WHAT lies ‘Beyond Access’? Why is it that increasingly we allude to access as the basic issue, while the ‘quality’ of education is relegated to the so-called second level of problems or priorities? What is implied by the term quality of education, especially when it is perceived either chronologically or even financially as something that can be tackled once the primary problem of getting children to school has been resolved?

Moreover, this ostensible dichotomy between ‘access’ and ‘beyond’, or between the ‘basic’ provision and its ‘quality’, seems to have been amplified more recently, largely in the last decade, to somehow justify not being able to do both simultaneously, as had earlier been assumed. The world-over, universal elementary education has been achieved principally through state provision of compulsory schooling, where quality was not differentially reserved to be doled out either ‘later’ or ‘only to some’.

The question of quality was first raised in policy debates in India around 1929 in connection with the Hartog Committee Report, which concluded that ‘expansion had been gained at the cost of quality’ and that ‘consolidation should be adopted in preference to diffusion’ of mass primary education. These recommendations had then been strongly opposed by several national leaders, who saw in this deliberate dichotomy between quality and quantity a discriminatory colonial policy for India.

In fact, once the Compulsory Education Act was passed in Britain in 1870 there was a vociferous demand by Indian leaders for state provision of mass schooling and similar legislation here, compelling the first Indian Education Commission in 1882 to seriously deliberate on these issues. Indeed, for the next 70 years, through the struggle for an independent nation and the making of its Constitution, this commitment to provide ‘free and compulsory education’ to every child was tenaciously reiterated.

However, soon after the first decade of independence was over and it was clear that commensurate financial commitments to ensure the constitutional promise were not forthcoming, state policy strategically shifted focus from compulsion to persuasion (Juneja, 2003). This consciously promoted the belief that only some genuinely wanted education while most others, who also contributed to the high levels of ‘wastage’ by dropping out of schools without learning much, were unwilling. J.P. Naik, former Educational Advisor to the Government of India, candidly wrote about the vested interests demanding greater financial allocations and subsidies for higher education meant for the privileged social groups at the cost of funds for mass primary education. ‘We were in fact called fools who try to educate those who do not come to school and do not want to learn. The first duty of a government, we were told, was to educate those who were willing to learn. The task of those who do not even want to learn should come later’ (Naik, 1982).

 

 

The above remark openly reflects the ‘first’ and ‘later’ dichotomy, between competing priorities for government funds, deliberately divided between those who are ‘willing’ and others who ‘do not want to learn’. In fact, this myth of the unwilling masses has continued almost unchallenged for several decades, and has been debunked only in the last few years by several studies, including the Public Report on Basic Education (Probe Team, 1999). The disadvantaged are increasingly looking towards education as a possible way out of their condition and are, in fact, dropping out of school only because they learn nothing and have lost faith in the ability of the state system to provide quality education. Professor Yashpal had highlighted this in his preface to the report ‘Learning Without Burden’ (MHRD, 1993) when he wrote that those who dropped out were probably superior to those children who continued in the system because they had not ‘compromised with non-comprehension’, with the meaninglessness of what they were being compelled to do in school.

 

 

With the myth of the unwilling masses fast losing ground, it is becoming convenient to articulate competing priorities for funds in terms of other dichotomies, such as ‘access first’ and ‘quality later’. Unfortunately, several well-meaning initiatives are also taking this line, mobilizing tremendous efforts to enrol children into schools without simultaneously demanding that these be restructured for better quality. With increasing internal and external pressures to show results, the state is advocating all means of cutting costs through what it calls ‘alternative arrangements’ such as the Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS) Centres or other such ‘alternative’ schools.

