Learning from the classroom

Govt schools need to focus on quality

Over the past decade, successive governments have taken pride in the fact that growing numbers of children in rural India are being enrolled in schools and, what is more, staying there for longer periods of time.  In a country as large and geographically varied as India, this is no mean achievement. The disheartening factor is that no government has chosen to build on this initiative in a meaningful manner. The unintended consequence of this “quantitative” focus has been to downplay the “qualitative” element, as the latest Annual State of Education (Rural) or ASER report shows. ASER surveyors visited some 37,000 children between the ages of four and eight in 26 rural districts in 24 states. The results suggested that government schools fared considerably worse in terms of the quality of education. For instance, less than half (46.8 per cent) of students in government primary schools can read letters of the alphabet compared with 77 per cent in private schools. Worse, for a country that prides itself on its information technology talent, only 54.4 per cent of children in government schools can recognise number one through nine compared with 82.7 per cent in private schools.

The picture of early stage learning (at age five) — a critical stepping stone to learning abilities at a later age — was no less dismal. ASER surveyors discovered that children in government schools fared worse than those in private schools on this count too. In cognitive tasks and picture description, the variation between government institutions (including anganwadis) and private schools was between six and 13 percentage points. In slightly more advanced skills, such as listening comprehension and counting objects, the gap widened to 17 and 21 percentage points, respectively. The lesson is not just that government schools deliver poor quality education but that the approach to early stage learning may be flawed. As the report points out, “focusing on play-based activities that build memory, reasoning and problem-solving abilities is more productive than an early focus on content knowledge”. At least part of the problem is that the government’s drive to get children into school has resulted in many children being too young for their class. The report found that more than a quarter of Class 1 students were four or five years, two to three years younger than the recommended age. Permitting nursery school-age children into primary grades, the report points out, “puts them at a learning disadvantage that is difficult to overcome”.  No less worrying in this qualitative differentiation between government and primary schools is that it is widening the gender gap. The survey found that more boys are being enrolled in private schools and more girls in the relatively inferior government schools. This discrimination persists through all age groups.

The big picture, then, is that the government is neglecting its role in basic education. This is a perilous path to follow. The “miracle” growth trajectories of the Asian Tigers (and China) were underpinned by the state’s delivery of quality primary and secondary education. If the trends highlighted by ASER persist, India, an aspiring power, may find itself firmly in the realm of the world’s largest sub-Saharan country.