In a society overly impressed with degree qualifications, early childhood or pre-school education is a grey area, if not an area of darkness. Certainly, there is a severe paucity of reliable information and data related to Indian pre-school education. However with the rapid expansion of India’s influential middle class over the past two decades following the historic liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy in 1991, and double income households becoming normative in the new middle class, access to professionally-administered early childhood care and education has become a high-priority issue within India’s 250-300 million-strong middle class, if not beyond.
That’s the socio-economic explanation behind the sudden explosion in the number of early childhood education (ECE) institutions aka pre-schools countrywide, since the beginning of the new millennium. Another explanation is that ECE is the only sector of Indian education in which private initiatives have been spared the unwelcome attention of government and its over-zealous and venal educracy, which instead of focusing its attention on raising teaching-learning standards in the country’s 1.3 million government anganwadis (crèches) and 1.25 million primaries, is overly concerned about regulating and preventing “commercialisation of Indian education”. This curious paradox has created formidable entry barriers — and demand-supply imbalances — against private initiatives in K-12 and higher education.
Nevertheless the consensus of opinion at the Early Childhood Education Global Conference 2010, convened in Mumbai by EducationWorld on July 17, was that the pre-school years are critically important for children’s health, happiness, ability to learn in K-12 and higher education, and achievement of economic well-being in adulthood. With latest neuroscience research studies indicating that 70 percent of children’s brain development occurs between the ages of 0-3, the critical importance of ECE in enabling and supportive pre-school environments was highlighted and magnified. This was a major revelation to pre-school promoters, principals and teachers (and your editor) who packed the conference venue, and for whom ECE is synonymous with institutional baby-sitting and unstructured play.
In this context, the frightening truth is that ECE/pre-schooling is dangerously neglected in contemporary India. For one, 46 percent of the 110 million children in the age group 0-5 are severely malnourished and likely to suffer brain damage. Although the Central government has established 1.3 million anganwadis across the country to provide supplementary nutrition and ECE to infants from poor households under its Integrated Child Development Scheme, the massive number of malnourished children countrywide is testimony to the failure of the programme.
The outstanding quality papers presented at the ECE Global Conference 2010 and reproduced in our cover story this month, not only highlight the critical importance of happy, fulfilled pre-school years, but also ways and means to enrich the early formative years of the country’s helpless children aged 0-5 whose continuous neglect has grim implications for the transformation of India into a developed nation in the forseeable future.
