The education wars….Pratap Bhanu Mehta
We haven’t even begun to address the key questions on schooling
We haven’t even begun to address the key questions on schooling
In country after country, the consensus over the importance of education is matched by angst over how to reform it. These debates have two dimensions. There is the increasingly murky relationship between education and employment. Unemployment is being attributed not merely to a business cycle downturn, but a mismatch between education and employment. In advanced countries, college graduates are less likely to be unemployed than their less educated counterparts. The technology revolution and globalisation produced a pitiless combination. On the one hand, you must have higher skills to have a shot at a job. On the other hand, there is global competition for those jobs. The answer to both these challenges, so the story goes, is education reform: education that allows you to participate in the economy, and education that allows you to compete. Both propositions seem intuitively obvious. But whether education will continue to be enough to give access to jobs, if the competition becomes genuinely global, is an open question. Education will be central to the arsenal of competition between nations. War metaphors are not alien to education. After all, the famous American Report, A Nation at Risk, had as far back as 1983 warned that the nation has been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.
In countries like India, there is another version of the education-economy mismatch. There is a disjuncture between the demands of the economy and what education produces. Part of this may be simply a matching problem: there is a supply out there, but individuals cannot be matched with the right kind of jobs. Part of it is a genuine shortage, exacerbated by the fact that schooling is not the same thing as education, just as having a degree is not the same thing has having actual skills. Low (albeit growing) rates of educated female participation in the labour force means some of Indias significant human capital is simply not coming on the job market. India is also going to increase its retention rate in secondary schools and higher education. In the short run, this helps mitigate the employment challenge: it may be that the upward pressure on wages is due in part to the fact that the supply of labour is shrinking because more people are staying longer in school. States with higher education achievement like Kerala tend to have higher unemployment. So while education is intrinsically important, the relationship between education and employment in the long run is no less uncertain. The framework for calibrating education to the job market remains a leap of faith.
But if the top end of education is marred by uncertainty, so is the lower base. With the Right to Education Bill, the milestone of near total enrolment and access to adequate infrastructure will have been achieved. The demand for schooling has exploded. But the key issues in school reform quality and accountability are still open questions. It is, in retrospect, amazing that so much ideological energy has been expended on the issues of public versus private schooling. Part of this was understandable: there was a deep consternation at the failures of the public system; and now there are questions about the RTEs possible effect on low-cost private schools that have been as much part of the education revolution as any. The comparative evidence on what systems work is mixed at best: there are successful and unsuccessful models of all systems, public, private or public-private partnerships. But the focus of debate largely remains the somewhat unresolvable and abstract issue of systems.
The real tricky questions come in the realm of teaching, testing and curriculum, no matter what the system. But these three issues are harder to resolve because they involve difficult choices. They are also not the sort of issues that lend themselves to neat legislative or bureaucratic solutions. There is a consensus in most studies that exposure to good teachers is the surest guarantee of improved learning achievement; equally there is a consensus that good teachers are not easy to identify before the fact. The quality variance of teachers, even in Indias so-called top schools, gives one a reason to pause. Some have proposed that teachers be appointed only after long internships and evaluations. But there is no framework in which to think of our recruitment practices.
At one level, testing is a no brainer: an essential ingredient of accountability is being able to measure. Organisations like Pratham revolutionised our discourse on education by simply measuring what children know. It is a mark of some progress that there is now at least beginning to be a debate over what we should measure: at higher levels, what is the trade-off between aptitude based testing, and content-driven exams? At the lower level, there is a need to at least track basic achievement in mathematics and literacy. But while some measure of testing is essential for any accountability, preventing an education system from being distorted by the superficial certainties of testing is a different challenge. An equally deeper challenge will be responding to results of such tests. At one level, these can be a tool for teachers to identify where to begin their teaching: teaching must talk to a child, not talk at them. On the other hand, what we do know from comparative evidence is this: given flexibility and a culture that makes students the centre of education, not abstract objectives, teachers can improve outcomes. Yet, it takes enormous resources and the best teachers to compensate for the complex background inequalities that result in unequal educational performance. Testing allows for a perverse kind of sorting: where society stops investing in weaker children. These are not insurmountable challenges. But they will get exacerbated in times to come.
Our curriculum debates have oscillated between ossified, bureaucratic imaginations, taking perverse pride in an endless amount of material formally covered, and the romantic fantasy of an oxymoron called free, unstructured education. This is now being replaced by equally false dichotomies between skill-based and general education, and near total neglect of the basics like writing, logical reasoning and mathematical skills. That we need the educational arsenal is clear. But post-RTE, the oldest questions need to take centrestage. What should we be teaching? How should we be teaching? Why should we be teaching? And how do we know that we have in fact managed to teach? Or else, to use the other war metaphor, will our education be arming without aiming?
The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi, express@expressindia.com
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/the-education-wars/873575/0