Table of Contents
Volume 76 Issue 3, September 2020
Friday, November 06, 2020
Education, the nation and the States
The National Education Policy 2020 underestimates the problem of reconciling the three systems of education in India
Towards the end of a recent webinar on the National Education Policy 2020, a retired civil servant asked a question. Referring to Centre-State relations and roles in education, he asked whether the new policy gives the Centre a predatory role. The use of the word ‘predatory’ felt a bit sharp in the context of education, but the intention obviously was to ascertain whether the new policy observes federal courtesy. Even the 1986 policy didn’t fully acknowledge the variety prevailing in provincial practices and the legacies those practices are rooted in. The trend has been to assume that a national system will evolve and iron out provincial variations. That is a strange assumption. For education to fulfil its social role, it must respond to the specific milieu in which the young are growing up. India has sufficient experience of attempts made from the national level to influence systemic realities on the ground. There is a considerable history of strong recommendations made by national commissions and of provincial recalcitrance. States have their own social worlds to deal with, and they often prefer to carry on with the ways they became familiar with in colonial days. A prime example is the continuation of intermediate or junior colleges in several States more than half a century after the Kothari Commission gave its much acclaimed report.
Evolution in the provinces
Historically, the system of education evolved in the provinces. One hundred years ago, the Central Advisory Board of Education was created to co-ordinate regional responses to common issues. The ‘advisory’ character of this administrative mechanism meant that the Board served mainly as a discussion forum. The Constitution, in its original draft, treated the States as the appropriate sphere for dealing with education. But unlike some other federal countries, India chose to have a Ministry of Education at the Centre. Its role was not merely decorative or confined to coordination among differing State perspectives and practices; rather, the Centre was expected to articulate aims and standards, or to pave the road to nation-building and development. Soon after independence, a more substantial sphere of the Centre’s activities in education emerged in the shape of advanced institutions in professional fields and schools specifically meant for the children of civil servants transferable across India. Such institutions received higher investment than the States could afford. The same can be said for national-level resource institutions which guided policy and encouraged new practices.
Thus, concurrency was already a reality before the 1976 amendment formally included it in the Constitution. What it might mean after the Emergency was an open question. A decade later, when the national policy was drafted under a youthful leader, it emphasised national concerns and perspective without specifically referring to provincial practices that indicated strong divergence. Engagement with the States remained a function of the Planning Commission. In the meantime, a burgeoning private sector had begun to push both public policy and popular perceptions of education. The force of this push can be measured from the difference between the 1986 policy and its own action programme published six years later. Throughout the 1990s, those in charge of education remained hesitant to explain publicly how exactly liberalisation would apply to this traditionally public responsibility. The rapidly expanding and globalising urban middle class had already begun to secede from the public system, posing the awkward question of why education cannot be sold if there are willing buyers. Systemic chaos grew, leaving the policy behind.
Three systems
India now has three systems. To call them sectors would be an understatement. There is a Central system, running an exam board that has an all-India reach through affiliation with English-medium private schools catering to regional elites. Two school chains run by the Centre are part of this system. The Central system also includes advanced professional institutes and universities that have access to greater per capita funding than what their counterparts run by the States can afford. These latter ones belong to the second system which also features provincial secondary boards affiliating schools teaching in State languages. The third system is based on purely private investment. Internationally accredited school boards and globally connected private universities are part of this third system. These institutions represent a new level of freedom from state norms.
An explicit attempt was made under the Right to Education (RTE) Act to bridge the first two systems. The RTE is a parliamentary law, providing a set of standards for elementary education and a call to private schools to provide for social justice via the quota route. In higher education, such an attempt to balance private autonomy with an obligation to provide social justice is yet to be made in any palpable sense. Accreditation norms and recognition procedures create a semblance of public accountability. Coordination among the three systems has proved unmanageable, even in purely functional terms. The least we might expect would be a reliable mechanism to reconcile the marking standards of different Boards and universities. Far harder is the coordination required in adherence to social responsibilities in a period of rapid economic change. Inequalities have become sharper with the rise in overall prosperity. Education must mediate between different social strata divided by caste and economic status. The recent attempt made by Tamil Nadu to create a modest quota in NEET for students who attended government schools points towards an endemic problem exacerbated by centralisation.
