A forest is a library but a library is not a forest!

For those who can read it, a forest is like a library. From 1986 to 1992, I lived in a tribal village. Among the most fulfilling time I spent was in the forest, especially in the company of children I taught or those who lived near my home.

As we moved into the forest, I saw them look alertly at the bushes, trees and much else around them. They knew which of these presented opportunities (a fruit or a berry or a leaf that could be made into a whistle), which presented a threat (an insect that bit or stung or a danger such as a snake), or where you might fall and hurt yourself, or which was a good spot to sit and take a look at the world around you. They anticipated phenomena – which parts would be more interesting or more treacherous or dangerous after a shower or when it got too hot or after leaves had fallen and it was difficult to see the ground. They noticed changes, they commented on how something had been earlier and how it was now.

 

Children would accurately point out holes on a slope to say whether a scorpion was inside them or not, or would be able to pluck a particular leaf that could be crushed and put on a scratch or a wound, and acted as an effective, medicated bandage.

 

They navigated on paths new to them to find their way or set a general direction. They knew if an area was good for their purposes, such as when herding a group of cattle during a given season or when collecting forest produce. They made sense of sounds from different types of crickets or a truck lumbering through the forest track a kilometre away. They sensed when water was near or when not to mess with things.

 

The alert look that seized their faces, the searching eyes or ears or nose or hands or feet as they moved about expertly and casually, were all signs of persons competently reading the environment around them. That pause, curiosity and exploratory actions showed something new was being encountered, processed and recorded. The reaction, of moving urgently away from something or towards it, was instant reading that you and I might not conceive.

 

Very often, children would learn not just from their own experience but that of others too, by asking questions or being told about something at an opportune moment. As a novice, I was enabled a glimpse into this world by my expert guides and often left feeling inadequate by their quickness in reading the world around them.

 

In contrast, the kind of reading I taught them using books was too basic. It helped them read texts, maybe even make sense of those and occasionally enjoy or appreciate some pieces. But I doubt it could make them alert to ideas, concepts or new information in the way in which they were in their native forest environment or capture shifts in meaning or explore excitedly in search of a prize (e.g. a new revelation) or make their life more interesting or worthwhile or just plain rooted. No, we teach reading as an act to be performed, perhaps to satisfy some assessment, not as an enriched and enriching life to be lived.

 

In the end, as our children go through schooling, they move away from their enlivening forest but never reach that lively engagement with the written word and the vast windows of meaning it ought to open. In the end, the forest may be a library, but a library is not a forest.

Key Focus Areas for Improving Education Quality - 2025-27

NITI Aayog – National Workshop on Quality Education

28 February, 2025

 

 

Getting Back To The Basics –

Key Focus Areas for Improving Education Quality

 

 

Subir Shukla

Ignus Pahal

 

 

In terms of getting back to the basics, in order to improve quality of education and learning for each child, there are three areas we need to focus on.

1. Increase the teaching learning time.

2. Improve the quality of processes and relationships that take place within that time, and

3. Prepare the ground for all children to attain higher order learning and not remain just at the basics.

 

Now to go into these in some detail.

 

1. Improving teaching learning time

While it is well understood that teachers are now burdened more than ever before with many other tasks than teaching, including filling in forms on WhatsApp or undertaking other activities, teaching-learning time is now also deeply affected by climate change too.

 

In a survey conducted in four major states of India last year, it was found that around 15 days on average are lost due to school closures resulting from climate events. However, between 20 to 30 days were also affected by near extreme climate events – i.e., when school was not closed but it was too hot or too cold or too wet to learn. And then when school does start after a gap, it is not as if momentum continues from before. Thus, we are losing around 40 to 50 days of teaching learning time every year, apart from all the other burden that we already have.

 

This requires us to do an audit and have some stronger data on exactly how much teaching learning time is actually there.

 

We also need to assess whether all the other tasks we are asking teachers to do lead to improvements in learning or not.

