it is not
difficult to imagine the kind of learning experiences that children studying in
the former have and their long term ‘expected’ implications on
mitigating their poverty or promoting social mobility. While there a few
exceptional students who study in such schools and still do outstandingly well,
breaking out of their circle of poverty, their over-glorification sends a wrong
social message that, ‘if they can study and still perform well in adverse
circumstances, why can’t the others?”
There certainly cannot and should not be
any sidelining of the issue that all children deserve equal good quality
education, irrespective of their social standing and economic position in life.
There have been several efforts on the part of the government and non
government organisations to get children into school. Special incentive
schemes, like exemption of tuition fees, mid day meals (MDM), free textbooks,
uniforms, cycles, scholarships and even provision of hostels have been
introduced by the government. While these schemes have had some visible
benefits, it would be difficult to call them substantial. while a few schemes
despite their much debated and controversial status, like the MDMs have been
reasonably successful in addressing hunger of poor children, helping them
concentrate on their studies and attracting them to schools, a few others like
free uniforms or waiver of tuition fees have been too basic to make any
significant difference in the lives of poor people. This is because there are
innumerable costs of schooling and unless all of them are addressed, it may be
difficult to imagine one incentive scheme to make a huge difference to their
lives. It may also be practically difficult for the government to take care of
the entire costs of schooling of children of all the poor families but what
may and should definitely be possible is to set up infrastructurally adequate
and well-functioning schools for all children, especially the poor.
Incentives
are merely sops and may address part of a need of the disadvantaged
communities, but are in no way adequate in ensuring that children will learn in
schools, leave alone sufficient in ‘attracting and retaining’ them in schools.
Rather than assuming that these schemes will automatically lead to positive
results, these schemes need to be systematically examined to see the impact
that they have on children’s education. There is also a need to perhaps
introduce more meaningful schemes for children which will actually ensure that
schools are happy places where children learn, with possibilities of carving
out a better future for themselves and which also ensure that government
resources spent on these schemes are better utilised.
Coleman’s idea (1966) of
'equality of educational opportunity' is
very much relevant in the Indian context, which means acknowledging that there
are differential inputs which children receive at home and bring to school.
While these inputs significantly impact children’s educational outputs,
equality of educational opportunity would mean that schools must shoulder
additional responsibility and give support to those who need it most, mitigating
the differences among students’ home backgrounds, rather than holding the
students’ deficit home backgrounds accountable for their poor performance. This
means that rather than just providing basic schooling facilities to the
disadvantaged children to bring them into the fold of education, one should
ensure that these schools are far better equipped with proper infrastructure
and competent teaching staff which is far more important in pulling children to
school, motivating them to stay back and facilitating their learning.
Children
inside School and Still Excluded
One would naturally
assume that, issues of inclusion and equity perhaps do not effect children
inside school as much as they affect those outside school. However, experiences
of children inside school, attending classes and getting promoted in the
educational ladder do not necessarily translate into equal participation in the
education process on their part. This again can be seen at two levels- children
in school and yet not learning like the Annual Status of Educational
Research (ASER) reports have been indicating year after year that children are
going to schools but are unable to read, write and do basic arithmetic suitable
to the class that they are studying in and competencies that they are expected
to acquire by then. Another meaning is the exclusion of knowledge,
perspectives, worldviews and misrepresentation or sometimes even distortion of
experiences of children and their families in the curriculum, syllabus and most
importantly, textbooks prescribed and studied in schools. Depiction of a
homogenised reality, most often in the form of an urban north Indian Hindu male
character in the textbooks is well known girls are either absent from the
discourse or presented as dumb characters relegated to performing insignificant
roles, working class is often portrayed as lazy and inefficient, tribals as
superstitious and people from minority religious denominations in stereotypical
images/roles. These inadequate and often distorted projections have an
insidious impact on children who read these books from childhood and start
believing in such depictions and projections.
This is also to do with the fact that
textbooks are prescribed in most schools and considered to be absolutely
sacrosanct. They are to be received and absorbed in their exact form, more for
the purpose of examinations which are based on them and test the ability of the
student to reproduce what is printed in them. This also leads to a faulty
understanding of learning where the ability to memorise facts without applying
one’s mind gets promoted to the exclusion of higher order skills of
comprehending, synthesising, inferring, integrating and eventually making sense
of the information given to construct knowledge. These books often present a
sanitised version of reality, which is far removed from conflicts and tensions
which an ordinary child experiences in his everyday life. They create a schism
between the spontaneous lived world of the child outside school and the
artificial but domineering world of the classroom. While the world outside
continues to be important, it has little legitimacy in school because what gets
tested, assessed and certified is what is given in the textbooks and not what
the child experiences in his day to day life.
