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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Primary Schooling by Amartya Sen

Primary Schooling by Amartya Sen

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published Published on Dec 20, 2009   modified Modified on Dec 20, 2009

PRIMARY SCHOOLING: I

Pratichi Trust (India) was established a decade ago, along with its sister across the border, Pratichi Trust (Bangladesh) [1]. The Bangladesh centre has been concentrating on the social progress of girls and young women there (it has worked particularly on supporting and training young women journalists reporting from rural Bangladesh), whereas here in India, the work of the Trust has been mainly focused on advancing primary education and elementary health care, along with a few other selected activities (such as providing disaster relief).

Even though Pratichi Trust (India) has a programme of establishing new schools (the Pratichi School in Orissa is already functioning actively and well), our main work in the field of education has been to examine, assess and scrutinize the schooling system in operation in the east of India, beginning with West Bengal and a part of Jharkhand. We have surveyed a number of schools across the region, and even though the overall picture cannot be called, in any rigorous sense, representative of the region, there is enough information in these studies to arrive at some general judgments about successes and failures, and, most importantly for us, to form an understanding of the principal problems that face primary school education in this region and how they can be addressed in order to attempt remedying the adversities [2].

Empirical Surveys and Repeats

Our first set of surveys of randomly selected primary schools from six districts of West Bengal were done for the year 2001-02 [3]. Recently we have resurveyed the same schools in the same districts to check how — and whether — things are moving forward, and where they stand seven years later in 2008-09. This report presents our latest findings, along with a comparative assessment of the situation today compared with what we had observed seven years earlier.

The first set of studies led us to offer recommendations about necessary changes for the enhancement of primary education in the region. The action plans were based, among other issues, on the following diagnoses:

— the critical need for working together with the teachers’ unions to advance the role and effectiveness of school teachers (including the reduction of teacher absenteeism and helping teachers to pay special attention to children from disadvantaged families);

— the importance of regular and constructive use of parent-teacher committees (particularly to increase communication of teachers with parents from economically and socially disadvantaged families);

— the necessity of serving cooked midday meals both for advancing elementary education and for improving child nutrition (the reasons for the often-neglected complementarity of child nourishment and elementary education were investigated in our earlier reports);

— the need to reverse the decay of the inspection system for schools (which is severely underused and sometimes almost entirely defunct);

— the importance of providing more educational facilities in some schools and particularly in the Sishu Shiksha Kendras (SSKs) and making sure of prompt payment of salaries and making other administrative improvements;

— the need for discouraging the growing dependence of school children on private tuition to supplement educational arrangements in the schools (various means of achieving this were suggested).

Cooperative Efforts and Collaborative Understanding

A number of our recommendations — though not all — have in fact been carried out in the intervening period, and we are grateful for the attention that our work and assessments have received from the government, from the media, and from the general public.

While some of our recommendations broke fresh ground, others provided reasoned support for independently developed — but new — efforts by the state and Central governments in these fields (for example, the provision of cooked midday meals and the use of parent-teacher meetings). Our approach has been one of collaboration with, as well as mutual critique of, the work of different agencies dedicated to the improvement of school education, including Central and state governments and teachers’ unions, and we have been rewarded by the engagement and cooperation of all the parties involved [4].

Since we have been privileged to work together with the primary teachers’ unions (in particular with ABPTA and WBPTA), we have had the benefit also of exchanging our views and analyses with the union leadership in pursuit of a fuller understanding of the problems and prospects of primary education in this state. The Pratichi Trust has held several joint meetings with the unions in which large numbers of primary school teachers have actively participated. Our understanding of the problems has greatly benefited from the cooperation of teachers’ unions, and they in turn have done a great deal to help implement a number of our recommendations.

We have also held every year a fairly large meeting of teachers, parents, educational activists and experts. These meetings have generated a number of important suggestions for improving school education in West Bengal, on which we have drawn for further enquiry. We are particularly grateful to the parents and teachers who have joined us, often involving considerable travel, in these regular meetings to present their own analyses and to enrich our understanding of the problems involved.

Curricular Overload

The regular meetings we have had with the different parties (including parents, teachers, unions, government servants, and NGOs working in similar or related areas) have also helped us to pay special attention to critically important features in the ongoing schooling arrangements that need re-examination and reform, and to supplement the findings of our own surveys and investigation. For example, one of the important issues taken up more fully in this report deals with the content of the official curriculum, and the heavy load that very young children have to bear in pursuit of elementary education. The official demands typically require — and insist on — home-based study of children after school hours, often in excessive and unreasonable ways (particularly unreasonable for families in which the parents have not, in their own childhood, had the benefit of going to school themselves). As is discussed in the report, the apparently unshakable dependence on private tuition of primary school children has a strong connection with the unrealism of the overloaded curricular content.

