360 degrees: A retrograde step indeed

I had never been an apologist for the Right to Education Act of 2009 for it was not brought out with any political will to provide all children quality education. Rather it was born out of the pressure from educationists and social activists to implement the Unnikrishnan judgement which declared that education up to 14 years had become a fundamental right. It is only the fifth draft that became the 86th Constitutional Amendment but restricted compulsory education for children between 6 and 14 years, leaving out the under-6 children.

The two child-friendly provisions in the Act, namely ban on corporal punishment and non-detention up to Standard VIII were viewed with concern by most parents and the teachers alike. They opined that fear alone would be the motivating factor for a child to learn.

Childhood should be joyous and should be free from fear. The adage goes as: Success leads to success and failure breeds failure.  The chances of failure should be reduced so that the child will be free from failure. No two children are alike It is all the more so with regard to learning.  When a child joins the first standard, it is reported that it comes with a vocabulary ranging from 300 to 600 words. These are learnt from listening to voices in the neighbourhood without any formal schooling. The home atmosphere determines the number and nature of words learnt. But our system does not take note of the individual differences among children.

Similar is the case relating to the period taken by children to blossom. Every child blooms to its full capacity at his/her own pace. Some are late bloomers. They may take a longer time to assimilate what is taught. They are slow learners and they should be allowed to grow according to its nature. Many of the late bloomers have been very successful in their later life. This is one of the main considerations that might have weighed with persons who drafted the bill.

The school curriculum is adult-drawn without it being field-tested with children. The educated middle class has often determined the nature and content of the curriculum.  The curriculum is most often difficult even for children coming from educated homes.  The unduly heavy curriculum has been the reason for low performance of children. The very fact that most children from educated and affluent homes go for private tuitions from LKG show that the curriculum cannot be transacted within the school time schedule.

Non-detention is not synonymous with non-learning. Rather it should ensure the learning of each and every child. In the 1990s, under an Unicef-supported initiative, a programme called Minimum Levels of Learning (MLL) was tried in Tamil Nadu and other states. In that programme, the curriculum content was decided on the criteria that all children were capable of learning all the concepts introduced. The curriculum was drawn after successful field trials. The teacher tests that every child learns successfully the concept, though time taken by individual children might differ. In the textbook itself, every child could note down the day on which he or she had mastered the concept. This ensured that every child learnt all the concepts intended for the standard. That experiment proved that field-tested curricular materials were helpful for the children to understand and assimilate. The strength of the project lay on accepting individual differences and permitting a child to learn at her or his own pace.

I made a study of students who were detained in a standard for more than a year. The cases where the repeaters showed progress in the second year was negligible. Further at least 50 per cent of the repeaters dropped out on their own or withdrawn by the parents.  So detention will lead only to drop-outs.

Detention has also its own cost to the exchequer. If a student takes 10 years to complete 8 years of education, the state has to bear the burden of educating him or her for two more years. The curriculum is based on the assumption that every student will be having a minimum of 1000 hours of learning every year. In five years, he or she is entitled to not less than 5000 hours in primary schools.

A teacher can at most give 1,000 hours of teaching per year assuming that he or she doesn't absent herself even for a single day. As Government Primary schools have just two or three teachers only, students cannot get 5,000 hours of instruction in a year. In earlier years, a non-graded curriculum was in force allowing the teachers to draw their own plans to achieve the curricular  needs by the end of five years. It will be good that terminal standards at the end of primary and middle school levels.

A deep study should be made of the socio-economic backgrounds of low achievers and steps should be taken that they do not come in the way of learning. Residential schools should be opened where they could be accommodated and provided compensatory education programme. As one who had designed and conducted short bridge courses for school dropouts and non-enrolled children, I can confidently say that there is no one who could be called as incapable of learning.

The scrapping of non-detention provision in the RTE Act is unwarranted as it will cause more harm to slow-learners.  It will also defeat the entire purpose of the Act for which a many persons had struggled for years to fruition.

(The writer is an eminent academician and expert in school education)