A recent all-India Survey sought to probe students’ minds on the quality of school education in our country.Presenting the findings

It is an open secret that India’s school system, a legacy of the colonial era, needs to be overhauled if it is to meet the needs of a modern and largely young nation. Yet students themselves have rarely been asked for their impressions, much less consulted on ways to improve the quality of education. To help fill this lacuna, the International Forum for India’s Heritage (IFIH) conducted an NCERT-sponsored Survey on Education for Standards 9-12; over 11,000 students were asked to answer 72 questions. We conducted the survey in English (66%) and seven Indian languages; students (40% of them girls) were drawn from 278 schools spread over 21 States; 85% of the students were from private schools, 81% from urban schools. To our knowledge, it is the first time that such a survey seeking to probe our school-going students’ minds has ever been conducted in India, a fact edifying enough in itself.

The questionnaire’s first part dealt with Indian culture and values, the second part with the students’ experience of other aspects of the educational system; while some questions were of the yes/no type, most required the students to spell out their thoughts and suggestions, which provided a substantial qualitative feedback. Results proved revealing at many levels.

Findings on culture in education
We first questioned students on aspects of Indian heritage: arts, science, festivals, traditional sports and games, literature, inspiring historical or mythical characters, yoga and spirituality. The results were striking: 91% of all students felt that they would benefit from learning elements of Indian culture. Among the aspects of Indian culture that students would like to learn, art comes first, followed by asanas and pranayama, physical games such as kabaddi, and meditation.

Coming to values, only 38% of the students felt that they were acquiring some values at school – an unflatteringly low proportion; 7% specifically stated they were acquiring no values at all, 11% gave intermediate replies, and 44% did not reply at all. As regards the values which students said they would most like to practise in their own lives, honesty came first followed by truthfulness, brotherhood and friendship, duty and dharma, reverence for / inspiration from one’s parents, self-perfection, courage and simplicity each, and finally non-violence. When asked which values they felt they had acquired from stimulating stories from the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Panchatantra, etc., the categories and proportions were very similar, which reflects on the inspirational potential of such texts and stories when used as educational tools.

In a study correlating 11 different questions and defining a five-grade scale, 83% of students showed a substantial degree of interest in Indian culture or in learning about it at school, denoting an eagerness for cultural education.

Analysing the variables, we found that Indian-language students value Indian culture (including yoga and meditation) markedly more than their English-medium counterparts. While Tamil-medium students are the most dissatisfied as regards the attention paid to Indian culture in their curriculum, students of Gujarati and Bengali mediums are those most interested in Indian culture; barring Hindi, English-medium students score the lowest. Overall, students of rural government schools showed far more interest in Indian culture, followed by their counterparts from private urban schools. Students of government urban schools seemed the least interested.

This is undoubtedly one major finding of this Survey: Indian culture has been kept out of sight of our children, and they are asking for it to be restored to them – a legitimate demand. When their British, French or German counterparts are imparted something of their country’s culture at school, it is baffling why Indian students should be denied access to Indian culture and the world-acclaimed values that it has nurtured for millennia.

Findings on the quality of the educational system
Other important aspects of the students’ experiences came to light:

• Mother tongue vs. English: 47% of the students feel that the mother-tongue medium is the best to facilitate understanding (against 24% who favour English). This feeling is especially strong in government schools (63%), and among students studying in Bengali, Kannada, Tamil and Gujarati. Even among English-medium students, 40% favour the mother-tongue medium. This does appear to make a strong case for a mother-tongue medium of instruction.
• Moreover, English-medium students find the examination system much more stressful than do Indian-language medium students; we showed that one contributory factor for the stress is the difficulty of following studies in English. One more negative aspect of the English medium.
• Competition: Even though 64% of the students find competition beneficial, 43% feel that the examination system is stressful (the figure is probably much larger in reality).
• Textbooks: 62% find the load of textbooks they are made to carry to school unnecessary and excessive. Strangely, despite countless complaints from educators on this score, out of sheer lethargy most schools continue with this cruel and wholly unnecessary practice; the medical consequences on the children’s spines are apparently none of their concern.
• Role of parents: While the majority seem satisfied with the role of their parents in their education, 35% report being under pressure to get marks.



