Democracy and Childhood School Curriculum

Date:02/07/2008

URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/07/02/stories/2008070253081000.htm Back

At a recent seminar on democracy and development, an elderly gentleman came up to me and said he wanted advice. His son was planning to return from the United States next year, primarily for the sake of his three-year-old daughter´s education. He asked if I could suggest a few good schools which would give her a firm grounding in Sanskrit and Indian ethics. I was a bit taken by the precise description of his vision of what might constitute ‘good´ education for his daughter.

As someone with a life-long interest in early childhood, its psychology and educational needs, I had never come across such a succinct statement. Dr. Mina Swaminathan, who has been my guide for several decades now, articulated her vision of early childhood in the position paper of the National Focus Group on this subject set up under the auspices of the National Curriculum Framework debates. To quote the paper, the education of three to five-year-olds should be based on “an understanding of the patterns of learning that define the essential nature of childhood.’ Following this approach, the group led by Dr. Swaminathan recommends a curriculum which focusses on play, art, rhythm, rhyme, movement and active participation in group activities. Nowhere does the early childhood curriculum mention ethics as an isolated or overriding concern as the NRI gentleman apparently did.

Mulling over his anxiety, I slowly realised that his idea of ‘good´ education was shaped by social and ideological forces which have acquired specific local forms in different countries. In the U.S., the idea of good education under the George Bush administration has become synonymous with familiar neo-liberal and neo-conservative expressions such as “choice,’ “standards,’ and “sound traditional values.’ Prima facie, none of these terms sounds negative or threatening. It is only when we sense the politics underlying them that we recognise a basic contradiction between these ideas and what John Dewey, arguably the greatest American educational thinker till date, might have considered a sound vision of education for the young.

Dewey spoke about the fundamental necessity of nudging the world and doing something new in order to learn. His acute observation of children convinced him that learning occurs when children experience knowledge, not when they are told about it. The implication is that we cannot teach children to be good; we must practise goodness. This is not such a difficult point to grasp, and you don´t need to go to school or university to learn this truth. But the neo-conservative elements in Mr. Bush´s America somehow persist in believing that they can teach American children the value of freedom, liberty and tolerance while bombing Iraq and killing thousands of its children. Even internally, the neo-conservative agenda of education has been quite remarkable. It has kept up with its mission to promote traditional family values while protecting the citizen´s right to carry a gun in order to feel secure from other civilised citizens.
Confused and contradictory

Let us not be surprised that this confused and contradictory vision has influenced Indian policies. One important meaning of globalisation has been the transportation of half-baked ideas to the so-called developing world. Over the last two decades or so, India has received and absorbed quite a few neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideas in education. In a society where liberal spaces and values are still struggling to survive, neo-liberal economic rhetoric and planning have boosted regressive cultural forces. Salient among these ideas is a radical reduction in state liability on various fronts, particularly those related to social services, and replacing it with markets for these services — in health for instance, markets for health insurance instead of universal healthcare.

The policy of state surrender to market forces in culture and media has encouraged a crude and relentless assault on children´s sensibility. In education, the neo-liberal perspective has promoted ideas like vouchers for the poor and contractual appointments for teachers, replacing the ideal of universal school education with good quality. Overall, a blanket regime of lessened fiscal expenditure has been unfairly weighted against the social sector — particularly education, without any consideration for the obvious fact that India is still vastly illiterate. A society like ours, where millions of children are barbarically exploited, needs generous long-term investments in education.

The net effect of neo-liberal policies in India on education has been along predictable lines. While children from poorer sections have entered the school system in large numbers, the teachers available to teach them lack both the vision and the motivation to compensate for socio-economic deprivation. A laissez faire regime has meant freedom for religious separatists to promote their dangerous social vision through schools and textbooks. The gap between schools of the rich and the poor has increased. All-round growth of the child has silently slipped away from social justice programmes even as words like ‘playway´ and ‘joyful learning´ keep public attention away from the erosion of academic rigour in teacher training.

In the context of early childhood education, even national-level flagship programmes such as the ICDS have lost their claim to financial favour, what to say of smaller state-level initiatives. The hope of curricular reform in nursery education has dwindled even as aggressive private players have set up business, offering a cacophony of electronic devices and formal instruction at the hands of a frugally trained housewife doubling up as a nursery teacher. It is through these nurseries that the nouveau riche urban Indians now aspire to prepare their young for global competition. Their idea of good education resonates well with the peddlers of CCTVs, air conditioners, computers and marble-finish tiles for lavatories and swimming pools, for these are the new symbols of a good school.
Far cry

This is a far cry from where Rabindranath Tagore or Mahatma Gandhi wanted India to go, educationally. But the situation is not bad for the gentleman whose son wants to return from the U.S. for his three-year-old daughter. Quite a few residential schools now offer the kind of education he wants, with a heady mix of innovative software and conservative values. These schools are physically as well as socially cocooned in a world of their own. They think their virtual connectivity should suffice to teach democratic participation and civic responsibility. They refuse to recognise that democracy in a stratified and highly unequal society requires its citizens to possess a large heart and the capacity to apply individual judgment. These prerequisites develop best in common schools where children of the rich and the poor study together.

Democratic governance calls for equitable development. This point was forcefully made by quite a few speakers at the seminar where I met the elderly gentleman, whose NRI son is planning to return. Sadly, the seminar had no room for a discussion on what egalitarian education might mean in today´s socio-economic climate. As it often happens, the organisers had assumed that education would take care of itself if democracy stabilised and economic development speeded up.

No better example is needed than India itself to question this assumption. Despite regular elections and high growth rates, India has failed to prioritise the need to modernise its education system at all levels, from nursery to university. True, the struggle to protect education from fundamentalist assertions has by itself been quite hard. The gains made on this front can easily be squandered away in the absence of a professional cadre of teachers. Even as political instability looms on India´s federal horizons, the absence of even minimal consensus on state provision required to make elementary education a fundamental and justiciable right symptomises India´s uncertainty as a country which is still “developing.’ As its democratic citizens we must ask, ‘what is it developing into?´

When I enter a school which has CCTVs in its nursery, I wonder if we are soon going to become a ‘guided´ demcracy, with a compliant workforce and an intolerant and aggressive middle class. The same impression is conveyed by the diminution of humanities and social sciences in schools and universities. Of course, we can still redesign things, starting with the realisation that children deserve better treatment, and that children of the poor matter no less than those born in rich homes. If the NRI father of the three-year-old saw some merit in this position, he wouldn´t have to worry about choosing a school for her.

(Professor Krishna Kumar is Director, National Council of Education Research and Training.)

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