                                                                                                             

And then, given climate-induced disruptions, school needs to be seen not just as a space where we learn but as a state of learning – one in which learning continues beyond the physical building in order to overcome the effects of climate change.

 

Overall, our objective should be to enhance the time on task, within which there is engagement time and academic learning time, as much as possible.

 

 

2. Improving the quality of processes and relationships

Here, our first step would be to work towards a have common agreement on exactly what we want to see happening in our classrooms. Policies have always asked for active learning on the part of students, starting with activity-based learning in NPE 1986, followed by constructivism in NCF-05, ‘activity, exploration and projects’ in RTE 09 and now ‘experiential learning’ based on activity and constructivism within the NEP.

 

However, your notion of experiential learning can be very different from mine! And at present, different people are doing different things under this. Some believe experiential learning happens only if you take children out of the class. Others believe that some action inside the class is enough. Yet others believe that without serious reflection and application or cognitive engagement on students’ part, it is not experiential learning, or at least the learning part is not there.

 

Schools are now getting inputs from a wide range of sources, including many different NGOs, very often with very differing views on what pedagogy there should be. So, there are now contradictory versions happening in many places, thus dissipating all the effort underway.

 

On the other hand, we also have a situation where all teachers are being asked to strictly follow instructions given from the state level, consisting of which lessons are to be taught on which particular days. This is very difficult to achieve between, say, a tribal village and an urban area or a multilingual or a non-multilingual area.

 

Here, a degree of teacher autonomy (within a framework of agreed-upon principles) is extremely important. It is quite obvious that a one-size-fits-all approach does not work and we now need to go beyond. Most of our inputs (such as curriculum, textbooks, lesson planning) do not take into account the multi-grade context, the multi-level context resulting from children's differential attendance, and the MLE context, which is now beginning to be thought of. So along with teacher autonomy, contextualization for diversity matters a great deal.

 

In order to gain traction on the ground, we need to create ownership on part of implementers, including teachers. Such ownership is only possible if there are some decisions in which the implementer is involved. That is where teacher autonomy – at least in terms of deciding the what to teach, when to teach, how to teach, in keeping with broadly agreed upon principles – makes a great difference.

 

The way to do this would be to enable a common vision, agree on goals and then let implementers decide their targets, state these publicly and support them in the process.

 

We would also need to work strongly on the belief systems of teachers and officials. It is often not acknowledged but discrimination remains a deep part of our system, where many teachers (and admin personnel too) do not believe that children from certain sections of society will learn. In fact, this is reflected in newspaper reports every year when after the board exams, it is often reported that a child from a poor family has done well. It is a news item because she is not supposed to do well!

 

A very good way to enable progress is to use performance indicators, not just for teachers, but for all involved, including HM, supportive supervisors such as BRCs and CRCs, BEOs, DIETs, DEOs, and state level personnel and institutions too. It is not possible for the school and teachers and children to improve without those at higher echelons improving too. Thus, collecting data on performance of all echelons and students would enable us to take corrective steps and generate momentum towards improved learning.

 

We also need to explore creating incentive for states, districts, blocks, clusters and even schools to focus on those at risk of being left behind. One good way would be to ensure that everyone is rated on basis of the performance of the bottom 25% in any cohort. If states and other entities know that they are ranked on basis of the performance of those falling in the lowest band, it would encourage them to focus on the needs of those farthest from the expected levels, thus raising learning levels overall.

 

In order to work on

·  belief systems of teachers and others, and

·  to create and implement TPD through a ladder or progression of performance indicators,

we need to urgently develop our SCERTs and DIETs, a process just initiated by MoE. In these institutions, it is important to place funding within the institution rather than with SPOs. Otherwise, we will be stuck with a situation where the institution is responsible for implementation and accountable for it, but does not have access to the funds needed for the same.

 

Along with this, if it do not work on CRCs and BRCs, then we have a cutting edge that is not cutting! We need to revive the supportive supervision mechanism of CRCs and BRCs around performance indicators as mentioned earlier.

