There is no doubt that the quality of education in India, especially in government schools but also across a whole range of private schools, is very poor and needs a complete overhaul. Repeatedly surveys show that the learning outcomes of children are way below what is expected based on their age and grade.
This is true for basic literacy and arithmetic as well as critical thinking and articulating abilities. Interventions towards improving quality of education are then often limited to a focus on ‘learning outcomes’. This reflects a severe limitation in understanding what role education, especially school education, can play in the lives of children as well as for society.
School education performs multiple roles, including of course teaching children to read and write and preparing them for further education and/or employment.
This became all the more evident during COVID-19 and the long school closures in India. Schools keep children way from the hardships of child labour.
For girls, schools are what helps them postpone the pressure to get married and through schools they gain mobility and freedom. Thanks to the mid-day meal scheme, school is where many children also get their first proper meal of the day. In some states now they even get some breakfast. It is very common to see that older child in government schools (the mid-day meal scheme only covers children up to class 8) often do not eat anything all day or depend on some unhealthy cheap snack that is available in the market (usually a packet of namkeen of some kind or biscuits).
School is where children interact with those belonging to other castes and communities, get a chance to play, think of themselves and dream of a better future. Schools offer new values and a web of interaction outside their villages, dreams and aspirations for a better future. Along with this, of course, schools provide them the knowledge and skills as well as discipline and the joy of learning. While schools in India are lacking in many ways, they have the potential to be all of this for every child in the country.
Government schools in India are largely accessed by children belonging to poor and marginalised communities. With the elite and even the middle classes abandoning the government school, inter-generational inequality is perpetuated right from the beginning. Yet, education is one of the only ways through children are able to break the shackles of caste, gender and poverty. While there is a growing alarm that children are not learning, there is not enough attention being paid to the equity aspects of education. At no time is the ‘learning crisis’ being attributed to lack of teachers, classrooms or other infrastructure. There is also a total disregard for children’s vulnerabilities given their location in the existing social and economic hierarchies. The current system is one where the child feels completely disempowered and is blamed for ‘failure’.
Also read: What Kind of Future Are We Building for Our Children?
‘No detention’
Realising the disadvantages that children who are first generation literates face in coping with the formal education system the Right to Education Act, when it was passed in 2009 included a no-detention clause.
Basically, the Act stated that, “no child admitted to a school can be held back in any class or expelled until the completion of elementary education (Classes 1 to 8)”, (Section 16) which basically meant that a child would be automatically promoted to the next grade and could not be detained for any reason. The RTE Act was amended in 2019 to withdraw the no-detention policy. The 2019 amendment allowed state governments to detain students in the fifth and/or the eighth grades of they failed in the year-end examination as well as the re-test after two months. Since then, 18 states and UTs have adopted this new policy. Further, in December 2024 the Union government scrapped the no-detention policy in schools governed by it, including Kendriya Vidyalayas and Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas, affecting around 3,000 central schools.
The no-detention policy has basically been blamed for the poor learning outcomes, arguing that in the absence of the need for exams children were not assessed and were being promoted even when they were not ready for the next grade. While the no-detention might have led to no-testing in many schools in the country that was not its purpose to begin with. It in no way meant that children must not be assessed for how they were learning. Assessments, including tests and exams, are an important way in which teachers also get feedback of how each child is responding to what they are being taught.
The idea behind such a policy was to ensure that children do not feel undue pressure and also so that children do not drop out of school mid-way. Detention leads to insult, humiliation and results pushing a child out of school completely. It rarely increases her capacity to learn and gain knowledge.
Rather than finding this easy scapegoat in the form of the no-detention policy the more relevant question to be probed is on how accountability can be fixed for ensuring every child is learning. Some children will always learn with the least help, for various reasons, – but the system should surely be designed to address the weakest. After all, it is the teacher’s job do figure out what it will take for each child to learn and the system’s responsibility to provide all the support that the teacher requires to play this role. When there are such massive gaps in the system, is it even fair to label the child a failure.
The focus should be on improving school infrastructure, ensuring there are enough teachers, labs, libraries and other facilities, and a teaching-learning environment that is sensitive to the context of children’s lives. The challenge is to put in place systems where every child feels respected and cared for and to build a public education system that expands children’s freedoms.
Dipa Sinha is a development economist.
