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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Ten ‘Nudges’ for education by Satya Narayan Mohanty

Ten ‘Nudges’ for education by Satya Narayan Mohanty

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published Published on Feb 18, 2012   modified Modified on Feb 18, 2012

If India is an aspiring society, education is perhaps the quickest vehicle of social mobility. Right to Education (RTE) is a supplyside intervention by the government that will make education cheaper and, in the process, every child will get a chance to be educated. But an approach that focuses on availability of schools, getting children to the classroom and getting them taught by reasonably well-trained teachers is not enough. Retention and quality issues, which are outside the purview of the RTE, are at the heart of the problem. Education, the way it is run, entails huge wastage if the learning outcomes continue to be dismal. It is not a revelation that poor children who have come to the school because of universalisation are precisely the ones lagging in these statistics. 

We operate in a system in which the child absentee rate is 50% and teachers' absentee rate is 45%. Teachers, even if they are not absent, are often found to be wasting time. 

What creates the unwillingness of children to go to school, of a teacher to teach and what parental resistance to educating their children (in the poor segment) consists of, along with the awareness that compulsory education cannot be enforced by an ineffectual state, is the challenge. 

Abhijeet Banerjee and Ester Duflo of the MIT Poverty Lab found in their research based on Randomised Control Trial experiments that (a) expectations about what education is supposed to deliver distorts what parents demand. Their expectation is wealth for their children, learning English and a government or office job. They expect an elite education for their children even if they are in no position to monitor what is being delivered. 

(b) Teachers think poor students cannot be taught as they are not hard-wired to learn. They think their mandate is only to prepare better students for difficult examinations. Teachers have low expectations from the bottom group of a class, which creates self-defeating behaviour in the weaker students. 

(c) The schooling system is so organised that the poor are not wanted in the classroom, and are expected to suffer in silence until they drop out, unless they show some 'gifts' on their own. 

(d) While parents are by and large right about the returns on education, they tend to overstate the downside and upside. 

RTE lays no emphasis on the learning outcomes, though finishing the curriculum is stressed. To come out of the vicious cycle in which 'parents give up quickly, teachers never try to teach and students who are diffident', we require 'nudges' that create positive behaviour. We need to believe that all children can learn and love to learn. Nudges and commonsensical interventions can cause big change. 

Here are 10 suggestions 

Give control of elementary school teachers' leave and salary to Gram Panchayats to reduce their absenteeism.

The secret of a good education is an 'excellent teacher' and hard work by students. As we are unlikely to get a large number of such teachers in the short run, we will have to use different study materials to balance the weaknesses of classroom teaching. 

Train all teachers to remove their elitist orientation. It should be ingrained that all students can learn and can love to learn and their job is to give shape to it. 

Organise mixed classes of good and indifferent students, since experience shows that doing so makes the latter learn better. 

Remove all caste names from the class register. Reference to surnames, studies show, reinforce debilitating behaviour both in the teacher and student. 

Teachers are best placed to pass on the information to parents about the benefits of education that they might have underestimated. 

Rewarding teachers and children on learning outcomes with small gifts will make handling learning challenges a fulfilling experience for both. 

To achieve the twin objectives of giving everyone a sound basic set of skills and for identifying talent, emphasis on core curriculum for poor students rather than completion of new-fangled, but unwieldy, curriculum will be steps in right direction. Their learning will be like an 'S' curve that will start out flat initially and will pick up rapidly later. Students of higher classes should be enabled to attend classes in the lower grade if they need to (Banerjee & Duflo). 

Most private schools continue to be inefficient though they are comparatively better than public schools in terms of learning outcome, enrolment and retention. Training of private school teachers should be insisted upon, facilitated or hand-held as their training is as important as public school teachers' training. 

Elementary education should be declared an essential service to negate both the perverse incentive of making a teacher a player in rural politics and rising unionisation. If we do not raise our educational quality and make sure that most of the children are retained, then the ticket to a better life will remain a distant dream. 

(The author is a civil servant)

The Economic Times, 18 February, 2012, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/comments-analysis/ten-nudges-for-education/articleshow/11933715.cms


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