Higher rungs of learning ladder out of reach

Bengaluru: The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2023 underlines an exercise that tested critical thinking among the respondents of the national survey, all aged between 14 and 18 years and living in rural areas. Their task involved the calculation of money to be repaid on a loan of Rs 20,000, based on different interest rates offered by three banks. Two questions were posed: Which bank would you approach? What would be the amount to be repaid after a year?

Only 10.6% of the sampled group could answer both questions correctly. About 37% of the respondents could work the percentages and calculate the interest but adding it to the principal to arrive at the repayment amount was the tougher part.

The report notes that even among the science and commerce stream students in classes 11 and 12, only 20% could get the answer.

Four key questions that emerge from the findings of ASER 2023 – the report is based on a citizen-led household survey, conducted in 28 rural districts across 26 states, and reaching 34,745 youth – are about the inadequacies in our school education systems and a set of unique social and economic markers that influence learning in rural India.

What pushes a large number of children out of schools between ages 14 and 18? How do we intervene and set right the flat learning trajectories in grades 5 to 8? Why are there, still, large gaps between the learnings from school and their applications in life? Is India at a place where it can leverage its rising digital literacy to enable a generation of students to find more employment opportunities?

What a law can do

Prof S Japhet, former vice-chancellor of the Bengaluru Central University and founding director of the UGC-sponsored Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, lists multiple factors that contribute to the high rate of school dropouts among older children, most of them traced to social inequalities.

He notes that economic constraints make the possibility of an immediate income seem attractive, forcing parents to send their children to work. “The proximity to schools is critical in getting children to enrol; this has always been a serious issue. A lack of clarity on prospective careers among the youth is more evident in rural areas. The subpar quality of existing school curricula has also contributed to the poor retention of children in this age group,” Prof Japhet says.

The report reveals that while 86.8% in the 14-18 years age group are enrolled in educational institutions, age-specific discrepancies emerge as a key takeaway – among the 14-year-olds, 3.9% are not enrolled; the non-enrolment rate among the 18-year-olds is significantly higher, 32.6%.

Education policy expert and researcher Rishikesh B S traces this striking variance to the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, which covers children who are aged between six and 14 years. “The high enrolment rate among the 14-year-olds shows that the RTE Act has had a tremendous impact. This is the power of law and this is why it needs to be extended to the 14-to-18 years age group. The high dropout rate among older students reflects multiple systemic flaws. There is poor implementation because there is no law. For households struggling for their two daily meals, sending the child to work makes economic sense. The children themselves are averse to the idea of continuing because of the poor standards of elementary schooling they have had,” he says. Rishikesh leads the Hub for Education, Law and Policy at Azim Premji University.

Low access, lacklustre resources

The calls for extending RTE to older students have been gaining traction in India. Prof Japhet says the potentially “transformative” extension could significantly improve two key aspects of India’s school education system – inclusivity and continuity. “By ensuring free education to a large group of children, you are addressing the social and economic disparities as well. This, however, is an ambitious task that will require extensive planning and careful allocation of resources,” he says.

India’s plans for revitalising its schooling system, some of them inspired by successful global models, are also tempered by the realities of inadequate basic infrastructure – this has necessitated experiments like clustering, where schools that do not have enough students, teachers or facilities, are grouped to share the resources.

ASER 2023 highlights the rising academic pressure on the children, and “severe disappointments”, often a result of the aspirations of parents with limited or no schooling.

Experts have also underlined the need to address learning disabilities in rural India where a lack of resources could leave these shortcomings unattended. “There has to be a system that identifies these issues and sensitises people who are handling them. It requires a certain level of proficiency to distinguish between what is an inherent learning issue and something that is the result of the quality of education that is being offered. Trained clinical psychologists, among a few other groups of professionals, can identify learning disabilities and provide the appropriate intervention,” says Thomas Kishore, Professor of Clinical Psychology at NIMHANS.

Prof Japhet, a member of the expert committee which is drafting the upcoming state education policy in Karnataka, sees the training of teachers as critical to developing learning models that engage with the children. “There is the issue of filling up the large number of vacancies. Then comes the challenge of getting the teachers who are used to traditional methods to adapt to digital tools,” he says.

By rote is not the route

There are foundational problems to address, like the absence of basic reading and numeracy skills among large sections of India’s young population. Students who miss the initiation to these skills in the early stages of schooling are, typically, left without intervention as they progress to higher classes with flat learning curves.

ASER 2023 reveals that more young people have completed eight or more years of schooling – 84% of the sampled group – compared to 81% in the 2017 report. It notes that the longer period of schooling has, however, not translated to improved Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) skills. While 76.6% of the 14-18-year-olds could read a grade 2-level text in 2017, the number dropped to 73.6% in 2023. Only 43.3% could solve 3-digit by 1-digit division problems (39.5% in 2017), a skill “usually expected” in grade 3-4 students.

Rishikesh notes that the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has been emphatic on the importance of FLN skills. “There is no need to pit FLN against critical thinking in some kind of a debate – without FLN, children will not survive high school; without FLN, that ninth standard is going to be a horrible place for them. It needs to be emphasised that FLN is not mere reading, writing and math; it involves thinking while the children engage in these activities. These skills, unlike those acquired through rote learning, help the children understand the concepts,” he says.

ASER 2023 comes with the tagline ‘Beyond Basics’. Wilima Wadhwa, the ASER Centre Director who details findings from the bank loan exercise in the report, notes how the respondents missed a “fairly simple operation”. This is where she argues for a reorientation in the teaching methodologies, a shift in objectives that is aimed at enabling students to apply their learnings from school in life situations.

NEP 2020 addresses these concerns in its plans to transform the student assessment models. It proposes a shift from existing models that test rote memorisation skills to a more competency-based system that encourages critical thinking.

The importance of FLN skills in handling everyday tasks has been acknowledged in government programmes like the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN) Bharat. These steps come against the backdrop of negligible growth in basic learning reported over the last decade. Experts maintain that widening the scope of these efforts to address learning deficits among children in higher grades is the way forward.

Skills for the future

According to ASER 2023, only 5.6% of the respondents are currently taking vocational training or related courses. NEP 2020 has recommended a phased integration of vocational education programmes into mainstream education. This proposed integration is aimed at overcoming the “social status hierarchy” associated with vocational education which is perceived as inferior to mainstream education.

Narratives around the education and employability of the youth are increasingly tagged with the staggering rise in the use of smartphones and digital technologies in rural India. Is the country placed well to leverage this digital literacy, to prepare its youth for higher studies and better employment?

The internet’s potential to democratise the use of these technologies comes with pitfalls, argues N Ramakrishnan, founder and director of projects at Ideosync Media Combine, a policy advocacy group that works in the area of communication for social change. The Haryana-based group runs Free/Dem, a programme that trains young women and men from marginalised communities in digital media and information literacy skills, helping them navigate fake news and familiarise themselves with safe social media practices.

Ramakrishnan says the COVID years presented a challenge and an opportunity. “Smartphones became necessary for the children to attend online classes but there was also the issue of children having to drop out and miss school because they did not have access to these phones; the situation was exclusionary on that account. Online learning (during the pandemic years) also had the potential to create connected communities which I don’t think has happened. There has been a rise in the use of smartphones but that does not ensure greater knowledge levels or a more informed use of technology,” he says.

Digital literacy, when integrated into school curricula, could be a gamechanger. Its potential, experts argue, is realised only when complemented with efforts to offset social and gender disparities (boys finding greater access to smartphones than girls, for instance) and a key capacity-building measure that remains largely underexplored – the training of the trainers.