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Lutyens’ Delhi

A friend of mine who loves gossip and wit described Lutyen’s city as everyone’s envy, the nation’s pride and the regime’s embarrassment. He explained that the critique of Lutyen’s Delhi is a psychoanalytical syndrome. It is a belated response to the nationalist envy the BJP has always felt. It is the one thing it shares with the Party Left. Both felt left out of the nationalist movement and both have tried to redeem this lack in their own way. The Left devoted itself to the idea that nationalism was bourgeois, while the Right insisted that the Mughal and British still reside in Lutyen’s Delhi. They claim that only an exorcism by BJP can rid Delhi of the symptoms of Lutyen’s Delhi.

Lutyen’s Delhi was a creative expression of power. Power had to reside, had to reside in eloquent spaces, grids of roads that provided a cartography of the imperial, houses that were so colonial that each demanded an outhouse of subsidiarity. A sense of hierarchy was needed for the aesthetics of the imperium. Power needed its own sensorium of space, majesty, distance, humanity and Lutyen’s Delhi was an architectural projection of that.

The idea of Lutyen’s Delhi was attacked twice; first by Patrick Geddes, the Scottish biologist and polymath, who designed over 29 Indian cities. Geddes claimed that Lutyen’s Delhi epitomized a mechanical Delhi with its arid grid of roads. It lacked the organicity of a native world and created a nested wave of exclusivity. Probably the best story to capture this came during the first years of independence where, ironically, a meeting of the Planning Commission had just been convened by Nehru. The Gandhian J.C. Kumarappa arrived in a tonga and was held up by the army, who could not believe he was an official. It required Nehru’s intervention to let one of our most famous Gandhians into the officialdom of Delhi.

One has to contrast this story with the folklore around the head of the Ford Foundation in the early years of Independence. Douglas Ensminger, as the political scientist Rajni Kothari told me, loved to move around Lutyen’s Delhi in a horse driven carriage. He pretended he belonged to the reign of viceroys. It was only apt that a technocrat would understand the continuity of power because technocracy was only a continuation of colonialism by other means. A carriage represented and evoked power while a tonga represented vulnerability, the impotence and improvization of the weak. The moral was clear. One cannot go dressed up as a native in the costume ball of the imperium we call Lutyen’s Delhi.

One must comprehend the difference in the idioms of the Geddesian and Modiesian critiques. A Geddesian re-reading Lord Acton would have said ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts obsoletely.’ Modi had no sense of fun or language. He would have insisted ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts obsessively.’ You are haunted by power, driven by it. In fact, eventually power drives the powerful. It becomes its own procrustean grid of behaviour and thought. Modi, like any johnny-come-lately, knew what power would do to those who just acquired it. He sensed it would turn the BJP into another Mughal or colonial regime as it enjoyed power.

Residence and residentiality was a good index of power, and Delhi had converted secularized colonial distance into VIP importance. Your residence was your claim to power and reflected your distance from it. The impotent and the aspirational lived outside the magical circle of power and perpetually envied it. Modi’s hunch was right but his answer to it was weak. He clung on to the idea of the smart city.

An ideal typical portrait between Lutyen’s city and smart city could elaborate this argument. A smart city was virtual, preening itself with the power of the digital. It wasfaceless, which is why it needed a face book. It was mobile, functional, aspirational. It had a sense of the past, no memory of monumentality. It did not live genealogy, it merely downloaded information. A smart city lived on data. It had neither knowledge nor wisdom which only power bestows on you. It was mobile, aspirational and memoryless. Lutyen’s city reeked of memory, imperialism and power. It oozed history from every pore. It reflected conspicuous consumption, the excess, the disdainful waste and contempt, the epic indifference only power and the powerful could convey.

Imperial Delhi proved too seductive to the new regime as ministers fought over preferred addresses. In fact, the smart city effete challenge to the Imperial city was a bit like history bashers who change the name of the street to keep power alive. Labels change, but relationships do not. Lutyen’s city, as an observer put it, had reclaimed both the natives and the alternatives of Delhi.

There was one last minute attempt to distract from this struggle. A diversion was created from Lutyen’s Delhi as a whole to Khan Market as a part. It was tactical that IIC, already a home to many in power, was not part of it. It was predictable that a party of shopkeepers should attack a market. Khan Market is a bazaar where the powerful meet to shop and look at each other. It is an informal avenue for voyeurism, where journalists often meet first because it is close to power and second, because it avoids the seediness of the Press Club. When Khan Market was attacked as a surrogate for Lutyen’s Delhi, the battle was literally over. Power reasserted itself as a habit, as a costume ball. One cannot speak power to power except from Lal Qila. One cannot hold a Republic Day parade in Khadi Boli. Modi lives in Delhi and he knows all’s right with the Lutyen’s world.

