School system should not be instrument of coercion

It is ironical that a state which has not succeeded in providing minimal schools and teachers to all children in the country for 70 years is considering labelling 10-year old children as ‘failures’ for not being able to read and write. Grade retention (‘failing’) is not a pedagogic tool for improving children’s learning but a systemic tool to fix responsibility for poor learning outcomes on the children rather than the schooling system. The discourse may sound significantly different if we were to say, “fail the students whom our schools did not teach how to read and write”.

A large number of states had abolished grade detention until class V or VIII long before it was mandated by the RTE Act in 2009. The call for restoring detention comes in the wake of studies by ASER (2013) and NCERT (2015) which show a decline in learning levels over the last few years. It is a matter of further concern that the learning levels of marginalised social groups like Dalits and adivasis is significantly lower than that of the other groups. This warrants a serious look at the strategies adopted during the last few years and initiate corrective measures.

Nevertheless, we need to be wary of judging the performance of our school system only by the yardstick of ‘learning levels’. During these very years, we have been able to bring to school almost all children (above 93%) of school going age irrespective of gender, class, caste, ethnicity and religion. And this was achieved without any significant increase in the expenditure as a share of our GDP.

The very fact that the most marginalised sections of the society are finally coming to our schools is worthy of celebration. For the first time, our middle class schools have been plebianised. If in the process, scholastic achievement of the school system were to show a decline, it does not warrant knee-jerk reactions. The entry of these excluded children into the schools has to be attended by a very special investment in teachers, resources and innovative pedagogies.

Even more important, this warrants a restructuring of our curriculum which has since time immemorial been geared to the needs of the middle classes. Instead, our decision makers seem to be in a hurry to restore the ante-diluvian measure of testing, ‘failing’ and pushing out students.

CABE panel report
Responding to widespread clamour, the Central Advisory Board on Education (CABE) set up a sub-committee in 2012. It chose to set aside the view of experts from NCERT, MHRD and independent academics and the majority of states and instead recommended a regime of examinations in all grades and detention after class V. The sub-committee cited questionable researches based on high schools of USA in support of its claims that assessment driven learning and ‘high stake exam’ would ensure greater teacher accountability and student motivation.

In contrast, the Unesco report (Opportunities lost: The impact of grade repetition and early school leaving, 2012) points to the need for nuanced strategies to support the learning needs of specific groups of children rather than simplistic systemic solutions like grade retention which only damage the self esteem and confidence of the learners.

Children from most deprived communities have just begun to come to the schools. The NCERT achievement survey (2015) clearly indicates that it is children from SC, ST and OBC background who form the bulk of students ‘under achieving’ who would get pushed out if detained. In the present system, children can be detained from class 9 onwards.

This dramatically increases drop out rates for children from SC and ST backgrounds. The NSSO 2011-12 household data shows that of the SC and ST children in the age group over 14 years, more than 25% drop out without completing their schooling. The figure for elementary level, where there is no-detention, the drop out rate is under 3.5%. This alone should alert us to the dangers of restoring detention at the elementary level.

Norms violation
The schools that such deprived children go to are also the worst provided - even the minimal norms of the RTE have been blatantly violated by the governments. It therefore characteristically takes them much longer to master the basic tools of scholastic learning, especially literacy and place value based mathematics.

What privileged middle class children learn with parental support in three years these children may take up to five to eight years. They need that time to overcome the disadvantage they have historically been subjected to. Failing them before this is tantamount to depriving them of the chance to move out of the cycle of deprivation.

In truth, the problem is not one of marginalised children out there. It is about how we treat all our children. Schooling tends to repress the natural urges of children and natural processes of learning, denying them any agency in their own growth and development. This involves a tremendous use of coercion and violence and our elaborate systems of ‘examination’ and threat of labelling ‘failures’ are the principle instruments through which this is exercised.

Outright physical violence by teachers is just an extension of this. In fact, most teachers of the country find themselves disarmed when they are told that they can’t fail or beat children. Now they have to engage with the children and teach them. But we have not equipped our teachers or schools for this basic educational task. The RTE challenges us to re-vision education without the two instruments of coercion.

This requires us to re-imagine curriculum taking into account the diversity among children, reorient and give agency to teachers to decide what is best for their students, and above all provide enough number of teachers and equip the schools not as prison houses but as centres of learning. It is for us to decide whether we want to rearm our school system with the instruments of coercion or turn them around as spaces for democratic learning.

(The writer is with Eklavya in the area of social science curriculum and teacher education)