The government spin masters have introduced two canonical
phrases “knowledge economy” and “demographic dividend” reassuring of propitious
omens of progress. But the making of the knowledge economy seems to be
whimsical as the UNESCO’s 11th Education for All (EFA) Global
Monitoring Report released last week revealed bitter facts about the spate of
the present education system in India. Even the Annual State of Education Report
(ASER) by the NGO Pratham has a similar story of the educational sector. Though
government has heavily lobbied around the idea of galloping the economy by
improving the educational base of the country by projecting precocious enrolment
rates for the primary education and reducing the school-drop outs, the EFA
report had brought into light serious learning crisis among children. According
to the report around 250 million children of primary school age are not
learning basics in reading whether they are in school or not. There is a severe
parity in the learning outcomes and the disparities are prominent in rural
India between rich and poor children. The performance of poor girls in rural India is
at a much lower level and the overall performance in mathematics was worst.
Data collected from different states of varying income levels
have clearly exhibited a wider difference in learning. For example among the
wealthier states of India, 44% of grade five children in Maharashtra and 53%
children of Tamilnadu could perform a two digit subtraction. Among the rich rural
children, girls performed better than boys. The poor girls of wealthier state
like Maharashtra are slightly better than their counterparts in poor states
like Madhya Pradesh. Wide spread poverty in states like Madhya Pradesh and
Uttar Pradesh hardly allowed children to reach till grade five. In Uttar
Pradesh only 70% children could make it to fifth grade while nearly all rich
children could do so. In Madhya Pradesh 85% of poor reached grade five against
96% of rich. While in schools poor girls have lower chances of learning basics
of reading. These glaring disparities point out to the failure of the target
support to reach those who need it most.
It was observed that children who learn less are likely to leave the
school early. Children who achieved lower score in mathematics are twice more
likely to drop out by the age of 15 than who performed better. In India while
the richest young women have already achieved universal literacy the poorest
are projected to reach the same level by 2080.
The data suggests that in India after completing four years
of schooling nearly 90% of children emerge as illiterates and after 5-6 years
of schooling 30% emerge as illiterates. Young people from poorer households are
likely to read and the situation even worse for poor young women. Though youth
literacy is improving it is not fast enough for the disadvantaged groups.
Education for all is a global movement led by UNESCO aiming
to meet the global education requirement of all children, youth and adults by
2015. Universal Primary Education and gender equality in education constitute
two important goals among the eight targets of Millennium Development Goals
(MDG). Education for All movement was launched in the year 1990 when
representatives from 155 countries met at a world conference in Thailand and
agreed to universalise primary education and vowed to massively reduced
illiteracy by the end of the decade by formulating six goals. A decade later,
the World Education Forum (WEF) met at Dakar, Senegal to take stock of the
progress made. It was noted that many countries were lagging far below the
targets. They formulated the Dakar Framework of action and reaffirmed their
commitment of reaching the education for all by 2015 and entrusted UNESCO to
lead the movement.
Dakar Framework for Action (post 2015) mandates all countries
to set aside 6% of GDP or 20 % of total government expenditure for education.
While South and West Asia spends about 3.7% of GDP and 15% Government’s
expenditure on education, some of the countries are spending less than 3% GDP education.
Around the world countries are still grappling with the ways to reallocate
their educational budgets to children who need it most. Hence it is proposed to
increase the tax base so that the additional amount of revenue generated by the
tax exemptions can be diverted to educational needs. India’s wealthier state
Kerala spends $685 on education on a single child as compared to $100 in Bihar.
In some cases though the amount spend was same, the grant is not utilised for
the activities aimed at improving the quality of education or learning. Hence an
increase in fund allocation should take into account the current cost of
education so that benefits could reach the poorest.
The EFA report suggests that the answer for the learning crisis
lies in having quality teaching or making quality teaching a national priority.
It is estimated that between 2011 and 2015 South and West Asia need to recruit
1 million teachers to achieve ideal student teacher ratio of a teacher per 32
children in the lower secondary education. A four pronged strategy has also
been suggested for providing best teachers. These include -attracting the best
teachers; improving teacher education through training programmes; getting
teachers where they are needed most as inequality in deployment leads to few
teachers being deployed at fewer areas and finally providing incentives to
retain best teachers. Further, curriculum should be more inclusive for children
to connect themselves to the subject. Computer-assisted learning has improved
learning perceptibly. It is found that ambitious curriculum drawn out for
children in India seems to be one of the reasons for learning crisis.
India has the largest number of adult illiterates in the
world with 287 million. Though the literacy rates increased from 48% in 1991 to
63% in 2006 the population growth has cancelled out the gains. While India has
comparable rate of pre-primary school enrolment of 70% and 95% of primary
school on par with other developed nations, when it comes to quality education
it is placed in the list of 21 countries facing extensive learning crisis.
India has reduced its spending on education from 13% of government budget in
1999 to 10% in 2010. Report reinforced that the cost of 250 million children
not learning basics would translate into loss of $129 billion or 10% of global
spending on primary education. At least 37 countries are losing half the amounts
of money spend on education as children are not learning. Quality learning can
generate huge economic rewards by increasing the GDP per capita by 23% in 40
years.
Through concerted efforts India has achieved the distinction
of consistently higher levels of enrolment in primary schools. It shouldn’t
fritter away the gains of huge demographic advantage by poor learning outcomes
and by wider disparities in learning. With renewed energy, India should
urgently focus on producing successful teachers to end the learning crisis.
Else the unacceptable levels of inequality in access and learning would cripple
the very foundation of the concept of “knowledge economy”.
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