P is for Pre-schools and Policy

 

            Will this New Education Policy (NEP) of 2020 be able to solve the worst of the problems in the realm of Indian education—the absence of a robust Pre-school Education in the country? 

 

It is an exciting proposition in the NEP to group the first five years together, three of pre-school and two of classes 1 and 2, or ages 3 to 8. This gives recognition to the pre-school years, also called Early Childhood years, as a legitimate part of schooling.  

  

At present in India, those who can afford it struggle to find a private school for their 3, 4 or 5 years old. In larger cities and metropolises, there is a range to choose from but still the shortage of preschools is palpable. In Kolkata and Lucknow, I have observed the ritual called "entrance tests" for 3 and 4-year olds and "interviews" for their parents. In smaller cities and towns, there are no preschools that educated parents could consider appropriate for their cherubs. The one prestigious English medium "convent" or "public" school in a small or medium-size city would have a Nursery and Kindergarten attached to it, with perhaps six sections and 50 to 60 children in each. Thus it would open admissions to 300 or even 400 children at one time. The number of those trying for these places—those "filling out the form" as popular wording goes—might be fifty times as many if the school has a reputation. 

 

The demand for private preschools exceeds the supply resulting in overcrowded classrooms. This then justifies poor pedagogy, which is given the rosy hue of good pedagogy by pointing to the looming Board exams ten years later. In this version, the poor school is doing only what guardians want. Guardians are both right, and wrong, depending on who is interrogating the school. 

 

If life indeed runs on free market principles then demand creates its own supply, and there have in fact suddenly appeared as many expensive preschools as required by the middle classes. Since no affiliation or accreditation is required for preschool, any kind of claims can be made from the simplest and most basic (suggested by the names 'stars,' 'flowers,' 'gardens,' 'Euro,' and 'Aero') to the most exaggerated ('Harvard,' 'Oxford,' 'Hindu' and 'International.') Knowledge about early learning is sketchy among the practitioners in these private places. There is a consensus that the front should be formulaic: a formal symmetrical building, with a gate in bright colours, ringed by flowerpots and cartoon characters, and that the promise should be of gadgetry, air conditioning, and smart screens. 

 

The amazing thing is that alongside these private schools there are free Preschools run by the government called by the pleasant name of anganbadi,  "a courtyard home." A scheme funded by UNICEF and WHO and launched around fifty years ago, it is well entrenched and widespread, at least in North India. The anganbadis don't just have "education" for 3 to 5-year olds, they supply meals and keep a record of infants' growth and expecting mothers' health. In the fifty or so anganbadis I have visited from Himalayan towns and hamlets to those in remote villages of Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, I have consistently found the workers to know all about procedures and be trained in pedagogy with a respectable repertoire of the right kinds of activities for their young clientele.  

 

Yet, with one or two exceptions, in all these anganbadis, the children are not being given the stimulation and attention that they could in the time they spend in the anganbadi precincts. The teachers have packed away their materials in trunks in their classrooms and their teaching techniques to a shelf at the back of their minds. They are not embarrassed at being observed in an attitude of indifference and neglect of their children. They are apparently not aware that the explanations they give for not delivering what they are supposed to do not hold water. 

 

How are these different problems, the scarcity of good, elite preschools; the abundance of expensive, private preschools; and the low level of public, free preschools for lower classes and villagers, going to be resolved in the new policy? 

 

The New Education Policy does not acknowledge these differences in schools, including preschools. Presumably all difference in India may be ignored since India is prima facie the ultimately diverse nation. And since the market system is entrenched, and daily more so, commercially run pre-schools should of course proliferate. Coming to anganbadis, there is a conundrum. No policy can succeed if it does not state directly the problem that has been keeping our anganbadis and Primary Schools in the inferior condition they are, and then state directly the solution. The Pre-school part of the Policy contains this huge discrepancy. We know that the most crucial years of a child's life are the ages 3 to 8. We are not inventing anything when we say that early childhood education should be mostly play, activities and projects. We are saying what every developed country, and a fair number of developing countries, have known for decades. As I mentioned above, good private schools know it as well and the whole set of trained anganbadi workers. They know wonderful songs, activities and games. 

 

I cannot emphasise enough the need for acknowledgement of the problem. It is the first little step towards its resolution, to be followed by many more. We will fail before we even start if we simply state something as desirable and not mention that the problem has been not ignorance of its desirability but the lack of will or techniques to implement it. But, presuming we have now officially accepted what is important to do for preschool children, how do we get around to doing it? 

 

First, we have to train our teachers to behave with children as if each was an individual, to respect their personalities, their pace of learning, their levels. Teachers will continue to act according to their own personal and social ideologies of the child. It would be a waste of time to make this into a subject of surprised discussion. Instead, we need to have strict taskmasters who make zero tolerance policies for physical and verbal abuse, for ignoring students and wasting time, for indifference to planning and teaching techniques.   

      Anganbadi teachers understand progressive teaching in principle. However, it remains only an abstract idea that they can present when asked. In order to make them live out the idea, anganbadi teachers have to be converted more deeply so that they have, as the cliché goes, ownership of the idea. More about ownership under O. 

 

What is needed is a paradigmatic shift towards a recognition that it is not clever to be knowledgeable about the problem and hide it. It is clever to state it and then mention the solution which is also partly common knowledge but kept hidden. 

 

What I would love to see tabled for discussion is a set of points related to the politics  of education in India that has resulted in this double problem: a set of elite preschools that have half-developed but comparatively good practices; and a set of preschools for the poor whose smart, skilled teachers habitually leave their children in neglect.  

 

Then we would see that there is a pseudo-racism in India that relegates certain people to an essential inferiority. Anganbadis are bad because village children are deemed to deserve no better. Expensive preschools are "good" because middle and upper class children are valued clients and must be satisfied. Apart from nurturing ownership of the idea of the equality of children, the problem could also partly be solved with a strict management policy that has zero tolerance for this hierarchical mindset. 

 

How I wish that one of my favourite critics of injustice, oppression and class difference in Indian society, Premchand, the beloved kalam ke sopahi (the warrior with the pen) could be present to deconstruct in his scathing, eloquent way the poverty of the NEP's approach to the needs of 3 to 8 year olds. 

Nita Kumar

Hon. Director, NIRMAN

N 1/70 Nagwa, Varanasi, India

Brown Family Professor Emerita of S Asian History

Claremont McKenna College, CA 91711

Read my blog! https://nitakumar.wordpress.com/