• Physical training: 70% of the students find physical training a pleasant change, but 31% of them find it insufficient. Most schools have some physical activity once a week, but many have it once a month or even less. This is clearly a great lacuna, and India’s poor performance at international sports events must certainly be traced to it. Medals apart, a wonderful opportunity to build the health and physical endurance of our children is thrown aside for imagined academic gains.
• Eco-awareness: About half of the students report participating in the planting of saplings or cleanup programmes, but only 26% have been taken on visits to nature spots. 67% desire a green area in or around their school. This is another serious lacuna, when the growing generation is going to be exposed, more than ever, to critical environmental issues.
• An elaborate study of a “satisfaction” pattern, correlating 15 different questions and drawing a five-grade scale, concluded that only 42% of all students could be said to be satisfied with the quality of school education (out of which 8% were “very satisfied”). Another 28% are average, 23% are dissatisfied and 8% very dissatisfied. Moreover, students of government schools, especially in urban areas, are more dissatisfied than those of private schools. Overall, Bengali-medium students rank as the least satisfied, followed by English-medium and Tamil-medium students. Taken together, these figures establish a deep undercurrent of dissatisfaction – one that our educationists and policy makers would do well to take into account.

Remarks on Expression
Our studies of patterns highlighted a few important points:

• The proportion of blank answers to challenging questions was generally high (21% over all questions, rising to 36% over the more challenging questions), suggesting a lack of habit of original thinking or expression. We feel that this is because the school system relies largely on mechanical methods of teaching and learning, and discourages students from articulating their own thoughts. This exposes another serious shortcoming of the present schooling system, which overall seems designed to produce machines rather than thinking beings.
• Analysing the pattern of replies to the Survey’s more challenging questions, we found that students of government rural schools are the most capable of expressing their thoughts. Private urban school students come a distant second. This unexpected result calls for reflection, especially from those who swear by privatisation of education or who think that the urban milieu provides a better education than the rural one.
• In terms of medium, the same study shows that students in Tamil and Gujarati are well ahead of others, including English-medium students, in the ability to articulate their thoughts.

Conclusions
IFIH’s Survey highlighted the failure of the average school curriculum to meet the cultural needs of students, regardless of the school type or medium of instruction. This confirms long-standing observations by educationists that schooling in India imparts no meaningful cultural values to the students. In particular, English-medium students come out as the least interested in Indian culture; whatever the cause, this points to a systemic failure. Value-based education has long been viewed by educationists as supremely desirable, yet the average Indian school appears to be as far from this goal as ever.

To meet the students’ aspirations, therefore, it would be essential:

• to reduce the pressure of examinations and competition, and to lighten the syllabus so as to make space for such disciplines;
• to integrate Indian culture in the curriculum in an innovative manner, and also to encourage schools to conduct extra-curricular activities of a cultural nature;
• to work out ways to reward students who excel in cultural disciplines.

The above can only be done if deeper reforms are envisaged. In fact, the students themselves have come up with valuable suggestions for change:

• Reduction of the syllabus, in order to make room for quality.
• A less mechanical pedagogy: many complained in strong terms about teaching methods which, they felt, brought no stimulation to thinking. Students also asked for teachers to have human qualities such as patience, understanding, cheerfulness, etc.
• A practical-oriented pedagogy: there was a consistent demand for a more practical, less bookish or theoretical orientation unrelated to the student’s life and environment; some asked for audio-visual material, computers, more sports and physical activities, visits to places, industries, nature spots, etc.
• Examinations: 24% of students suggested either doing away with exams altogether, replacing them with daily evaluation, or making them more flexible in terms of subjects and timing; exams should test the child’s real talent and understanding, including practicals, not merely his or her capacity to “mug up” the textbook. This seems to be the key to all other changes one may envisage in the educational system.

Despite some limitations, this Survey has highlighted important areas where school education has failed in its mission to equip a student to face life. It also shows the falsity of the still widespread notion that school education can be designed and imposed without the active participation of the students. In any effort to make those twelve years of schooling a more fulfilling period in a child’s life, students should not be seen as passive recipients. Their voice is a genuine one and deserves to be heard. They should be accepted as active participants in their own education.

The author is convener of the International Forum for India’s Heritage (www.ifih.org). He can be contacted at michel_danino@yahoo.com.

