TEACHING AND LEARNING

Can India afford to guarantee quality education for all children? What should be the benchmark for an assured minimum quality? Is learning outcome more important than infrastructure? The extraordinary thing about such questions 68 years after Independence is that they are still being raised. We, as a nation, are fiercely debating what should have been non-negotiable half a century ago.

And if the emerging trends are any indication, we will perhaps go on debating them for another fifty years. Says a UNICEF report, “In India, the richest young women have already achieved universal literacy but based on current trends, the poorest are projected to only do so around 2080” which is 64 years away! Obviously, it is time for action.

Titled ‘Teaching and learning: Achieving quality for all,’ the 11th UNESCO Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2013-14 notes that children who learn less are more likely to leave school early. It has found that our children who achieved lower scores in mathematics at age 12 were more than twice as likely to drop out by age 15 than those who performed better. This means that providing good quality education is not just the right way but the only way to achieve universal education.

We are perhaps the only country on the planet with millions of children out of school despite a constitutional Right to Education. The constitution now provides that every child of the age of six to fourteen years shall have a right to free and compulsory education in a neighbourhood school till the completion of elementary education. True, the enrolment has crossed 96% mark in 2014 but the achievement is tarnished by an alarming dropout rate, as high as 45% in some states. According to ASER 2014, in rural India, 15.9% of boys and 17.3% of girls in the age group of 15-16 years are out of school.

A good way of assessing a nation’s progress is by examining the child’s environment, which also has a direct bearing on education. For instance how well will a child be able to comprehend lessons of science and mathematics is directly linked to her or his nutritional levels. The cognitive abilities also depend on whether the mother was fed nutritional food during pregnancy or not. The education levels are also determined by things like immunization, health and sanitation, safe drinking water, livelihoods and well-being of parents.

Much as one would like to see the glass half full rather than half empty, one cannot close one’s eyes to the pessimistic picture in front. According to National Family Health Survey (NFHS) two third of babies born in India are anaemic and about half the children under five years of age are stunted, which means that for no fault of theirs they enter the world with an inborn handicap. As high as 20 per cent of all children are severely stunted or wasted because of high malnutrition. This is not all, millions of Indian children are abused, trafficked and forced to work as child labour. Does this have a connection with enrolments, dropout rates, learning outcomes or motivation to do better? Can things be improved radically from here?

This issue of Common Cause journal seeks to address some of these questions. Curated by Anumeha, the issue covers some critical concerns, policy perspectives, aberrations and success stories about right to education. It is meant for anyone who has interest in making a difference through policy advocacy, voluntary work or direct intervention. The writing is largely simple and jargon-free and the emphasis is on positive social change.
Please write in to us or share your thoughts via commoncause.in, our website. Your ideas will help us serve you better, as also to improve our advocacy efforts on every child’s right to (quality) education.

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Vipul Mudgal

Volume: Vol. XXXIV No. 4
October-December, 2015