Various euphemisms have been used to denote these alternatives, ranging from Shishu Shiksha Kendras to Rajiv Gandhi Pathshalas or Vaikalpik Shalas, and hundreds of thousands of para-teachers, variously called acharya, guruji, sahayika or shiksha mitra, are perfunctorily trained and employed as contract workers for a fraction of the salary of a regular teacher. State provision of schooling has now been starkly stratified, and the poor are offered a low cost and low quality version in keeping with their position and capacity to pay. Ironically, these poor communities are asked to arrange for the space or even build a structure themselves. More significantly, the Constitution has been amended to allow for this dilution, and the proposed Free and Compulsory Education Act (draft, January 2004) is now trying to create further inequalities and institutionalize dichotomies between those who can or cannot pay for their schooling.

The 93rd amendment bill (passed by the Rajya Sabha in 2002 as the 86th Amendment Act) had allowed the spirit of the original Article 45 of the Constitution to be radically altered. ‘The state shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of 6 to14 years, in the manner as the state may by law determine.’ This additional clause allows the state to get away with whatever ‘quality’ it deems fit, for those who actually need much more investment and affirmative action. It also abandons its commitment for ‘equality’ and ‘removal of disparities’ through the common school system, upheld by the National Policy on Education.

 

 

In fact, the proposed Free and Compulsory Education Act, meant to serve as the central legislation for the 86th Amendment Act, is diluting even the notion of a school or teacher to justify a discriminatory system introduced through a differentiated typology of government schools, such as the ‘approved’, ‘recognized fee-charging’, and ‘transitional schools (defined as an EGS centre or alternative school)’, etc. The proposed act states that for those habitations or groups of children for whom the establishment of approved schools or alternative arrangements is not immediately feasible, the government may cause transitional schools to be established. It is indeed ironical that more than half a century after the Constitution had envisioned ‘free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen years’, the proposed act will legally wash its hands off this basic responsibility on the grounds of what is not immediately feasible.

 

 

In some recent studies the ‘quality’ of education is mentioned superficially by looking at parameters such as the attendance of children or the actual time spent in school without classroom observations. For instance, the Pratichi Education Report from West Bengal presents a rather cursory comparison between the quality of primary schools and the alternative schools – the Shishu Shikha Kendras (SSK). The overview of the report rightly stresses that the ‘poor quality of teaching not only makes the children learn poorly, but also widens the gap between the two classes – one which can buy education, and the other, which cannot. It is the poor quality of teaching that forces children to seek private tuition (an issue of major concern in WB).’ However, the analysis fails to go beyond surface perceptions. Moreover, the section on ‘private tuition and quality of education’ draws conclusions about quality from whether children can write their names or not, thereby trivializing the issue.

Having termed SSKs as ‘great achievers at extremely low cost’, the report further compares how parents of these children seem ‘less dissatisfied’ with the quality of provision than those of children studying in formal primary schools. Satisfaction is clearly a relative notion and is crucially linked to expectations and aspirations. Poor parents may have good reasons to be satisfied with a school where the teacher comes regularly and does not discriminate against their child, irrespective of what goes on in the name of teaching and, more crucially, of the quality of learning. However, a school that functions as minimally as most SSKs (or for that matter even formal primary schools) do, cannot qualify as a great achiever, even if the extremely low-cost is what makes it attractive to policy-makers.

The SSK is anchored problematically on a ‘retired’ structure, with women teachers who are selected only when they are over-age and therefore unqualified to demand a regular job. The sahayikas are ‘aged women over 40,’ in the words of the programme officials, who even justify the need to select not ‘caring young women’ but ‘aged’ ones for their ‘motherly’ qualities! The trainers are retired officers and inspectors from the Education Department, usually in the age group of 65-75 years, and the training is gender skewed, with old male veterans often patronizingly lecturing to the all-women cadre of diffident housewives.

 

 

These personnel bring with them not only limited resources of energy, but more significantly, traditional mindsets conditioned by the existing hierarchical system. This political economy of selecting retired teachers and trainers, who would by their very nature not make any demands on the system, is at the heart of its low quality potential. It needs to be underscored that to provide good quality education to those consistently excluded by the system requires an expanded vision, that voices a demand for change, both within and outside the system.

