IF INDIA’S DESTINY IS BEING shaped in its classrooms as the Kothari Commission (1966) stated in its oft-quoted opening paragraph, every educator and right-thinking citizen should be asking tough questions about policy planning and quality of teaching that has led to a miasma in Indian education five decades later.
Alarm bells have been ringing for a long time in Indian education, of which the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2013 published by Pratham — the highly respected Mumbai-based education NGO — is the latest wake-up call. According to ASER 2013, in rural India only 47 percent of class V children can read and understand class II textbooks, and a mere 26 percent can solve simple three-digit long division sums. Earlier in 2009 when 16,000 15-year-old students from India wrote OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) maths and science exam for the first (and last) time, they were collectively ranked a dismal 73rd of 74 participating countries. India’s education system as a whole — and K-12 education in particular — is inexorably sliding towards an abyss.
Over four decades of teaching and education consultancy experience in India (Bishop Cotton and Baldwin schools in Bangalore and Mysore University) and Australia, including deep research into trends in teacher performance in India and the UK, have convinced me that the major cause of poor learning outcomes in school education is the continuous failure of government and Indian society to develop globally benchmarked teacher training institutions. Teachers require training for classroom and curriculum management, professional development and performance assessment. Unfortunately, there isn’t a nationally accepted curriculum or guideline for teacher training and development.
Currently, teacher education programmes in India require college graduates to complete a two-year B.Ed programme before qualifying to teach in K-12 institutions. This compares unfavourably with the four-year B.Ed programmes mandated in the UK and Australia. Worse, with India’s 1.30 million schools experiencing massive teacher shortages, state governments have resorted to hiring ‘para-teachers’ who are class XII and often class X school-leavers.
Against this backdrop, the national interest demands that the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) prescribes more rigorous standards for India’s 7,461 NCTE-approved teacher training colleges and institutes. Even if given the urgent need for qualified teachers the duration of the two-year B.Ed degree programme cannot be extended, it needs to be made more rigorous and contemporary with in-class practical training prior to graduation made mandatory. The existing gap between theory and practice can — and must — be bridged by having trainees work for several months in schools where they apply contemporary theory in classroom settings. In Australia, B.Ed students acquire valuable experience working alongside duly qualified teachers in K-12 classrooms.
Poor teacher morale and motivation is a complex issue in India. Available research indicates that a cocktail of factors, including onerous workload (because of high teacher-pupil ratios and multigrade teaching), social distance between teachers and children, lack of skills to deal with classroom diversity and coping with official corruption, are some of them. According to a research study conducted by Prof. Moss Kanter of the Harvard Business School, opportunities to develop deep skills, working with innovative individuals and job satisfaction are prime motivators of professionals across all industries and vocations. Remuneration is low on Kanter’s list of motivators, although she concedes that merit-based pay is an incentive.
It’s not as though school managements and teachers have to await grudging manna in the form of improved teacher training syllabuses and curriculums to drop from NCTE and/or government teacher training programmes. Well-developed teacher training programmes of the British Council and Schools and Teachers Innovating for Results (STIR), an NGO offering micro-innovations to measure teacher performance, are available online. In 2012, UK’s Open University introduced a teacher training programme in Uttar Pradesh based on a pilot project it successfully implemented in Bangladesh. It makes audio-visuals with low-cost material available to teachers through a combination of mobile telephony, face-to-face training and support.
With start-of-the-year enrolment percentages in primary education averaging 95 percent countrywide — proof of universal awareness of the importance and value of education — the high-flown rhetoric relating to India’s destiny being shaped in its classrooms needs to be substituted with a determined nationwide push to improve learning outcomes. The paradox of rising enrolments in primary, secondary and higher education reported by the Central and state governments and declining learning outcomes shown by ASER 2013 and PISA scores needs to be resolved through a concerted national effort to upgrade and modernise teacher education standards. Alarm bells have been ringing for quite a while. It’s time the Central and state governments, NCTE, and India’s 300 million-strong middle class which has the most to lose, started paying attention to them.
(Lionel Cranenburgh is CEO of Shannon Quest, a Western Australia-based careers consultancy and education company)