Shiv Visvanathan

 

Tuition culture

THE Indian education system has witnessed an increasing trend to keep students busy with private tuition, involving parents who spend hours searching for a good quality private teacher from the primary level to higher classes. Even tiny toddlers are subjected to private tutorials. Parents have failed to notice the negative impact that this has had on their children, as well as their academic performance. Most parents encourage their children to study with home tutors without thinking about its negative consequences.

Reportedly, some school teachers encourage and pressurize their students to take private tuition from the teachers themselves Threatened that they will fail in a particular subject, the so-called teachers intimidate both children and their parents. As per the Right to Education (RTE) Act 2009, ‘No teacher can engage himself or herself in private tuition or private teaching activity, to ensure that teachers must contribute in imparting quality education in the school itself.’ The RTE Act also explains that this applies to all government, government aided, and private schools. School teachers can provide private coaching two hours before and after school hours, defined as remedial or coaching classes.

These days, most of the students have less perseverance, motivation and self-confidence that affects their studies and results. The students who devote enough time for self-study can enhance their productivity and improve their learning curve, which can bring them more than 90 per cent in the examinations. Indeed, those who attend regular classes don’t need any private tutorials. Those forced to rely on private tuition are often unable to answer basic questions and do not even practice with additional questions at home. Therefore, students need encouragement to focus on school learning.

No doubt there is competition among students, but it should be approached through self-study to elleviate pressure and stress. The advantage of self-study is that one can somewhat predict the kinds of questions that could be asked in the tests. Self-study provides for a more thorough knowledge learning experience. Students who do not join private tuition and instead concentrate in school, will certainly score good marks in both the school and board exams. However, every student needs proper guidance, academic support and feedback, and not mere judgment.

Sudeshna Sanyal, senior consultant of Capgemini, and a former academic researcher of Jadavpur University, explained that to write off private tuition as a necessary evil may be the easy option. Instead, an effort should be made to figure out the reasons why the schools themselves are not emerging as centres of excellence. Let us take the Delhi schools as an example. Reportedly, the learning ability of Delhi government school students has improved significantly without going through private tuition. She also added that our school systems are inadequate and flawed in the basics, such as infrastructure (teacher-student ratio, libraries, playing fields), teacher training in work ethics, school management committees fostering parent-teacher relationships, to name a few. Besides, specific programmes like special learning programmes for weak students, happiness curriculum that includes meditation, storytelling, question and answer sessions, value education and mental exercises, need to be emphasized. Once the basics are sorted out and schools return to giving students a complete learning experience, this hype and craze for private tuition will reduce.

The private tutorial method impedes the thinking ability of young minds. Private tutors are seen as a tool to solve the problems of homework given in school, and the students do not need to do the hard work of self-study. It has often been noticed that the home tutor provides a selective note taking system for the student, which is harmful for an academic career in the future. This is not all. These days, children do not have time to spend on extracurricular activities such as playing games, doing physical exercise, relaxing, reading and more, because tuition takes too much time. The best learning exercise for children is to learn on their own rather than be spoonfed. It makes for an open door to a bright future. Hence, let us not waste a child’s life, as a child is the face of God and the future of the nation.

Mithun Dey

 

The ASER report

THE Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) brought out every year in January, has shifted its gaze this year to look at learning and development of the early years, or the preschool age of children. This is a welcome move, as the ‘Early Years’ lay the foundation for the rest of a person’s development – physical, intellectual and emotional, with 90% of human brain development occurring by the age of six, yet this crucial stage has often been ignored.

Multidisciplinary research from neuroscience, education and economics has demonstrated that if a child does not get a stimulating and enriching physical and psychological social environment in these years, the chances of the child’s brain developing to its full potential is considerably reduced. Positive inputs, care and quality education at this stage can have lifelong benefits, while neglect at this stage can have lifelong negative consequences.

Early years, or early childhood is defined as the first eight years of a child’s life. It is this period that is most important for the cognitive, motor, emotional, and social development of children. The ASER 2019 survey was conducted in 26 districts across 24 states with tools specially developed for the four to eight age group that included tasks which assess the cognitive, early language, early numeracy and social and emotional aspects of a child’s development. Based on these, the tasks sought to address four key questions: Can children do simple problem solving tasks? Do children have early language skills? Do children have a sense of numbers and quantity? Are children able to identify emotions?

The ASER reports throws considerable light on this critical age group and positions early childhood education as one of the most effective investments in development, as it lays the foundation for a child’s lifelong learning. There is also a large body of global research evidence that has demonstrated the importance of both cognitive and personal and social school readiness skills for future school and adult outcomes. It is important however to challenge the narrow construct of ‘school readiness’ that limits the focus to certain literacy and math skills. It is fundamentally important for educational programmes at this stage to be ‘developmentally appropriate’, and cater to all aspects of a young child’s development which include cognitive, personal and social skills as well as physical development. In this, the role of families and communities is also very important.