National
Curriculum Framework 2005
The NCF tries to bridge the gap between
these two worlds as experienced by the child and make the world of school more
relevant and more representative of the life, concerns and views of the child.
To address the ills with the prevailing system of education which confuses
information with knowledge and over burdens the child with ‘joyless learning’
and bane of ‘incomprehensibility- where a lot is taught but little is learnt or
understood’ (Yashpal Committe Report 1993), the National Council of Educational
Research and Training (NCERT) formulated the NCF in 2005. Moving away from the
controversies which NCF 2000 was mired with, the NCF 2005 tried to make a fresh
beginning in terms of recognising the need to move away from the tendency to
rote memorise the textbooks and the need to acknowledge and legitimise the
agency of the child and to allow him to construct knowledge by giving him
suitable opportunities in school. Drawing inspiration from the Yashpal
Committee Report, it seeks to make learning more meaningful and enjoyable by
relating formal education to the lived world of the children.
Accordingly
NCERT revised its textbooks, which sought to do away with the restricted imagination of learning
and sterile and information- heavy textbooks and infuse them with some flesh and blood. Books in Social and
Political Life, Environmental Studies and History were particularly successful
in making a significant breakthrough in resisting the temptation of giving
chunks of huge information to be learnt by students for exams. These books also
do away with common stereotypes surrounding several religious and ethnic
communities, region and gender etc. They deal with contentious issues as
experienced by many children in their daily lives and help them make sense of
them. It is possible that they raise many more questions than they provide
answers to but that is the idea with which these books have been written that
they arouse curiosity in the child and egg him on to look for answers beyond
the textbooks. Though controversies also surrounded these textbooks especially
the one in Political Science, and they have not been accepted without
criticism, there is no doubt about the immense pedagogic contribution that they
have made and continue to make in the world of school-going children, the fresh
lease of life that they have given to the meaning of teaching-learning and
understanding. What remains to be ensured however is, that teachers are
suitably trained in the philosophy and principles underlying the new framework
and textbooks so that justice is done to this approach to learning and
knowledge.
Low
Cost Private Schools for the Poor
Of late there have been a spate of studies
promoting privatization of school education. Though private schools have always
existed in India and contributed to giving good quality education to children,
what is new in the neo-liberal regime is that there is now a strong position
which believes and actively proposes that since the government school system
has failed to deliver and unable to fulfill its commitment to universalise
elementary education, low-cost private schools must be entrusted with the
responsibility of providing good quality education to children of poor
families. Several studies are cited to show that children of such schools
perform better than those studying in government schools. While several other
studies and educational researchers have challenged the simplistic relationship
which these studies draw between ‘low-cost private schools’ and ‘performance of
children from these schools being better than government school children, these
low cost schools also have a rider attached to them. These schools are low cost
because the teachers employed in such schools are paid 30-40 percent less than
those employed by the government. Most of them openly flout all norms
especially related to basic infrastructural requirements and employ
under-qualified and under-paid teachers with minimal training. Where the need
of the hour is to strengthen teaching profession, ensure that teachers are
properly qualified and sufficiently trained, this model legitimises
under-trained and under-paid teachers. It sees teaching as a task to be
delivered by people who receive a series of short trainings which then regards
them fit for the ‘non-specialised’ job of teaching small children.
These private schools do not aim at
strengthening the hands of government but compete with them, in an effort to
prove that they are better. Moreover, most of these schools operate for profit
motive and are under no compulsion to provide equitable education to their
children, unlike the State schools, which are also constantly under the scanner
and expected to provide equitable education to children. The private schools
are unlikely to have any such social audit and will continue to rope in poor
children with the promise of better quality education in English medium. The
actual differentiating factor for variation in performance of children from
different schools is perhaps the social backgrounds of these children and the
possession of the cultural and social capital on the part of some of them which
puts them at an advantage enabling them to perform better than those who lack
this capital and not better quality education as projected to be given by such
schools.
Conclusion
Linkages between education and
empowerment/social change/upward social mobility are not as simplistic as one
may like to believe. For education to be truly inclusive and equitable, a
strong political will and greater efforts are required on the part of the
government to ensure that all children are not just in school but receiving an
education which they can relate to, which represents their experiences and
enables them to make sense of their lives and things around them. The recently
enacted Right to Education needs to be supported and the initiative by private
sector only needs to be lauded if it strengthens the hands of the government
and collaborates meaningfully with it. Cheaper and sub standard solutions for
poor children may give some basic education to children of poor families but
will not significantly impact their lives in any meaningful way. Inclusion and
equity in a true sense mean good quality education for every single child of
this country. These terms also mean that education makes sense to all the
children and enables them to participate meaningfully and equally in the
process of knowledge construction.
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