Many teachable moments

The Kasturirangan report is exhaustive in its scope

Now that the headline three-language formula has been removed from the draft education policy, attention can be turned to the myriad details in the report submitted by a committee headed by scientist K Kasturirangan. The report, which runs into 480-odd pages, amounts to a wholesale restructuring of the country’s school, higher education and technical education systems, in keeping with the lofty aim set out in 2017 of making India a “knowledge superpower”. How far the reforms set out in this exhaustive and well-meaning report can be implemented is an open question. Reiterating the urgency for India to invest in Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) — the report says a Re 1 investment yields an expected return of Rs 10 — it takes an all-encompassing view that includes infant and maternal nutrition. To this end, it says the state’s ECCE investment should start when the child is three years old, and suggests restructuring the school curriculum for 15 years of schooling.

Within the current system of delivering pre-school learning through anganwadis and private play schools, the report sets out a detailed framework that draws on “the numerous rich traditions of India over millennia involving art, stories, poetry, gathering of relatives” and other traditional resources to create a curricular and pedagogical framework. This is certainly an imaginative solution but it may run into practical difficulties. For instance, would anganwadis have the trained staff and resources to do this? Besides, not all families may be able to cope with the demand that three-year-olds be taken to play school as a matter of policy.

Although the committee’s intentions are admirable in suggesting a significant expansion of pre-school education, it would have been more practical had it focused on enabling the government to concentrate on delivering better-quality schooling within the current 12-year system, which Annual Status of Education Reports have shown to be critically sub-standard. That section of the report does suggest some useful improvements in teaching routines to improve foundational literacy and numeracy — a prescribed minimum daily and weekly focus on language and maths and a connect with real-life learning. But the crisis assailing public primary education in India today is teacher absenteeism and poor teaching quality. The report addresses these problems by suggesting the mobilisation of a large-scale volunteer programme and a refocus of the teacher-training programme both in content and structure by integrating them into a new system of centralised teaching institutions. Oddly, there is minimal focus on distance-learning technologies, which could deliver some measure of quality education to India’s more remote areas.

The micro-recommendations for pre-school education offer a flavour of the treatment the Kasturirangan report has accorded to higher and technical education. Overall, the report reflects a sincere effort to mobilise innovative solutions to the vexed problem of India’s education and, at the same time, take on board the opinion of all its members (why else would it include a suggestion to set up a school for Persian and other Oriental languages). It has also addressed the “how to” element of its recommendations by setting out a comprehensive set of new regulatory and monitoring institutions — including renaming the ministry of human resource development the ministry of education. Any government that wants to enable a better educated India will find many teachable moments in this report. For one that wants to refashion education for specific political purposes, it may come up short.