TEN SUGGESTIONS TO IMPROVE EDUCATION IN INDIA

Few will be surprised at the news that India ranks very low in global rankings of learning. 

Here is my das paisa on what to do about it. 

In India, the emphasis in education has always been on developing technical manpower at post-secondary levels. Improving quality, access and infrastructure at primary and secondary levels has always had much lower priority, until very recently. These policy priorities of the last 65 years urgently need to be reversed. Here are 10 proposals to do that. 

1. Let the main beneficiaries of technical education, viz., industry, pay for good quality education by investing in universities and IIT's, and vocational institutions. 
2. Let the state enable and subsidize community and private sector participation in primary and secondary education, and let schools and workplaces link up more effectively so that the walls between them are lowered. 
3. Let more teacher training institutes be created by the state and others to raise a generation of educators who model good learning, and who are able to design good SOCIAL learnscapes (see 9 below). 
4. STOP EQUATING EDUCATION WITH SCHOOLING and devise alternative flexible channels for learning, using IT and broadband. 
5. STOP EQUATING ASSESSMENT WITH STANDARDIZED EXAMS, and introduce a wider range of assessments of performance based on authentic understanding. 
6. Develop alternative credentials that post-secondary institutions and employers can recognize, based on the new assessment methodologies. 
7. Restructure schools so that their students can learn to function creatively, compassionately and productively in the real world, not spend their childhood and youth in misery preparing for one test after another. 
8. Assess and reward private sector contribution to education by measurable benchmarks for enhancement of intellectual and social capital, not by RoI or market share alone. 
9. Let the best teachers teach at the primary levels so that by the time learners reach secondary and tertiary levels, they are capable of SOCIAL (Self-Organized Collaboration for InterActive Learning). 
10. Devote the major share of educational resources to developing primary years and secondary learning for an unknown future, not for the past.

WHAT DOES THE ENTRY OF CORPORATIONS INTO THE INDIAN EDUCATION SECTOR MEAN?

The announcement of the entry of Reliance, HDFC, Wipro and other big corporate names into the Indian education sector raises many questions. 


Why is it that we always talk of education as if it were nothing more than schooling and attending universities and writing exams? Schools, even good ones, are usually very badly structured to promote learning for the future. The corporate entry into the education sector will simply exacerbate the problems of education if they only open new schools that do the same things in the same way as the old schools, but only with more impressive cosmetics. Many of the so-called "international" schools in India are good examples of this, because they have been promoted by people who have little understanding of learning, but have plenty of cash to park into what they see as a new marketing opportunity, with IB, IGCSE and other exclusive foreign "brands". Broadening educational access is one of the new strategic emphases in the IB, but what are the Indian IB schools doing to promote this agenda?

Are the corporates going to promote new structures of learning based on contemporary understandings of the learning process? Are they going to provide new and affordable learning opportunities for the masses using the declining costs of IT and broadband? Are they going to make it possible for students who can't go to school to receive a personalized education on demand? Are these students going to be able to acquire a qualification based on performative demonstrations of their understanding? Are these qualifications going to lead to jobs? Will corporate education qualify students to contribute usefully to improving their own communities? I certainly hope so, but all this cannot be the task of the corporate sector alone, but also of community level organizations. The role of the state should be to enable and incentivize the community level organizations and corporates to do what each does well.

It is time to develop performance indicators ("balanced score cards") to measure the contribution of the corporate sector (and indeed all learning service providers) to education not just in terms of RoI and market share, but also in terms of enhancement of social and intellectual capital. We need convincing evidence (not always *measures*) that the schools they support develop a broad range of future oriented skills and dispositions, not only for students, but also for teachers. Here is a partial list: ability to use and interpret data, communicate sensitively with people of different cultures and social backgrounds, conduct scientific and conceptual inquiry supported by analytic reasoning, develop sound arguments, exercise social and emotional intelligence, solve problems creatively, reason soundly on ethical matters, enjoy and create a broad range of aesthetic experiences, reflect usefully and deeply on their learning, engage in activities that challenge them meaningfully, and also improve their respective communities.

Do our employers value these skills and dispositions? Or believe that they also make for a richer and more productive life? Are the corporates interested in moving education towards these kinds of goals? Or is the education sector going to be captured by a drive to maximize market share by fooling parents with money into believing their children are getting a superior education simply because they acquire a foreign diploma?