Need to recognise changing social milieu of learners

Cumulative enrolment, including upper primary level, tripled in past five years — recording a high of 192 million enrolments in 2009. As a consequence, number of out-of-school children declined by a factor of three to 8.1 million during the same period. This is only half of an evolving story!

The other half of the story is equally impressive. A significant portion of increase in enrolment has been from the historically marginalised and excluded sections of the society, reports a Unicef study based on disaggregated data from NSSO. The study further observed that large number of children between the age 6-14 years, who can read and write, either belonged to scheduled caste families (58 per cent) or represented other backward castes (72 per cent).

But the flip side of the otherwise impressive story is that the drop-out rates too, despite some improvement, remain very high among children from marginalised and excluded communities. Grossly unrelated to the quality of incentives, including mid-day meals, drop out among children from diverse backgrounds has much to do with the quality of teaching-learning being offered at the elementary level.

If one goes by the contents of the school textbooks, country’s multicultural future is indeed bleak. “The contents of textbooks reflect and reinforce most of the negative values, which are contested in contemporary India resulting in the exclusion or at best only ambiguous inclusion of substantial proportion of children in the school system,” argues Prof T K Oomen, emeritus professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

The Education Commission’s (1964-66) observation that ‘the future of India is shaped in her classrooms’ remains ephemeral as the mainstream policy debates centres around provisions of basic infrastructural facilities in schools. They are undoubtedly important, but there is a need to focus attention on the nature and quality of teaching-learning practices and processes.

Offering a prescriptive diagnosis, recently released report on ‘Inclusive classroom, social inclusion/exclusion and diversity: perspectives, policies and practices’ addresses many of such compelling concerns. With support from Unicef, the participatory action research conducted by Deshkal Society has brought to light various myths and stereotype beliefs about children that are widely prevalent among teachers and school administrators.

One such belief is that children are children after all... they are the same. This belief ignores the fact that children come to school not only with their own individual identities and experiences, but also with a consciousness and identity formed while growing up as members of collectives. Another belief that leads to stereotyping is that children’s ability to learn is determined by heredity rather than by what happens in the classroom.

Such beliefs spring from cultural monism perpetuated as ‘one nation, one culture, one people,’ that has been internalised by most of the textbook writers in the country. As a consequence, the need to nurture cultural pluralism as an instrument fostering core values such as equality, liberty, fraternity, dignity, identity and harmony between humanity and nature without endangering cultural diversity and compromising on cultural pluralism takes a backseat.

Caste structure

Multiple identities of a child get adversely amplified as an alien medium of instruction alienates the child from the socio-cultural milieu of the classroom; the caste structure impinges significantly on child’s self-esteem and the economic stratification makes the child suffer most on account of subjugation in the classroom. In light of such a situation, the report emphasises the need to first recognise the changing social composition of learners in the classroom.

Innovative experiments in developing inclusive classrooms have been piloted; however, most continue to remain exceptions that have not been able to tilt the predominant picture on primary education in the country. Loreto Day School in Sealdah, Deshkal School Reform Process in Gaya and Activity Based Learning Programme in Chennai are some of the pioneering initiative wherein plurality and marginality have been simultaneously addressed.

Loreto is a privately managed school that believes passionately in inclusive education. Of its 1,400 regular students, only 700 pay fees to provide economic stability to the school. The remaining 700 students come from impoverished slums and are admitted through a lottery system at the age of four. Interestingly, these children wear the same uniform, and play, work, study, eat and compete as equals with their counterparts from higher social strata.

Such successful initiatives emphasise the need to carefully analyse not only the neglected dimensions, such as curriculum and medium of instruction, but also over-analysed dimensions such as caste and economic status in order to understand the nature and causes of social exclusion in the classroom. The report stresses the need for a greater focus on diversity issues in teacher training and teacher education programmes.

The dialectical intertwining between the general societal ethos and the type of the textbooks produced and prescribed should be squarely recognised as an important first step. The report emphasises that a genuinely decentralised planning at the district level, with school-based action plans at its core could not only make the agenda of inclusive classrooms feasible but also ‘total literacy’ an achievable target where each child will get treated at par.