The SSK has provided access to education to children in remote, school-less habitations or in areas where schools are overcrowded. A reasonable teacher pupil ratio of 1:30, adequate space for each child and the involvement of the community in ensuring regular attendance of the teachers and children are some of the factors that have contributed to its functioning relatively better than many dysfunctional primary schools. However, the classroom interaction was no different, often worse, because these sahayikas, older and not having been well trained, seemed understandably more insecure and heavily dependent on the textbook. Many sahayikas talked in a self-conscious, loud and high-pitched voice, and expected loud answers in chorus from the students. There was a lot of mindless repetition, often to the point of utter distraction, reminiscent of similar ‘drilling’ sessions we had witnessed during their training programme.

 

 

We all know of multiplication tables that children are heartlessly made to learn ‘by heart’, but at an SSK training we saw the use of addition tables, unflinchingly repeated over and over and over again. ‘Ek jog ek dui, dui jog ek teen, teen jog ek…’ (One plus one two, two plus one three, three plus one four, and so on). In addition, there was an absurd attempt to render it ‘joyful’, with little understanding of how children learn concepts of ‘number’ or addition. All kind of cosmetic padding was added to the exercise (literally so!) which resulted in the 70-plus trainer hopping single-legged, perilously unsteady, while chanting the addition tables.

The same mantra continued unabated through several mindless exercises which generated a lot of noise and energy – a dramatically loud and breathless ek, ek, ek, ek, ek jog ek dui ending with a wobbly jump. But that was all. No concepts of arithmetic got reinforced through all this rigmarole, though it is another matter that seeing a teacher wobble and warble through much skip and song may indeed be joyful for children, and may help the school system unlearn some of its traditional notions of authority.

Choosing local women from the community, as had been done for the remote and underserved habitations under the Shiksha Karmi programme in Rajasthan, has its advantages, but only when the selection and orientation processes ensure that the teachers are geared for this challenging task. In this case, the fact that SSK sahayikas were locally recruited from the same community did not mean that they had a close relationship with the children. Being from the same social class may preclude blatant discrimination, but much more is required in the student-teacher interaction to ensure that children do learn better.

A matter of serious concern is that the SSK model, instead of being acknowledged as an interim short-term measure for disadvantaged children, before being accommodated in the formal mainstream schools, is now being formulated as the alternate mainstream model in West Bengal, even for the middle school. With about 15,000 SSKs or more already, it is now envisaged that through the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan these would be extended into an MSK for children up to class VIII, so that there is no need to plan for their ‘mainstreaming’.

 

 

This last section attempts to unpack what happens within classrooms, to allow readers to look for the ‘quality’ of children’s schooling in the differentiated provision doled out to them. We present selected excerpts from three types of government schools – a ‘model’ school, a single teacher school for the OBCs, and an alternative or ‘community based school’ from Nalanda district of Bihar, which have been part of a programme for quality improvement.

Case 1: The ‘Model’ School? The Residential Model Middle School (RMMS) has an imposing doublestorey structure and 1700 children enrolled, though only 1200 were present on the day of the visit. The head teacher is normally on his toes, supervising students on ‘cleaning duty’, and the running of classes (including the running mass of students, pummeling each other and rushing to get seats in crowded rooms). He is under pressure to enrol even more, but the space is constrained and classrooms are already overcrowded. He takes pride that despite being surrounded by so-called ‘English medium’ schools, parents still prefer his school.

 

 

All classes look alike – bursting at the seams, children sitting on benches as well as on, over and under the desks, with some sprawled on the floor. Teachers have identical teaching styles and they read from the textbooks or give instructions. There are no teaching learning materials, the methodologies are far from joyful or even meaningful, and children have understandably learnt very little. Then why are parents so satisfied with this model school?