Class Disadvantages Imperfectly Captured by Caste Analysis

A second issue that has repeatedly emerged in our discussions is the importance of recognizing the class barriers that divide the school-age population. Problems of first-time school education are enormously larger than those faced by children from families with an educated background, at various levels. Also, lack of economic resources as well as low social standing in established stratification can make it much harder for children from disadvantaged groups to get the facilities and the attention they need for successful pursuit of their studies.

Class divisions have a clear connection with caste distinctions but actually go much beyond what is caught in conventional caste-based categorization. It is of course right that Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) are seen as being, in general, disadvantaged, with very few exceptions (the exceptions come mainly from particular SC groups and hardly any from STs). However, to that has to be added the category of the Muslim poor, which — for historical reasons — is substantially larger as a proportion of all Muslims in West Bengal than in many other states (for example in Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh). So, even though Muslims as a category cannot be seen as being a disadvantaged group (indeed a lack of adequate class analysis has been responsible for some very misleading recent statements on the subject), a very large proportion of Muslims in West Bengal do indeed fall in the category of being economically and socially disadvantaged in terms of their class background.

Any detailed investigation of the empirical situation brings out the need to go well beyond the SC-ST characterization of social disadvantage to taking note of the historically conditioned economic and social disadvantages from which most Muslim families as well as SC and ST populations historically suffer in this region. These disadvantages make children from those families particularly in need of greater attention and support. Even in interpreting the findings of our surveys, the broader issue of class disadvantage has to be kept firmly in view, as we have tried to do in arriving at our conclusions and recommendations.

Repeat Surveys and Our Findings

The recent resurveys give us an opportunity (i) to assess the present state of affairs in primary schooling in West Bengal, (ii) to see whether there have been advances or not, and what remains to be done, and (iii) to examine the effectiveness of the reforms that have been carried out and the changes that have occurred. It gives us particular pleasure to share our findings with the public as well as the media and the authorities responsible for schooling, including the government as well as the teachers’ unions.

Significant Improvements

The main findings in terms of the comparative picture between 2001-02 and 2008-09 are: (1) there have been significant improvements in the performance as well as coverage of primary education in West Bengal over these seven years, and (2) there still remain defects and infelicities that must be overcome.

There is certainly no case for despondence, and it is particularly important to recognize this fact both because despondence can lead to despair and resignation, and because there are good reasons to see, on the basis of the empirical data, that reasoned efforts, when properly executed, do lead to the achievements at which the efforts cogently aim. However, there is no room for smugness either. Things have moved considerably forward (often related to the reforms that have been carried out by the governments involved, and the cooperation of the unions, which have often substantially supplemented official efforts). However, much more needs to be done.

To note the improvements first, there is not only a higher rate of student enrolment, but also a significantly larger average attendance of enrolled students (75 per cent both for primary schools and SSKs — up from 58 and 64 per cent respectively).

Second, even though the problem of absentee teachers remains, there is in fact a noticeable fall in the percentage of absentee teachers on the randomly chosen day of our visit (14 per cent in primary schools, down from 20 per cent, and 8 per cent in SSKs, down from 15 per cent). There is also some increase in the number of teachers per school.

Third, the level of parent satisfaction with the performance of teachers has also gone up (from 52 per cent to 64 per cent for primary schools and from 70 per cent to 75 per cent for SSKs), even though it is still far from perfect. Parents’ satisfaction with the progress of children is up significantly (from 42 per cent to 71 per cent for primary schools, and from 49 per cent to 73 per cent for SSKs).

Fourth, we were really depressed with the 2001-02 results of independent testing of students’ achievements, for example, the fact that 30 per cent of the students in classes III and IV could not even write their own names. There has been considerable improvement in this area, and the proportion of students who could not write their names is now down from 30 per cent to just 5 per cent (that proportion should of course be zero per cent, but it would be silly not to see the progress that is observed).

Fifth, midday meals are now being served in most primary schools and SSKs, and there are clear indications of the benefits of that initiative both in educational and nutritional terms. Indeed, even the increased attendance of students in schools partly reflects the attraction of the school meals, even though the efforts of the teachers’ unions, particularly in reducing teacher absenteeism, has also greatly helped, in many regions.

Sixth, parent-teacher meetings are now much more in use, mostly in the form of mother-teacher committees, even though we still have specific suggestions for improving their reach.

