The Times of India Editorial

Comment: This is a sad article, but well worth reading. A lot of what is said here about a country like India can be said about our own country. We have yet to understand what the consequence is of keeping children from learning till the cut of line. We still don’t understand the necessity of feeding children properly.

Go to any school you consider good, enter Class II, and write these words on the blackboard in neat letters: ‘When you read this, stand up’. Children will read the words aloud, but nobody will stand up. Why? Because, by the end of Grade I, reading has already been dissociated from meaning. The methods employed to teach how to read and the material given to read ensure that reading is mastered as a mechanical activity. For it to be a meaningful activity, an agenda of drastic reforms in early childhood education is required.

Early childhood is a stage of education we do not fully recognise. Even the amendment made to the Constitution, making elementary education a fundamental right, leaves out the first five years of life. That is when the secret powers of childhood are at their most intense. From health care and emotional security to the cultivation of language and other natural endowments, needs of pre-school children are self-evident, but they are yet to be accepted as national priorities.

Fulfilling the demands of early childhood is crucial for later development. We bumble along, with shoestring provision for a handful of programmes in the state sector, while the private sector is happy catering to middle class parents’ demand for the earliest possible attainment of literacy and compliant behaviour. Pushed when they have no power to resist, our children suffer cognitive and emotional damage at the hands of poorly paid and trained teachers. Those who come straight to Class I are somewhat luckier, but not for long because their encounter with learning in the primary school years is equally lopsided.

Any listing of the common problems that pre-school education faces must start with the lack of adequate institutional provisions. The current scramble for seats in Delhi has more to do with the paucity of nurseries than with the correctness of admission formula. Why doesn’t Delhi spend more public funds on children, schools, libraries? No one knows. Private provision can never match the demand, but even in terms of quality, most private nurseries offer nothing different from those run by the government. Exceptions apart, both lack the imagination to engage the young child with experiences derived from resources like water, sand, clay, sounds, colours and shapes.

Classically known to enrich development, the most significant activities require purely natural resources, such as a patch of land to grow plants and to keep pets. Others call for equipment, such as toys, cardboard and paper, old tyres and building blocks. Most Delhi nurseries are poor in both kinds of resources.

They have no open space to let children grow plants or comfortably move about from one activity to another. The kind of apparatus Montessori had developed is rarely seen, though many nurseries flaunt her name. The quality of play equipment is poor too, partly because India’s toy industry is rudimentary and because governments have been indifferent to the advice available from the National Institute of Design.

It is a strange fact that India, which now produces ballistic missiles, does not manufacture a high quality ball for little children to play with. The same is sadly true of the equipment and training available in training institutes.
Teachers’ training as a whole is in crisis, but training for pre-school is simply not recognised as a professional activity comparable with paediatrics.

The level of funding needed to push early childhood out of an area of darkness is far too vast for private investors to contemplate. In teacher training alone, if we were to plan for leadership and coverage within the foreseeable future, we need at least five IIM-type national institutes of early childhood, serving each region with training and equipment.

Unfortunately, district institutes of education and training are generally not in a happy state though the
increased allocation announced recently for teacher education can make a difference if funds are utilised in the context of a wider reform strategy. National Curriculum Framework (NCF 2005) and its accompanying paper on early childhood by the National Focus Group chaired by Mina Swaminathan provides the outline of such a strategy, but the details need to be worked out.

Making pre-school education a part of primary schooling requires a deep curricular reform. Shanta Sinha had suggested during NCF discussions that we should recognise the needs of four- to eight-year-olds in an integrated manner. This is the period when each child develops along an individual trajectory of growth. By insisting on normative patterns, our nurseries and schools discourage individuality and the potential for creative growth. By subjecting children to learn reading within a fixed schedule and with the help of a single standard text, our system promotes mechanical decoding in the name of reading.

Reading for pleasure is replaced by pronouncing every sound correctly to avoid the teacher’s wrath. The child’s natural search for meaning is muzzled. The long road to survival by rote memorising starts. Early childhood has suffered for another reason. It carries the full burden of economic and cultural discrimination that women face.

Neither the family nor the state is willing to recognise what it means for a woman to care for a little child. Whether it is the challenge of poverty in the face of food scarcity and inflation, or the problem of looking after the small child’s health and daily needs while working for a living, women seldom find adequate support within the family or outside to play these multiple roles. Malnourishment among mothers is as common as among children.

The writer is director, NCERT.