By Girish Linganna
Jan 23: THE COUNTRY’S RIGHT TO EDUCATION (RTE) Act guarantees free, compulsory education up to the
age of 14 years. By this age, most children complete middle school education. How India’s children complete their middle school and high school trajectory after leaving elementary school—and before turning adults at age 18—determines their ability to take on adult responsibilities in the future.
Two recent studies on the cognitive skills of India’s adolescents show worrying trends in the country’s school education. The first report—in the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), a biennial publication by the non-profit organization, Pratham—named ‘Beyond Basics’, looks at teenagers’ thinking abilities. The second—the ‘State of Teachers, Teaching and Teacher Education Report’ (SoTTTER)—from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), examines the quality of teachers.
‘Beyond Basics’ reveals that up to 25% of children aged between 14 and 18 years cannot easily read texts meant for Class II level in their own language. It also shows that over half of the children in rural India find basic mathematics difficult.
These results, which used a wide range of data over time, make us question whether India’s literacy rate is really 77.7% as reported in the National Family Health Survey-5 (NFHS-5) for the years 2019-2021. Literacy that does not incorporate the fundamental skills of the three ‘R’s—reading, writing and arithmetic—is essentially ineffective.
The Centre of Excellence in Teacher Education (CETE) at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) on Thursday (January 18, 2023) released SoTTTER, which analysed the availability and deployment conditions of teachers. The report by TISS regarding the condition of teachers, teaching and teacher education is very concerning and may shed light on the findings of the ASER report.
The study, covering eight states in the country, shows that 35% to 41% of mathematics teachers in both government and private schools do not have the requisite skills to teach mathematics because they did not study it during their undergraduate studies. In simple terms, the lack of qualified teachers is a bigger problem in elementary schools and gets a little better in middle and high schools. However, this issue is still serious in mathematics classes. The early problems caused by this shortage are hard to fix later on.
While the government also avowedly lays great stress on multidisciplinary, holistic education, SoTTTER, 2023, has picked holes by highlighting that there is a great paucity of teachers for such subjects as physical education, music and art. The report states that the number of physical education teachers overall is low with 36% of them present in government schools and 65% in private ones. The number of art and music teachers is even lower.
According to the ASER report, only 43% of youngsters aged between 14 and 18 years can correctly perform simple division (dividing a three-digit number by a one-digit number). This is a skill typically learned in the 3rd or 4th Grade. A similar proportion cannot read English sentences, though this figure is an improvement from the 47% recorded in the 2017 ASER survey.
In 2017, too, ASER’s findings had revealed that about 25% of youth in the older age group lacked foundational reading and arithmetic abilities and could not read a basic text fluently in their own language. Over half of those covered by the study could not solve simple 3-digit by 1-digit division problems. With regard to applied literacy and numeracy skills, most youths struggled to understand written instructions and do financial calculations.
‘Beyond Basics’ points out that, in such subjects as history and literature, which are chosen by more than 50% of the students, understanding complex ideas and challenging texts is key. India’s school education, especially in public schools in rural areas, is extremely bad. This is a big problem for a country that depends on its young population for growth.
It is surprising that this problem has continued for many years (as shown in ASER reports over a period of time) even though a lot of money from each year’s Budget is allocated to education. A 2022 report from the Ministry of Education says that states use nearly 80% of their education Budget for elementary and high school education.
Data from the Reserve Bank of India shows that the states are spending less on education now. In 2014-2015, they spent 16% of their total Budget on education, but now this has gone down to only 13.3%. This includes big cuts in the southern states, as well as in Punjab (9.2%) and Arunachal Pradesh (9.7%). Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh spend less on education than the average for all of India.
For the 2023-2024 period, the Karnataka government has set aside ?37,587 crore for education, which is about 11% of its total annual Budget. However, such states as Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, which have increased their education spending over the past 15 years, have not seen much improvement. The quality of education depends on how much money is spent and how effectively it is used.
Most importantly, the crisis in education highlights misguided policy choices as the focus on quickly pleasing people through caste, religion and free giveaways has become a common practice now.
(The author of this article is a Defence, Aerospace & Political Analyst based in Bengaluru. He is also Director of ADD Engineering Components, India, Pvt. Ltd, a subsidiary of ADD Engineering GmbH, Germany. You can reach out to him at: girishlinganna@gmail.com)