Things that Remain to be Done

Significant as the progress has been, there are still big gaps to meet. Even in those fields, already mentioned, in which there have been significant advance, the absolute numbers of the performance indicators bring out the fact that there is still quite a distance to go for the primary school system to be considered really satisfactory. While some reforms have been carried out, for example, in having arrangements for midday meals (even though they can be — and must be — further extended), in other areas (such as, having a functioning inspection system and remedying the dependence on private tuition), the achievements have been very little, if any at all. The need for going further forward is strong and urgent.
 
PRIMARY SCHOOLING: II 

Private Tuition and Curricular Load

There has been a real regression, as opposed to progress, on the dependence on private tuition. The proportion of children relying on private tuition has gone up quite a bit (64 per cent from 57 per cent for the students of standard primary schools, and 58 per cent from 24 per cent for Sishu Shiksha Kendra children). Underlying this rise is not only some increase in incomes and the affordability of having private tuition, but also an intensification of the general conviction among the parents that private tuition is “unavoidable” if it can be at all afforded (78 per cent of the parents now believe it is indeed “unavoidable” — up from 62 per cent). For those who do not have arrangements for private tuition, 54 per cent indicate that they do not go for it mainly — or only — because they cannot afford the costs.

India is one of the very few countries in the world in which private tuition is thought to be necessary even at the earliest stages of primary education. Reliance on private tuition for very young children is unknown not only in Europe and America, but also in many developing countries. I had some difficulty in explaining to students at Peking University in Beijing what exactly I was talking about in referring to private tuition for the youngest primary school students, since the phenomenon appeared mysterious and incomprehensible to the listeners.

However, in a number of economies in Asia and North Africa, including Japan, Republic of Korea and Taiwan, there has been, in recent years, an increased use of private tuition even at the primary stage — though typically not for the youngest children. This development is seen as having resulted from the pursuit of the perceived competitive benefits of privately tutored children over others. Even in those cases in which private tuition operates only to supplement and advance good primary teaching (rather than acting almost as a substitute for organized schooling, as in many in cases in India), it can be shown that it has a significant adverse impact on the educational system [5]. The harm, however, is much greater when private tutoring becomes “essential” (rather than merely competitively advantageous for the fortunate), especially — as in India — when most families of first-generation school-goers are not able to afford this artificially generated “essentiality”. The advent of private tuition in school education may not be harmless even for Japan and Korea, but it is radically more harmful in India, when it eliminates, in effect, the right to basic education for all children (since the primary schools come to depend on such supplementation even for the basic education to be imparted).

The question must, thus, be asked with some urgency why this problem remains so strong and takes this form in primary education in India, and in the context of this study, in West Bengal, and why, rather than weakening, the evil has actually strengthened over the last decade, despite all efforts to eliminate the system. Why has dependence on private tuition come to take the place of what can be easily done in the class, and for which the schools are actually devised?

Our judgment based on extensive discussions with teachers, the unions, the parents, educational administrators and the general public is that one important reason for this is the heavy load of the imposed curriculum regarding what has to be taught at the primary level. Indeed, the load is so heavy and ambitious for primary schools that (1) students need supplementation even at the end of the school day, and (2) teachers have to spend a lot of their energy and efforts in imparting specialized knowledge even when basic literary and accounting skills (such as reading, writing and simple arithmetic) remain underdeveloped and insufficiently engaged. The proportion of primary educated students in classes III and IV who cannot read is still 17 per cent, those who cannot write is 19 per cent, and the proportion who cannot do simple arithmetic is 26 per cent, despite their schooling.

Indeed, many of those who do have proficiency in these simple and basic skills have often acquired them with the help of private tutors, rather than just from regular schooling [6]. The limited reach of teaching during the school hours may not come as a surprise, since the necessity of “home tasks” for even very young children is standardly accepted in India, including in West Bengal, whereas giving “home tasks” for very young children is typically not the practice in the rest of the world (that is, at least not before the end of the first few years of school education). Something, we would submit, has gone fundamentally wrong in the way we think about the discipline of primary education for young children, in our country, including in this state

Dependence on private tuition for school education in general, and for early primary education in particular, is, of course, a terrible affliction for reasons that have been extensively discussed in our previous reports. In particular, private tuition divides the student population into haves and have-nots; it makes teachers less responsible and it diminishes their central role in education; it makes improvements in schooling arrangements more difficult since the more influential and better-placed families have less at stake in the quality of what is done in the schools (thanks to the supplementation outside school hours); it effectively negates the basic right of all children to receive elementary education and replaces it by seeing effective education as a privilege, reserved for the better placed in society.