Class I Teacher: Ms. Asha Kumari, Number of children: around 100/140. Grade I has 140 children on roll but fortunately for those present about 30-40 children are absent. Almost 25 children squat on the floor, while boys and girls sit on benches in separate rows. The class teacher starts calling out the roll numbers, repeating names of those absent – ‘Terah, Rajesh Kumar, Rajesh Kumar, nahi hai kya re?’ (Number 13? Is Rajesh not there?) A good 20 minutes are over by the time she finishes. All along she demands complete silence, which never happens, despite her repeated shouting ‘ai halla, ai’ (why this noise?) and the brandishing of her stick.

She writes the alphabets ‘ka, kha, ga…’ and instructs the children to copy, sitting down with their scholarship forms. The noise level picks up. They have done this task earlier and are not interested in repeating it. One child writes the English alphabets instead. Others prefer chatting. Asha tries to reach some children but can never get close enough to look into their copies. ‘Padhna aata hai re? Padho to, nahi aata hai to dekho’ (Do you know how to read? Read, if you cannot then look here). She starts reading loudly from the blackboard. Children follow her in chorus ‘ka, kha, ga, gha’. Reading aloud of alphabets is the only way of engaging the children. After it is over, the noise continues and she yells, ‘ai halla, arre!’ (hey, no noise!) again and again, but to no avail. The bell rings.

 

 

In the next period she asks them to open a chapter ‘Saahasi Balak’ from the Hindi textbook for reading aloud. The response to this command is mixed. At a point there is complete chaos, and she seems in a fix, embarrassed at her own helplessness as she spots the researcher taking notes. She has another trick up her sleeve. She draws pictures of a mango, a pencil, a glass, a leaf, etc. Children look up with curiosity and suddenly it is quiet. (Now, this is a new task!) She points at the objects one by one and asks ‘ee kya hai? (what is this?) She gets a loud choral response. It has worked! One more way of engaging the attention of the full class. Satisfied, she goes back to the first picture and repeats again, and again. The responses get weaker as the novelty wears off.

Class II Teacher: Mohammad Atiqueddin, Number of children: 65. Atique has a commanding voice and anticipating ‘halla’ during the roll-call, he announces, ‘Koi halla karega to bahut pitega!’ (Those who make noise will get beaten hard!). It has its effect. Once the ritual is over, Atique’s table is flooded with scholarship forms and he takes his time collating those.

He then turns towards the blackboard and instructs students to copy the three headings – shabd (words), ling nirnay (gender determination) and wakya (sentence). He writes under the ‘words’ category the following: dahi (curd), sadak (road), moti (pearl), tamasha (circus), aag (fire), baat (talk/issue), raat (night), din (day), etc.

He announces the task – ‘Inka ling nirnay karna hai aur wakya banana hai, kya karna hai?’ (The gender has to be specified and sentences have to be made. What has to be done?). All say in chorus, ‘Wakya banana hai’ (Sentences have to be made). ‘Bolo to ‘ling’ me kya likhoge?’ (Say, what is to be written under gender?) All quiet (naturally!). A little annoyed, he then says, ‘Bataya tha na ki jis se purush jati ka bodh hota hai usko puling kahte hain’ (Hadn’t I said that the word that signifies the male is termed as the masculine gender). He knows that children will have difficulty in doing the task, as it has been framed. So he proceeds to make sentences himself, with each word one by one, saying – ‘roti jal gayee’ (the roti got burnt), ‘raat ho gayee’ etc. Not once does he ask them to provide further examples, even though these are simple sentences from the children’s own repertoire.

He keeps moving in the room, brandishing the stick and asking them to complete the task. Children try to write but none of them manages to correctly note down what he is dictating. The bell rings and Atique gestures to ‘correct’ the exercise, by peering into their copies before leaving for another class.