Social vision
The new policy document underestimates the problem of reconciling the three systems. The architect of many of our national-level institutions, the late J.P. Naik, used to say that we must ask what kind of human being and society we want before we draft a policy in education. Apart from that philosophical question, we also need a systemic vision: both for recovery from institutional decay and for future progress. Functional uniformity is unlikely to offer any real solution. That is what the new policy seems to favour. In higher education, it proposes nationally codified and administered measures to oversee institutional transformation across State capitals and district towns. The assumption is that old structures will melt like wax under the heat of an empowered vision. The idea of a monolithic regulatory architecture to control a system that is privatising at a rapid pace suggests a tempting impulse rather than a considered plan. Sufficient indication has existed for many years now that economic policy favours greater private enterprise in higher education. How to reconcile this push with the necessity of equitable public education is a nagging question. Similar is the question of autonomy; it cannot be interpreted in financial terms alone. The many different ways in which the States have maintained their colleges and universities cannot all be regarded as signs of a dysfunctional or failing system. If failure is the criterion for choice of remedy, gradations of failure will have to be determined first and their causes studied before remedial steps are contemplated. To accept that one size does not fit all, and then to push every foot into a chosen shoe takes self-contradictory parlance to a new level.
At the school level too, the new policy proposes a post-RTE structural shift, ignoring the fact that the RTE itself has not yet been fully implemented. It is useful to recall that the RTE was drafted with prolonged involvement with the States, not mere consultation. The consensus for such a law was no less difficult to create than the formulation of its content. A vital role was played by the highest judiciary in pushing the polity towards recognising children’s right to be at school rather than at work. This was a historic social turn towards greater parity between sharply unequal strata. It might not have been accomplished if the Centre had not played an assertive role. Further progress of this role called for continued financial support for the implementation of RTE and policy guidance for the proper use of this support so that regional disparities diminish.
Krishna Kumar is a former Director of the National Council of Educational Research and Training and editor of the Routledge Handbook of Education in India
Source: The Hindu, 3/11/20
Keep a positive attitude, it will help boost your memory: Study
Science gives you another reason to have a happy outlook towards life; find out!
Even the most positive and optimistic of people have struggled with their outlook this year, because of the strange global situation brought about by the pandemic. But, even if you have had no reason to be in a celebratory mood this year, you need to consciously maintain a positive attitude towards life, because it can help you immensely with your mental well-being and your memory.
A recent study, carried out by Northwestern University in Illinois, has revealed that people who are positive and generally enthusiastic about life, are less likely to experience memory loss when they become old. Weakening of memory is a natural thing to happen to a person as they age, but their mental outlook can slow down this process.
Published in the journal Psychological Science, the research was done with 1,000 adults in the US, and was carried out over a period of time, as the participants got older.
For the study, between 1995 and 1996, 2004 and 2006, and 2013 and 2014, the participants were asked to describe the emotions they felt over 30 days leading up to the study, before being asked to take a memory test. The test had them recall words directly after hearing them, and again 15 minutes later.
The participants’ age, gender, education and history of depression was taken into consideration, and the researchers were able to find a link between “positive affect” — how a person experiences positive emotions — and memory loss.
In other words, while all participants for the study showed a natural decline in memory with age, those with “higher rates of positive affect, had a better ability to recall information”.
“Individuals with higher levels of positive affect had a less steep memory decline over the course of almost a decade,” Emily Hittner, lead author of the study, was quoted as saying.
Source: Indian Express, 5/11/20
In Assam, young women are learning to defend themselves —a punch and a kick at a time
Puja Das, a 21-year-old from the middle Assam town of Patacharkuchi, was pandal-hopping last year when a strange man shoved her in the crowd. The college student remembers feeling angry and humiliated, and yet was not able to “do or say anything”. “I wish I had but I just did not have the confidence,” she said.
Last month, Puja took matters into her own hands, when she and five friends traipsed down to an empty field in their town for a self-defence class at the crack of dawn.
Just a few days before, she had come by a Facebook post by a group called “Prahar”, offering free self-defence lessons — promising a mix of Karate, Taekwondo, and a healthy dose of self-confidence.
“For a class to happen, the organiser had told me that we had to collect at least eight-ten girls and find a suitable open-air venue,” she said, “I convinced five of my friends, and they agreed.”