Currently there are three avenues for accessing early schooling in India. The most widespread comprises the 1.3 million anganwadi centres run by the Ministry of Women and Child Development across the country under the Integrated Child Development (ICDS) scheme. The other is the growing private sector, with more than 40% of privately managed primary schools reportedly offering pre-primary LKG and UKG classes as well. There is a third possibility as well, in the form of preschool classes integrated within government primary schools, for example in Assam and Jammu & Kashmir. However, even within the anganwadi system, early childhood education is not given priority with the focus being on nutrition.

The ASER report shows that children enrolled in anganwadis have far lower levels of cognitive skills than their counterparts in LKG and UKG. The findings from the report indicate that more parents are enrolling their children in private schools compared to the government run preschools. However, there is a visible gender gap as more girls are enrolled in government institutions and more boys are enrolled in private institutions. In most of these schools, rather than a play-based, age appropriate curriculum, what is noticed is a downward extension of the primary school curriculum leading to overburdening of the young learner. This needs to stop as it has a negative impact on the child’s learning potential. This phenomenon is becoming a crisis in several privately run preschools that are highly unregulated and implement developmentally inappropriate curriculum. The ASER reports highlights that more and more parents are enrolling their children in such low cost private schools as compared to the government run preschools.

The previous edition of the ASER report (2018) indicated that only 27.2% of Grade III students can read a Grade III level text, and 28.1% can do subtraction at the same level. Further, the report indicated that 25% of students leaving Grade VIII are unable to read Grade II level text, indicating a crisis in our education system.

The 2019 report indicates that at least 25% of school children in the 4-8 age group do not have age-appropriate cognitive and numeracy skills, making for a massive learning deficit at a very early stage. ASER ‘Early Years’ data shows that children’s performance on tasks requiring cognitive skills (such as sorting, seriation, and pattern recognition) is strongly related to their ability to do early language tasks (such as describing what they see in a picture) and early numeracy tasks (such as relative comparison of objects). This suggests that focusing on play based activities that build memory, reasoning, and problem solving abilities is more productive than an early focus on content knowledge.

A large number of India’s children are born to young, anaemic mothers, which predisposes them to developmental delays that can be addressed by early identification and intervention. Such services need to be offered from birth to three years as well as the three to six year stages. The goals of achieving good foundational skills could be compromised if these services are not provided in the early years. Many learning difficulties such as dyslexia need to be identified and addressed in the early grades as well, as they result in poorer literacy and numeracy skills down the road if left unattended. In several countries a developmental milestone tracker is maintained for every newborn and this is required to be shared at the time of preschool/school enrolment.

Early childhood education is included in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 that were approved by India along with many countries around the globe. The SDG targets indicate that by 2030 countries should ‘ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education.’ The importance of this age group has also been emphasized in the draft National Education Policy (NEP), which describes early childhood education as perhaps ‘the greatest and most powerful equaliser.’

Although the RTE mandates that children should enter Grade I at age six, data suggests that children are entering formal schooling earlier, without the exposure to appropriate early childhood education. Allowing underage children into primary grades can put them at a learning disadvantage which is difficult to overcome. The batch of students who will enter Grade I (5-6 age group), would be best served by a year of good quality preschooling delivered through the public education system. This will ensure that children entering the formal education system are school ready. Data indicates that acquisition of crucial skills like following instructions, interacting with peers, identifying shapes, sizes and patterns, counting among others, between the age groups of five and six years correlates strongly with the ability to read with comprehension and do basic maths by the age of eight or nine. The entire age group of 4-8, needs to be looked at as continuum of foundational learning, and the curriculum designed accordingly, paying attention to all aspects of a young child’s development – cognitive, social, emotional and physical, with a focus on activities that strengthen skills in these areas, rather than subject learning.

Developing strong foundational learning skills among young children requires teachers to have appropriate knowledge, skills and attitudes for teaching early language and literacy in diverse and multilingual settings to children from marginalized and vulnerable communities, who do not get access or exposure to second languages at home. This requires strengthening of the pedagogies of teaching and learning for the foundational stage during pre and in-service teacher education and through mentoring and coaching through a continuous professional development approach. Teacher preparation should include a good understanding of ‘whole child development’, with strategies of inclusion, differentiation and child centric instruction as a part of the regular teaching-learning process and an emphasis on equitable learning in the classroom.

Preschools have often been seen as a luxury, only meant for children of the wealthy, but the ASER report, 2019, once again shines a light on the fact that good quality early childhood education is not a luxury but a necessity, and can have the most benefits for disadvantaged children. Indeed, the learning crisis the country is experiencing in primary grades can arguably only be arrested if we pay attention to the early years and implement high quality ECE programmes.

Shireen Vakil and Jyotsna