 

 

The teacher assumes that the ‘exercise’ cannot be done by children, and soon proceeds to supply the answers. This is the typical style of conventional teaching – to first mystify the task, as done here by framing it in awkward words that deliberately distance it from the children’s experience, and to then assume the role of the knowledge giver! Children by this age speak their language perfectly and are well aware of sophisticated rules of grammar. If only they were allowed to speak and participate in class. They would laugh if we spoke to them with genders reversed or with any of the rules used incorrectly; they need to be encouraged to see the patterns of their own speech and to articulate the rules for themselves.

However, the formal language of the classroom usually alienates the child (Rampal, 2003) even though she may fluently speak in her first language. Indeed the hegemony of such sanskritised Hindi, in its ‘standard’ or manak form, needs to be interrogated and discussed with teachers. This is critical in the case of tribal children, who speak languages which teachers do not understand, and are considered much lower in the hierarchy of status.

The hegemony of English is, of course, another matter, and has given the additional edge to the marketable ‘quality’ of private schools. As the head teacher had mentioned, parents preferred this model school to the English medium schools in the vicinity. Is their level of satisfaction a good indicator of its high ‘quality’? Or does it only show that the school manages to function, no matter how ritualistically?

 

 

Case 2: A Lone Shuttling Teacher – A ‘model’ for the OBCs? This school is over 30 years old and serves the predominantly Other Backward Caste (OBC) communities of the village (Kanchanpura). Of the three rooms, one is reserved for the Cluster Resource Centre (CRC) meetings and materials. The headmaster and effectively the lone teacher of the school tells us that there are 169 children enrolled, of which 127 are in classes I, II, III, while 42 are in classes IV and V. A community member tells us that the second teacher hardly ever comes.

Classes: I, II, III; Teacher: R.P. Sinha; Number of children present: 40/127. The room is well ventilated but not clean. Alphabets and numerals are painted on the walls. The children all sit mixed, neither in graded groups nor class wise. He brings a pocket board and asks them what it is. Then he himself answers and mechanically shows each alphabet card, asking only the class I children to respond. There is a lot of noise and he scolds them again and again. He holds a bamboo stick and uses it to point to the cards. Children continue chatting as he leaves for class IV and V. Soon he returns, and this time addressing class II, he picks up a few plants and asks their names, for which they give the local names.

 

 

He continues his monologue, asking and immediately answering his own questions.

Name some flowers.

Have you seen a lotus flower?

It grows in a pond, no?

What is the colour?

It is red, no?

How does it look?

Lotus floats in water, no?

Now write the word (lotus).

Then he switches to class I children and asks them to identify the alphabets from a chart brought from the CRC room. The chart is hung high up, from where most children cannot read. Next he turns to the class III students and asks them what they are to do today. Before they reply, he himself names some fruits. Not surprisingly, any question that demands more than a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ seems difficult for them to answer. Class III students can ‘read’ only the poems they have learnt by heart, but no other text.

Classes IV, V; the same teacher, shuttling in and out; Number of children: 10/42. Most benches are empty and the children say this is generally so, since some have joined the nearby private school, while others have chosen to play and not attend school. They are asked to read a chapter on rural life from the Hindi textbook. They read haltingly. He asks one girl to stand up and read till he comes back from the next room. In response to every instruction the children say ‘yes sir’. On his return he asks them to do the question-answers given after the lesson. When a girl writes a long answer he says she could have written a simple, shorter one. He then dictates all the answers.

 

 

Case 3: ‘Community Based Schools’ – more euphemisms for the poor: Village Kharjamma has about 80-90 households and a community based school (the name for the EGS centre in Bihar) runs in the house of the teacher, Renu Kumari. About 20 children sit in two rows in the passage of the house, with boys and girls facing each other. There is neither a blackboard nor any other material. In the courtyard three male members of the family are busy chatting, including Mr Pandey, the husband of the teacher, and begin to leave on seeing a visitor. Mr Pandey goes out to fetch more children and the strength soon rises to 30. The boys are younger than the girls, as the older boys move to the government school or to a private school located in Maghra.