Indeed, the necessity of stopping the dependence on private tuition has been the subject not only of our reports, but also of public pronouncements, governmental instructions, and general moral lecturing, along with various organizational proposals for improving the quality of what is offered in the schools to make private tuition redundant. These are not useless attempts, and we strongly support and encourage efforts in these directions.

The point that is being made here is that no matter how strongly we pursue these remedial courses of action, the dependence on private tuition would be hard to eliminate unless basic curricular reforms are undertaken. That is something we do stress in this report, without in any way undermining what we have recommended in the past to reduce this debilitating dependence, and without trying to undermine what is being done through other means to fight this dependence.

We are very aware that streamlining and simplifying the curricular demands at the primary stage of education would worry some people who see ambitious attempts, even if not successful, as good ways of performing better. We are not against anyone trying to do more than what is required from the compulsory school curriculum. If intelligently planned, a reduction of curricular load could still leave open the opportunity for better performing students to try more, particularly at home, perhaps with guidance from teachers. What is being argued here is that for normal primary education, “home tasks” should be completely unnecessary (but supplementary study at home would not, of course, be “banned” for those who would want to do more), and in particular, the primary students’ success at examinations and school tests should not have to rely on what the children have to do at home, outside the school. This is the way Europe and America have educated their children in primary schools when they were at the same stage of educational development as India is today, and this is how they still do it across the world right now to make basic school education accessible to all, even though the ability of the families themselves to help young children with home work has grown as the overall population have become more and more literate. Home tasks for school children begin at various ages across the world, but hardly ever at the very basic stages of early primary education, where the concentration has to be on reading, writing and simple arithmetic. This is where the particular issue of curricular overload in early primary eduction in India is critically important.

The report discusses some issues of overload that are particularly worth addressing. However, for effective planning and implementation, it would be necessary to investigate carefully the issue of syllabus reform for early primary education, bearing in mind the major goal of making children able to learn the elementary skills of the three R’s on which everything else depends. There should be no room here for dependence on — and demand for — home tasks for very young children, for which parental help may be necessary (which many parents cannot give), or assistance from private tutors (which most parents cannot afford). There is a great deal of expertise on the subject among teachers and educational experts — and indeed among many parents — and it should not be too difficult a job to rise to the challenge of reasoned curricular reform, with a view to altering fundamentally the dysfunctional system of primary education we have in operation at this time.

No one should expect that the practice of private tuition would go away with proper curricular reform (the attraction of competitive advantage of the privately tutored would be hard to eradicate), but the basic dependence on private tuition for elementary education — for what could easily be done in the class — has to be eliminated through a variety of means, in which curricular reform has to be included. This is a crucial issue that has not been discussed adequately — or at all — in critically appraising what has gone wrong in the delivery of primary education in India in general and in West Bengal in particular.

Taking Note of Class Divisions

The differential reach of primary education emerges quite strikingly in our studies. Bearing in mind the fact - discussed earlier — that belonging to scheduled castes or scheduled tribes, and coming from Muslim families, is not merely an indicator of caste or community background, but also, statistically, something of a proxy for class-related handicap, we can use the differences in educational performance of these groups vis-à-vis others, as partly a reflection of class handicap. It is, thus, important to note that while 13 per cent of scheduled caste children in classes III and IV could not read, and 25 per cent of Muslim children and 29 per cent of scheduled tribe children could not either. For the rest of the population this proportion was merely 8 per cent. Similarly, compared with 8 per cent of the group of “others” in classes III and IV who could not write, 13 per cent of SC children, 27 per cent of Muslim children and 43 per cent of ST children could not manage any writing. While there is nothing to celebrate in the fact that 8 per cent of children other than from SC, ST and Muslim families could not read or write, the much higher proportions of educational failure of deprived groups demand concentrated and urgent attention.

This general picture of class-related disadvantage (along with its correlates) calls for a variety of remedial measures. We have stressed in our past reports the importance of having greater facilities in schools and SSKs in which the proportion of class-disadvantaged children is high and which are often neglected in terms of amenities. The SSKs, in particular, demand special attention, and would need to be upgraded at some stage to regular primary schools, both for general enhancement of facilities, but also because SC, ST and Muslim children depend on them disproportionately. Schooling can be a major force in breaking down class barriers, and we have to be especially careful that instead of that, the educational system with differential facilities does not end up perpetuating the rigidity of class boundaries. It is also very important to establish minimal norms, such as having at least one teacher per classroom.

The issue of home tasks and private tuition also relates to the question of class divisions. The need for home tasks is particularly difficult to meet for parents from disadvantaged classes — these children may be the first generation to receive school education. Parents with the disadvantage of having received little education find it especially difficult to do anything for their children in helping them with their assigned home tasks. It is not surprising that they long for the ability to engage private tutors for their children, but of course very often they cannot, in fact, afford to help their kids in this way. The result is not only frustration and despair, but also continued transmission of education backwardness from one generation to the next.

