As we all might have realized by now, as a nation we are in the ‘Amrit Kaal'; and in early last December, the Prime Minister shared his vision that we would be, or try to be a ‘Viksit Bharat’ by 2047. Now this probably has a lot of indicators and benchmarks but a focal point in that would be the employable youth who would enter the workforce in and around 2047.
Sitting half way through 2024, I imagine that a child gets 12 years of school education, 3 or 4 years of graduation and perhaps 2 years of a Masters. The youth going through all these levels of education and entering the workforce is about 22-23 years of age. That is almost exactly the number of years we have in the run up to 2047. So, the child entering school today is actually going to be the person entering the workforce then and contributing to or enjoying the ‘Viksit’ part of the vision 2047.
One of the top indicators to being ‘Viksit’ is obviously an economic indicator, and let me just allude to the cliched phrase and, in some ways, the expectation of ‘getting rich before getting old’. Low-skilled jobs like manufacturing and assembly lack ambition and imagination and add less value than higher-skilled jobs like Research and Development or Sales and Marketing. Coming from Jamshedpur where there are factories everywhere and people are engaged in both these types of jobs, I can actually vouch for this. What I’m really saying is that we should encourage more and more students to move into fields like research or other higher-skilled jobs, and create a pull for the discouraged, unemployed youth by creating better work opportunities, and creating work itself for those on the fringes of poverty. Now before I get carried away further let me sort of stop talking development economics here and come back to education.
One of the buzzwords in education today is, irrefutably, ‘learning outcomes’. Teaching through learning outcomes as the base - instead of textbooks - gives students conceptual clarity and an opportunity to apply concepts to solve relevant problems, known or unknown. The moot point is that if students are able to achieve grade-level learning outcomes, they will be able to get better work and live better and also get to contribute to the economy and thereby to the vision of ‘Viksit Bharat’. Now the question is - WHERE DO WE BEGIN?
And the NEP 2020 suggests that we begin at the beginning. It lays a lot of emphasis on Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) and, in fact, buckets the pre-school years and grades 1 & 2 in the Foundational Stage and Grade 3 to Grade 5 in the Preparatory Stage. Now here, grade 3 is very crucial. We know through research that Grade 3 is an inflection point for children because they are expected to read and write simple sentences and perform basic arithmetic by the end of Grade 3. Children who do not gain these foundational skills may fall behind and have difficulty catching up later. The government has made this a national priority by including FLN into the New Education Policy 2020. The Department of School Education and Literacy has launched the NIPUN Bharat Mission and advised the states to ensure that Grade 3 students are able to achieve FLN skills by 2026-2027. There are different learning goals or lakshyas for each grade level. The grade 3 lakshyas are that every child should be able to read 60 words per minute with meaning, read numbers till 9,999 and solve simple multiplication. However, the evidence of improvement is not compelling thus far and the national average shows us that there is a long way to go. The ASER Report 2022 shows that only 25.9% of Grade 3 students are able to do Grade 2 Level subtraction and only 20.5% of Grade 3 students are able to read Grade 2 level text.
Education, and especially the paucity of attaining Learning Outcomes is pretty much a wicked problem; that is to say there is no single root cause. Therefore, the proposed solution is also multi-pronged. The first aim should be to evaluate the student levels, continuous and low stakes formative assessments are being conducted in class through qualitative observation based on the performance of the child in a multitude of experiences and activities. The feedback from these activities would help the teachers to improve their teaching practices and work towards attaining the outcomes. And then there are large scale assessments at the district, state or national level to get a larger picture of how each state or district is performing. Based on the outcomes, the recommendation is that the pedagogy is toy-based or play-based (think Jaadui Pitara) and can be done through story-telling and use of technology (think e-Jaadui Pitara). In addition, the NCERT has also designed NISHTHA (National Initiative for School Heads and Teachers Holistic Advancement) for teacher training on FLN. Finally, there is the digital platform, DIKSHA where the aim is to upload literacy and numeracy content, questions and explainers for quick reference and implementation.
The administration and governance pieces are broken down into levels or layers - National Mission, State Mission, District Mission, Cluster or Block Mission, and SMCs for better monitoring. There is also provision or suggestion for community participation to organize quizzes, readiness melas for a citizen-led audit of the achievement of these Lakshyas. Tackling the FLN piece and it is an ongoing process. State and national education departments, the bureaucracy and the consultocracy have and are continuing to give their best to achieve the best outcomes. In states like Haryana, parents too are playing an equal part in monitoring student's learning achievement. However, just like any other systemic reform, it's a long-drawn process and we’ll only get to know how we’re faring in FLN skills through periodic checks and finally at the end in 2026-27. As an extension, the attainment levels of the FLN lakshyas in 2026-2027 may as well be counted as an indicator on how we’ll fare as a nation in 2047.
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