A month on, the group has grown, as has Puja’s confidence — which she thinks will come in handy particularly next year, when she plans to move 100 km away to Guwahati for her Master’s. “It’s a big city — I will travel alone, possibly live alone too. I will need to have my guard up all the time.”
And that is what Prahar is aiming at. Moon Das, the 23-year-old BSc student and black belt holder in Taekwondo, whose brainchild it is, said that he was looking for ways and means to promote the concept of self-defence among women in Assam. “Initially I thought I could collect videos from martial art practitioners across the state and upload videos on a Facebook page,” he said, “But when the Hathras case happened, it gave us a push. That is when my friend, Rakesh, who holds a black belt in Karate, and I decided to hold free lessons.” The duo was later joined by another friend, Bibhu.
There is no business model, said the organisers. “We aren’t thinking of it like that — consider this social service. We are on-call self defence teachers, willing to travel to any part of the state — as long as those who are calling us can arrange an empty field and a group of willing students,” said Moon. The idea is to train them, and for them to train others, and so on.
In Puja’s town, after one week of lessons, the girls continued to practise by themselves. “On day one, we had just six girls,” said Pratyashi Nath, who had joined with Puja initially. “Now we have 15 — and a group oPuja said that her friends were sceptical initially. “So were my parents. But now they have realised that this is actually something good and a skill that may come in handy.”
On the first day, the class began with warm-up exercises, followed by running and then basic Karate and Taekwondo moves. “We recreate possible scenarios from real life — be it purse snatching, or unwanted — and have designed specific action sets as to how the girl can react/defend herself, whether she is on the road or at home or on the bus,” explained Moon.
So far, camps have been organised in a network of lower Assam towns — Pathshala, Tihu, Bajali, Barpeta, Nalbari and Sarthebari — following Covid-19 protocol. “We don’t take big groups, so that there is enough social distance during the lesson,” said Moon, “While the masks have to come off during exercise, they are on at all other times.”
Once a request comes, the organisers form a WhatsApp group to work out the logistics. “While initially people are a bit unsure, they do finally take to the idea,” said Moon.“Even if Assam is considered traditionally safer for women, there are a lot of incidents that go unreported.”
According to the annual National Crime Record Bureau’s “Crime in India” 2019 report released in September, Assam reported the highest rate of crimes against women (177.8 per lakh population).
“A lot of small things happen indoors, and no one knows about it,” said Puja, adding that the latest figures were rather worrying. 21-year-old Nath, who has been studying in Guwahati for the past year, said: “I am only attending the lessons because I have realised that I need to be prepared to protect myself. If I don’t, who will?”f curious onlookers, wondering what on earth we are upto so early in the morning.”
Source: Indian Express, 4/11/20
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Higher institutions and schools across the country are closed since March 16, on the orders of the union government, to break the chains of COVID19 transmission. Last month, the Ministry of Home Affairs allowed state governments to decide on phased reopening after October 15. The Punjab government, for instance, has announced the reopening of universities and colleges after Diwali, from November 16.The University Grants Commission (UGC) on Thursday released guidelines advising higher education institutions, outside containment zones, to reopen in phases, starting first with research, masters and final-year undergraduate students. However, the number of students attending classes on campus, at a given time, should not be more than half the total student strength, the guidelines state.Aside from standard precautions of regular disinfection of premises and screening of teachers and students on campus, the higher education regulator has also suggested institutions extend teaching hours and follow a six-day schedule to accommodate students in batches and ensure social distancing. Wearing a mask is mandatory for all teachers and staff on campus. Attendance for students will be voluntary. Universities have been asked to continue online classes for students who wish to study remotely.Residential campuses will be allowed to operate hostels “where it is necessary”, but sharing of rooms has been forbidden. “Symptomatic students should not be permitted to stay in the hostels under any circumstances,” the guidelines state.
“Isolation facilities for symptomatic persons and quarantine facilities for those who were in contact with the positively tested persons should be there on campus or a tie-up may be made in advance with some Government hospital or approved premises or as advised by the local authorities so that, in case of necessity, prompt action may be taken. Proper arrangement of safety, health, food, water etc. should be ensured for those in quarantine and isolation facilities,” the guidelines also state.
Source: Indian Express, 6/11/20