The necessity of home tasks for early primary education has to be comprehensively challenged for young children engaged in learning basic reading, writing and arithmetic, in primary schools and SSKs. If the case against home tasks for young children in primary schooling is strong on grounds of educational effectiveness (as has already been discussed), the case becomes even stronger when the impact of the divisiveness of class is taken into account in planning elementary education for all children as a basic human right.

A Concluding Remark

There is no magic bullet to solve the manifold problems faced by primary education in West Bengal (and, for that matter, in India in general). We need a multi-pronged approach to deal with the diverse sources of educational under-achievement. There is nothing defeatist in this recognition. Indeed, the significant improvements that have already happened in West Bengal over the last seven years between the surveys of 2001-02 and the resurveys of 2008-09 give strong indication that informed diagnoses and determined policies can bring about a substantial change quite rapidly.

Even though the new focus of this report has stressed the need for a radical reform of primary school curriculum to make home tasks redundant for very young children and to eradicate the necessity of dependence on private tuition, and has also emphasized the importance of taking explicit note of class divisions, the older policy recommendations, presented in our earlier reports, have continuing relevance. Even in those areas in which much success has been achieved, for example in instituting regular arrangements for serving cooked mid-day meals, and in making greater use of parent-teacher meetings, still more can be fruitfully done — to expand their reach and quality. Similarly, the success of SSKs show the positive force of participation of the wider community in the enterprise of schooling, and that constructive force has to be consolidated, even as the SSKs are ultimately upgraded to regular schools.

We present, with all humility, a variety of recommendations in this report, some of which carry forward what were discussed in earlier reports, and we have tried to spell out the reasoning behind them explicitly. We hope they will get attention from the government, the unions, the public and the media — as indeed we have been fortunate to receive in the past.

I will, however, end by emphasizing the special plea for urgent consideration of two central issues that we have particularly stressed in this report, drawing both on our surveys and resurveys, and on extensive consultation with teachers, parents, administrators, educational experts and the public at large. There is, first, a particular need to recognize the fierce urgency of curricular reform at the primary level to make home tasks redundant and private tuition unnecessary. The importance of recognizing explicitly the role of class barriers in educational under-achievement — a second point of focus — also stands as being in pressing need of recognition.

These two issues, it has also been argued here, are closely interrelated. More generally, there is, in fact, a basic complementarity between the different components of the kind of multi-pronged approach for which we are arguing. The complementarity gives us further reason to believe that multi-pronged action based on clear diagnoses will bring major results — and bring them fairly quickly. There is indeed need for some urgency here, since the problems are serious and involve long-standing injustice to millions of young children that call for rectification. Patience can be, alas, another name for continuing injustice.

Notes

1. Pratichi Trust (Bangladesh) has been working under the leadership of Professor Rehman Sobhan, with help from others sharing our objectives, particularly BRAC, led by Fazle Hasan Abed. Both the Trusts were set up with the help of the Nobel money that came my way in December 1998.

2. The research work, including empirical investigation and analysis, for this project has been very ably led by Kumar Rana, the Project Director, who has also largely authored this report. His initiative and stewardship have been important at every stage of this work.

3. The 2001-02 surveys were conducted in two instalments, beginning first with Birbhum, Puruliya and West Medinipur, and going on later to cover Barddhaman, Murshidabad and Darjeeling in the second instalment. The findings from the first instalment were published in The Pratichi Education Report I, (2002), and the combined results of the two sets of surveys were included in a Bengali publication, Pratichi Siksha Pratibedan (2004). In the comparisons presented in this report with the later 2008-09 surveys, the two instalments of the first round of surveys in 2001-02 have been aggregated together.

4. I should particularly mention here the exemplary cooperation we have received from the District Primary School Council of Birbhum, led by Gautam Ghosh, who has also given us valuable advice on the analysis of our findings and recommendations.

5. On this see Mark Bray, Adverse Effects of Private Supplementary Tutoring: Dimensions, Implications and Government Responses (Paris: International Institute for Educational Planning, UNESCO, 2003).

6. However, private tuition holds more promise for anxious parents than they, in fact, manage to deliver. Some children obviously benefit from this extra help to learn what the schools were devised to teach them, but our recent survey also shows that a significant proportion of those who could not read or write have in fact had the alleged benefit of private tutoring.

The Telegraph, 19 and 20 December, 2009, http://telegraphindia.com/archives/archive.html
 

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