Children have been asked to write tables as far as they ‘remember’. The atmosphere is quiet. Renu Kumari shouts at one child, in Magahi (the local dialect), ‘Chhav ke teen kar delhin; ab na hatayee galti na? Kal se pitaibe’ (You wrote three instead of six. If you repeat the same mistake you will get a beating). Some boys are writing ginti from 1 to 10, while others are writing Hindi alphabets. She starts dictating the table of 22 to Guddu. She proudly declares that this student is ahead of all as he can even ‘read’ the tables he has crammed, up to ‘baaiska’ (table of 22). ‘Beeska tak to kaigo janta hai’ (many know up to 20). She moves to Kaju to dictate the table of six – ‘Chhav ka pahara likh to Kaju; jaldi, jaldi, thoda teji me’ (quick, write the table of 6).

Grade III girls have been instructed to read the chapter titled ‘Chatur Lomdi’ (clever fox). They have difficulty and haltingly speak aloud separate syllables. Since reading and writing cannot be done simply by copying or through memorization, none of the children here have acquired even the most rudimentary of these skills. ‘Sir, dekhin na’ interrupts Kaju with all the tables he has written (he addresses her as ‘Sir’). She corrects what she had dictated and pats his back, instructing him to next dictate the table of 10 to Pooja.

 

 

Sulekha has finished writing the multiplication table of two. Renu instructs a senior girl to recite the table and Sulekha follows. Sulekha, like most others, has scripted the numerals as if drawing a rangoli pattern, but cannot read anything, and like most others is waiting for someone to come and recite what she has ‘written’.

It is now two hours since ‘teaching’ began. Mamta, after enthusiastically drawing some pictures is yawning and lying prostrate on the floor. She refuses to write despite Renu’s instructions. Most of the children are by now in no mood to continue. Guddu Kumar has progressed further today. He is doing ‘taeiska’ (table of 23) without being able to recognize any alphabets. He cannot read and only guesses from the photographs. In fact, most children ‘read’ only through memory, holding the book as a prop in the act. Within two hours they have all reached saturation; the teacher is tired and the children visibly bored.

‘Teaching’ tables up to 40 in class I, which they cannot even read? The instructor had no plan in mind and continued to assign tasks haphazardly, moving randomly from child to child, without realising what they were or were not learning. She had slotted children purely in terms of the tables they had memorised, since most had not learnt anything else, even after two years. The teacher was also terribly insensitive to the children’s emotions (making the whole class publicly humiliate late-comers, calling them names), and clearly needed intensive training.

 

 

Renu has evolved a style according to her particular conditions and concept of ‘teaching’, with no understanding at all of children’s learning. Tables were convenient as an unguided ‘writing’ task, to keep them busy, and she was proud that she remembered hers up to 30. Many regular school teachers too were found to be aiming for this feat, even to go up to 40 in the first year! Anyone who casually peeps inside the classroom may even get impressed. In any case, who really cares to look beyond the facade of what is popularly called ‘access’?

 

References:

N. Juneja, (2003) Constitutional Amendment to Make Education a Fundamental Right. Occasional Paper. National Institute for Educational Planning and Administration, New Delhi.

Ministry of Human Resource Development, (1993) Learning Without Burden. Report of the Yashpal Committee. MHRD, New Delhi.

J.P. Naik, (1982) Education Commission and After. Allied Publishers.

PROBE Team, (1999) Public Report on Basic Education. Oxford University Press, New Delhi (also the Hindi edition, 2002).

A. Rampal, (2003) ‘Texts in Context: Developing Curricula, Textbooks and Teaching Learning Materials’, in R. Govinda (ed.) India Education Report. Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

 

* Cases 1-3 are based on detailed classroom observations of schools in Nalanda district by Dr Suman Singh, Gaya College, Bihar, and Ms. Sharmila, Ankur, New Delhi, conducted during a participatory study of the SPEED programme supported by Unicef.