By Patricia Mukhim
There’s been much talk about the abysmal performance of the education sector in Meghalaya after the Performance Grading Index (PGI) launched by the Ministry of Education which looks at school education at the district level, was published. Naturally the State Education Minister tried to run for cover by blaming past governments for not doing enough to boost up the school infrastructure in rural Meghalaya. At around the time that the report surfaced, reports of schools in Garo Hills being run in rooms not bigger than a garage, dilapidated and susceptible to floods, had surfaced, thereby reinforcing the lack of attention by successive governments to provide basic facilities to their people. In Meghalaya there has been an over-reliance on private educational institutions, many of them run by church organisations. Rather than strengthening government run institutions, somehow it was felt that the missionary run schools would deliver better outcomes and make much better use of resources given to them. Hence many of such schools got absorbed into the deficit system of grant-in aid.
Now the missionary run schools are not exactly affordable. While fees may be minimal, the uniforms and books cost money. Many parents are seen lining up at the homes of MLAs and ministers to look for financial assistance to enable them to buy the books and uniforms and to send their kids to school at the beginning of the school year. This is where the problem lies and which should be addressed. When the government speaks of free and compulsory education it should mean that education should not extract a cost on parents. Even uniforms and books – a once in a year expenditure ought to be provided by the government.
The other problem with education in Meghalaya today is that children at the pre-primary level are being taught by Anganwadi workers. With all due respect to these ladies, they are themselves not educated or trained to teach. Teaching is not something you just pick up by the wayside. A teacher needs to understand basic child psychology to really know how to deal with each of these fragile minds. The pre-primary or pre-school level is actually the formative years of a child and they are the years that determine how that child is going to turn out in the long run. This idea of tasking Anganwadi workers with educating kids at their most vulnerable stage is fraught and needs to be revisited. The Anganwadi workers at main centres are paid a paltry Rs 4,500 a month at the main centres and Rs 3,500 at mini centres while Anganwadi helpers get Rs 2250 a month. Just look at the injustice of it. How can someone entrusted with children’s welfare be paid so little and be expected to educate young minds?
Those living in the comfort zone of the state capital will not understand why rural and peri-urban folks rely so much on Anganwadi centres. These are more like creches that look after kids while their parents eke out a hand to mouth living. Poverty is real and present in Meghalaya. It’s a different matter that the last socio-economic caste survey was done way back in 2011 and since then we have no data of the number of Meghalayans living below poverty line. My regular visits to rural Meghalaya informs that poverty has grown and so has landlessness. Hence the tussle between sending kids to school or making them work to augment the family income is ever present. Too often the latter wins.
According to the Annual Status of Education Report -2024 released by PRATHAM, the NGO working on educational outcomes in rural Meghalaya, the number of students enrolled in government schools in 2024 was 38.4%. Since not many can afford private educational institutions in rural Meghalaya it would mean that a huge chunk of children in the above age group are out of school. And this is visible because the young kids are either in the fields helping their parents or tending to cows and sheep. The heartbreaking question is – what is the future of these out of school kids? Their parents are poor; that poverty is replicated by their children and there is no visible effort at poverty alleviation or land restoration for those who have lost their land to mortgage or have sold it to meet immediate needs.
Since we are discussing education and learning outcomes in Meghalaya’s schools, the PRATHAM Report says the roots of the learning gap in India are multifaceted and deeply intertwined.
The education system focuses too much on aggregate scores but misses out on subject-specific mastery. This often leads to students being promoted to the next grade despite significant gaps in foundational skills. Then there’s the problem of absenteeism, whether because of economic pressures on families or illness or the need to look after their younger siblings. This creates a discontinuity in education, leading to an incremental learning gap.
The less we speak about classrooms the better. They are unattractive, overcrowded and teachers don’t have sufficient teaching materials nor the passion to teach. This adds to school-dropouts. Too often teacher absenteeism makes children and their parents wonder whether it is worth sending their kids to school. But the flip side is also that teachers are increasingly being used for non-teaching jobs and assigned administrative duties. All this adds to the lack of interest in students attending school. They feel there’s more freedom to be themselves outside the classroom.
At the risk of being repetitive, let’s admit that our education system still focuses on rote learning for passing examinations rather than developing critical thinking skills. You need exceptional teachers to trigger thinking among students and allow them to give as many open-ended answers to a single question and the space to be wrong without being judgmental. At the end of the day the student must be able to apply what is learnt in the classroom to real life outside the classroom. Isn’t that what is called experiential learning? What’s the point of teaching environmental studies if students are not allowed by their school principals to join a river cleaning drive or they are not taken for a nature class to see deforestation with their own eyes and be asked how they would tackle it at their level and about raising their voices for the right causes? Isn’t that real life learning and the purpose of all education is? This in effect is what learning gaps are all about. Students learn better outside the classroom where they are uninhibited and constricted by space and the need to be silent when they feel like speaking. Many students go into the next class without mastering the foundational skills. Such students will face challenges in the real world. It is the law of nature that individuals with no critical thinking skills (thinking on their feet) are more likely to face unemployment. This needs to be understood by our teaching communities.
The challenge for educators in Meghalaya is to identify specific areas where students are struggling, by using diagnostic assessments. Do we have such diagnostic capacities? Only when we have diagnosed the problem can we begin to focus on targeted instruction and individualized support, which could include amongst other things – remedial teaching or one-on-one tutoring and use of technology to help the students get a grip on the foundational skills.
Currently there are two schools of thought in the country which are proffering their own sets of remedies to improve the educational standards in the country today. There are those who think that the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 is a harbinger of a new dawn for education. Others contend that the NEP is a hastily adopted piece of legislation that has not gone through wide public discourse and have hence come up with a Peoples’ Education Policy (PEP).
The NEP 2020 has laid out bold and ambitious goals for the country which says, “Attaining foundational literacy and numeracy for all children will thus become an urgent national mission, with immediate measures to be taken on many fronts and with clear goals that will be attained in the short term (including that every student will attain foundational literacy and numeracy by Grade 3).
The NEP states upfront that the highest priority of the education system will be to achieve universal foundational literacy and numeracy in primary school by 2025. The rest of this Policy will become relevant to students only if this most basic learning requirement (i.e., reading, writing, and arithmetic at the foundational level) is first achieved.
All this is fine but the system needs a complete overhaul and that is the most stubborn challenge to achieve. This is where people’s involvement comes in and hence the Peoples’ Education Policy…