A growing number of private sector edupreneurs have started adapting global best practices in early childhood care and education
FOR ALMOST HALF A CENTURY after independence, early childhood education if not care, was the blindspot of India’s education establishment and omniscient pundits of the Delhi-based Planning Commission who assumed the mission-impossible burden of centrally planning every socio-economic development countrywide. Although the Central government introduced its Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) in 1975 and has over the years established 1.6 million anganwadis — early childhood mother and child care centres — countrywide, they are essentially nutrition centres for poor household lactating mothers and malnourished children, offering little by way of early childhood education. Even so, the country’s 1.6 million anganwadis provide basic nutrition to only 76 million of the country’s 158 million children in the age group 1-5.
Professionally delivered ECCE or nursery school remained the preserve of a tiny upper class minority until the dawn of the new millennium when new neuroscience research in the Western OECD countries established that structured and specialised early childhood education is vital since the brains of children are 90 percent developed by age eight. This discovery and awareness that the world’s largest under-five child population was grossly under-served by way of professionally administered nursery and pre-primary schools, prompted the promotion of a large number of pre-primary schools by well-known foreign and indigenous brands such as EuroKids and Zee among others. According to the Mumbai-based Early Childhood Association, currently there are an estimated 300,000 private preschools providing professionally administered ECCE to an estimated 10 million infants and children in the age group 1-5 countrywide.
The promotion of the Mumbai-based Early Childhood Association (ECA) in 2010 which currently has a membership of 970 preschools across the country, is in itself a positive development. Led by Swati Popat Vats, president of the 167-strong Podar Jumbo Kids chain, ECA has been propagating the important message that hitherto academically neglected infants need professionally structured early childhood care and education.
“Children go through a period of rapid learning in the first five years. The most embedded parts of our personality — attitudes, moral values, emotional tendencies, learning abilities, how we deal with people and situations — are determined by experiences that we have had between the ages 0-5. That’s when all human beings learn to adapt and respond to the world. In April this year, 16 neuroscientists specialising in nutrition, chemistry and child development discussed and debated the influence of early years education on brain development at the Unicef offices in New York. Three messages were delivered to Unicef from this meeting. One of them was that ‘early intervention is the answer: it becomes progressively harder to fix problems’. Or as the New York Times editorial put it, it makes more sense to invest in preschools than prisons,” said Popat Vats in a recent interview with EducationWorld. ECA has also made several important suggestions to make the NECCE policy more effective and written an eight-page letter to prime minister Narendra Modi proposing the establishment of a separate ministry for ECCE (see EW August p.46).
The better late than never discovery of the critical importance of ECCE by babus of the Union ministry of women and child development, even if not of the human resources development (HRD) ministry which should have discovered it decades earlier aside, another encouraging development is that there’s a rising number of — inevitably private sector — edupreneurs who have started adapting global best practices in ECCE across the country. For instance, while the pre-primary education philosophies and pedagogies of the Montessori, Adler and Waldorf schools are well-known in indigenous ECCE circles, the relatively less familiar and arguably more enlightened philosophy of Reggio Emilia is also becoming available to infants in India.
Developed by Loris Malaguzzi (1920-94), a progressive educator, together with parents in villages around the town of Reggio Emilia (Italy) in the aftermath of the devastation of World War II, the objective of this ECCE system is to enable the natural development of children and fortify the close relationships they share with their peers and environments. The essence of the Reggio Emilia philosophy is that children must have some control over the direction of their learning; learn through experiences of touching, moving, listening, witnessing, and hearing; establish relationships with other children and material items in the world, and be given every opportunity to express themselves freely.
“Reggio Emilia which needs adaptation to local conditions, is a wonderful ECCE philosophy which encourages children to learn by interacting with each other and exploring their environments. Therefore Reggio schools tend to do away with the walls of traditional classrooms and merge the indoor with the outdoors enabling children to learn through enquiry and exploration in environments of their choice. The focus is on developing the reading and writing skills of children naturally by exposing them — through reading to them, story-telling, board games — to books. They learn at their own pace with teachers trained to respect the inherent knowledge of their pupils. In this way, our children are exposed to 600 books per year. The outcome is confident, fearless children with highly developed social skills who are welcomed into top-ranked primary schools,” says Nina Kanjirath, an English literature and philosophy graduate of St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai with teaching experience in New Zealand and India, and founder director of the Gaia Preschool and Childcare Centre, Bangalore (estb. 2003) which has 65 children between the ages of 18 months-five years on its muster roll.