this story came in todays hindu. now its been removed from the website! or at least the link says no longer available! do read - on the politics of education and questions of social justice in india. Space for little people AGRIMA BHASIN>>Features>>Sunday Magazine, The Hindu, July 20, 2014 thehindu/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/space-for-little-people/article6229520.ece It’s time the government stopped focusing on glamorous schemes and started to think about the rights of children who cannot afford quality education. AGRIMA BHASIN on the recent India Exclusion Report on School Education Last month, the Ministry of Human Resource and Development (MHRD) recommended three big-ticket ideas for school education: the introduction of buttermilk as a part of midday meals for children, a fillip to Public-Private Partnership (PPP) led ‘model’ schools for talented boys and girls at district level, and the designation of Saturday as sports day across schools. In a country blemished by stubborn inequalities of access, quality and equal participation in education, these skin-deep ideas, lacking judiciousness, will only serve to deepen a longstanding piecemeal and ‘incentives’-driven approach to school education. The previous governments were confronted with formidable challenges — economic compulsions of child labour and the resultant exclusion from school, discriminatory classroom spaces, exclusionary laws and policies, incompetent implementation practices and shockingly low public spending on education, floating at three per cent of the GDP. All of these persist and demand a far-sighted and scrupulous response from the incumbent Government. The chapter on School Education in the India Exclusion Report (IXR) of the Centre for Equity Studies 2013-2014, collaboratively authored by diverse educationists and published by Books for Change, renews the debate around state provisioning of education as a public good and offers a thorough analytical framework to grasp the intersecting processes of exclusion from, in and by the education system that deny children from marginalised communities a chance to learn in schools. A blow to the ideal of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan or universal education, the Report first thrusts into focus the rights of children who cannot access school altogether or drop out because of extremely difficult circumstances or specific vulnerabilities. They may be internally displaced; surviving in conflict areas; children of de-notified, nomadic, semi-nomadic tribes; born to parents in stigmatised occupations; migrant child workers or ‘children in conflict with the law’, among others. Even though they constitute a significant proportion of the illiterate and out-of-school child population in India, their official numbers and an understanding of the socio-economic constraints facing them are invisible in existing laws, policies and government records. Dedicated mapping and identification of these children, with close coordination between frontline state authorities and local communities, is where this Government can make an unyielding start. If access to schools is not a barrier, in what ways are children excluded in the schools? Other than skewed teacher-pupil ratios, overcrowding in classrooms and inadequate infrastructure, how does a teacher’s chalk-and-talk pedagogy bore and exclude children? In what way does ‘hidden curriculum’ (pooja, worshipping idols, celebrating certain festivals over others) alienate students from a minority background? More active discrimination on the part of the teacher manifests in the seating segregation she affects between the kamzor (weak) dalit and tribal students and their hoshiyar (clever) dominant caste peers; or if she mocks children who do not conform to expected gender roles, labels tribal children ‘slow’ and ‘lazy’, their parents ‘drunkards’ and name-calls Dalit, Muslim and children with disability bhangi, miyan/Osama and paagal respectively. Besides schools’ unwillingness to invest in disabled-friendly infrastructure beyond ‘rails and ramps’, children with learning difficulties may find themselves isolated if an impatient teacher is indifferent to their pace of learning. Partisanship, deliberate neglect of children’s curiosity, corporal punishment and discouragement of merit among SC/ST students is also reflective of a teacher’s discriminatory attitude. Teachers who promptly label tribal children as weak, seldom quiz them on their intimate knowledge of the environment or of oral traditions of storytelling. State curricula (despite an ambitious National Curriculum Framework 2005 that offers a roadmap for states to make textbooks more socially relevant) rarely encourage children to relate their everyday lives and experiences to classroom learning. Thwarted from fully participating in classrooms, sports and leadership opportunities, children become demoralised and frequently absent themselves or drop-out as a consequence of intuitively internalising the discriminatory attitudes of teachers and peers. These attitudes frustrate classrooms from becoming the joyful, inclusive spaces they are meant to be. This foregrounds the critical necessity of undertaking relentless teacher sensitisation through a rigorous infrastructural, curricular and pedagogical repair of teacher training institutes such as District Institutes for Education Training (DIETs) and State Councils for Education Research and Training (SCERTs). The benchmark should be to equip teachers with an education that enables them to sensitively appreciate and nurture the diversity in classrooms and treat children with care, respect and dignity. Equally imperative is to not make a government schoolteacher feel like a worthless cog in the wheel. Therefore, a better salary; leadership training and capacity building to motivate teachers and principals are cardinal, in addition to strongly discouraging the trending recruitment of untrained, unqualified para-teachers on short-term contracts (as exposed by the Bihar scam). In-school exclusions crosscut with the socio-economic constraints that impact marginalised children’s everyday lives and affect their schooling decisions — notably a family’s struggle for livelihood, parental illiteracy, negligible academic support at home and societal prejudices and customs. For instance, gender bias resulting in greater burden of domestic responsibilities on girls, or social sanctions against education or in favour of early marriage — all impede the full participation of girls in school education. Great thinkers such as Ambedkar, Tagore and Gandhi, despite their differences, championed the intrinsic value of education in bringing about social equality and justice. India undoubtedly has an expansive philosophical, legal and programmatic framework that can eminently provide basic education to all its citizens. But exclusionary processes and the continually widening gap between policy prescriptions and practice arrest the assiduous realisation of this framework. The India Exclusion Report on School Education effectively demonstrates the policy-implementation gap by critically appraising the patchwork journey of education policy in India — from the 1964 D.S. Kothari Commission that espoused a ‘neighbourhood’ or Common School System without proffering a financial and organisational blueprint to invest it with vitality; the National Policy on Education (1968, 1986, 1992), which made inclusion a part of its rhetoric; to the flawed Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) that relied on fragmented incentives to attract children to school and shoddily scattered the responsibility for implementation across Government ministries; to the Right to Education (RTE) Act 2009, with its radical but hitherto unrealised features. Regrettably, the BJP-led NDA Government in the latest budget proposal ruthlessly slashed the outlay for MHRD by a colossal 71.4 per cent from Rs.61,862 crores (2013-14) to Rs.17,672 crores (2014-15). The abiding neglect of public school education — in terms of committing the requisite financial, human, technological and administrative resources — is unquestionably among the most obstinate challenges before us. In recognition of the remarkable spirit of the millions of young minds who undertake that trek to school against every adversity, the MHRD is faced with an onerous task — to not merely introduce buttermilk in midday meals but also ensure its quality, production and consumption in a school milieu that is free from discrimination and indignities. To not designate Saturday as sports day without guaranteeing the equal participation of every child in sports activities. And lastly, to not consider big-ticket the idea of establishing PPP ‘model’ schools for talented students but to lend reformative fiber to existing government schools for all children across the country. (Agrima Bhasin is with the Centre for Equity Studies, New Delhi)
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 07:51:42 +0000
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