 

The performance indicators could also be used as a basis to create a cadre of teachers for sectors where we are in short supply. This includes ECE where we need lakhs of trained personnel within a very short time, and ongoing TPD with assessment of performance on basis of indicators could offer an authentic pathway towards professional qualification.

 

And lastly, in order to improve classroom processes, we actually need to strengthen administrators at all levels. When I began working, there were only 28 lakh teachers in India. Today there are 98 lakh teachers. However, the number of administrators has hardly gone up. You might recall when you were young that there used to be something called ‘school inspections’ undertaken by administrators in order to assess quality of learning. That is no more possible because there is neither the staff nor the facilities to do so. Apart from being strengthened through staff and facilities, administrators also need to be supported in moving beyond a command-and-control approach towards transformative leadership.

 

While all these steps are much needed and also possible as they build on what has already been done in the country at different times, they cannot be implemented without a solid core of experienced resource persons working with the MoE and state education departments and institutions (in addition to those already in place). We need, in fact, to create a national pool of resource persons for this purpose, as a task force rather than a permanent ‘standing’ group.

 

3. Moving towards higher order learning

On the third challenge, preparing the ground to attain the higher-order learning that NEP 2020 repeatedly emphasizes as being a key aspect of ‘quality’ education.

 

First, if we aim for the basics, we are likely to achieve less than the basics, which means that the overall learning level will remain low. We need to aim high in order to get somewhere. While the curriculum often provides for this, it is in classroom processes that these get ignored, often because teachers do not know exactly how children who find it difficult to master the basics can go to higher order aspects.

 

To move towards higher order learning, therefore, it would useful to recognize the fund of knowledge and experience that students bring into the class. Every student is an expert on something or the other! A tribal child may know a great deal about plants and animals, while a slum child in a city might know a lot about materials because he's worked as a rag   picker. How can that knowledge and that capability, which they display outside the class actually be part of what happens inside the class? In fact, in a recent paper on street maths versus class maths, Esther Duflo points out how well children are able to handle the maths outside. So, we have a treasure of student capabilities, but it lies unutilized.

 

Similarly, community too can be a knowledge partner. For instance, a truck driver may know a great deal about the geography of India. An ironsmith may know about how to separate impurities from metal, which is high-level chemistry. Or a farmer may be well aware of weeds or a community health worker can enlighten students on many aspects of the human body. It is worth asking: How can the community emerge as a knowledge partner to enable deeper learning to happen in the class?

 

Finally, it is only when the assessment too starts looking at higher-order competencies and learning outcomes that these will become part of the normal process of the class. Hence, creating and implementing appropriate assessments, keeping in mind key areas emphasised in NCFs, would go a long way to enable higher-order learning to happen, ultimately contributing to the improvement of quality.

 

 

4. Finally, a fourth ‘basic’

While the three strands I have talked about address the critical basics we need to sort out, there is one overarching aspect too, which is of enabling continuity in the reform efforts. As we all know, whenever leadership changes, especially at the state level, there are disruptions in what is underway. Consequently, many good efforts do not see implementation over the duration that is needed for them to have an effect. As has been said, we have many beginnings, but not enough middles and endings.

 

In order to overcome this, it might be useful to consider creating a ‘educational quality protocol’. Just as there is no drastic change in administrative or financial procedures when leadership changes (because these have ‘protocols’), similarly, educational quality too needs to spell out a protocol. This could help ensure that random, sudden, or unexpected changes do not take place. For example, no ongoing project may be stopped without a sufficient evaluation conducted in a specified manner, or no annual work plan and budget may be changed in such a way that it contradicts a perspective plan that is put in place or that unnecessary piloting of what has already been piloted will not be undertaken. Such a step would ensure that there is continuity and reduced wastage.

 

Similarly, when any new leadership comes in place, a detailed briefing by the MOE on what has been done in the state and what needs to continue, would also be of great help.