As Director of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), Prof. Krishna Kumar has brought to his position an awareness of the systemic realities in Indian society’s approach towards Education for All. His sensitivity to the teacher-student relationship and openness to research in teaching methods relevant to Indian conditions have finally brought centre stage some of the exciting educational experiments, notably by Eklavya, the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme and the MV Foundation, among others. Some of these approaches have found place in the school curriculum.

However, the bottlenecks in democratising the school system persist. Krishna Kumar has gone on record to say: “There is plenty of evidence to say that India’s present-day society lacks the desire to see every child at school.”

For years, he and other educationists such as Anil Sadgopal and Shantha Sinha have been warning that the government school system founded on the Indian Constitution will collapse unless a genuine national effort is made to prevent it. The far-reaching recommendations of the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) and the new National Curriculum Framework (NCF) cannot take off “until people stop believing that only the best and the brightest matter … and that only their own children deserve education of the best quality….”

Krishna Kumar is the author of A Pedagogue’s Romance (Oxford). An advocate of peace education, he has written Battle for Peace (Penguin) and Prejudice and Pride, which is a study of Indian and Pakistani history textbooks. Excerpts from an interview with Krishna Kumar:

Education was mentioned no fewer than five times in the United Progressive Alliance’s Common Minimum Programme. But despite the work done by the revived CABE to achieve a national consensus, there is a feeling of let-down after the initial enthusiasm of 2004. We hear the Prime Minister expressing hope that the nation’s schooling system will improve. Has the agenda shifted away from education?

Education is a long-term investment. To make such an investment generously, one needs faith in the future and the hope that we will get there. For appropriate investments in education we also need socio-political imagination and a social consensus on certain basic ideas, such as the idea that every child matters. In our country such a consensus has yet to emerge. Far too many people still believe that only the so-called bright or smart children matter and deserve education of the best quality.

Also, a lot of people perceive education as a private concern, in the sense that they worry about their own children but don’t feel hurt or pained when they see others’ children exploited or treated badly. In such a social ethos, any government will have difficulty in pushing radical educational reforms.

In 2004, you took over as Director of the NCERT, which guides the State governments and provides replicable materials and models for school education and teacher education. After embarking on a curriculum overhauling exercise, in line with the National Policy on Education of 1986, you oversaw the emergence of the NCF in 2005. How representative were the debates and discussions held for this purpose?

I am very happy that the Ministry of Human Resource Development enabled the NCERT to build the National Curriculum Framework with the help of CABE. It is a document with tremendous potential for guiding long-term reforms in the system of school education. A massive attempt was made to enable all representative voices to be heard across the table so that ideas could be sifted. A major concern was to benefit from research to incorporate its findings in curricular policy. As many as 21 National Focus Groups were set up to cover all major points and areas relevant for curricular re-designing.

Each focus group included not only academicians and educationists from various universities and institutes of teacher education, as well as the NCERT’s own faculty, but also, very importantly, practising schoolteachers from all over the country. Quite a few rural teachers were among them. Their voices had earlier been largely ignored. In addition, we ensured that the voices of the more innovative NGOs [non-governmental organisations] known for their good work in education were also heard. These grassroots organisations had worked where the system had failed to reach, and NCF 2005 mainstreamed their ideas and innovations. The draft NCF also received wide attention and participation from the States. Its final approval by the CABE marked a historic national consensus on pressing issues in education and on the nature of curricular reforms required. We count this as a positive achievement.

The approval of NCF 2005 was followed by the preparation of new syllabi and textbooks with the approval of a National Monitoring Committee. The new syllabi focussed on reorganising knowledge in a psychologically and socially defensible manner. The issue of curricular burden, caused by the incomprehensibility of irrationally assembled syllabi and poorly prepared textbooks, was addressed.

The new textbooks are an entirely new kind of material. The main concern of NCF 2005 was: “Why has education become a burden rather than a source of joy?” The books are based on the recognition that children construct knowledge with the help of experience and activities. In every area, from science and maths to social science and language children must be given a space to reflect, ask questions, wonder, and probe sources of knowledge outside the textbook. The NCF process has been fruitful in bringing about a major shift in perspective. It permits the child’s view to become the centre of teaching.

Isn’t it a fact that NCF 2005 goes only to elite schools, mostly English medium, Kendriya Vidyalayas, Navodaya Schools and private schools? And there too, it is only after the eighth standard that CBSE [Central Board of Secondary Education] schools are required to use them? What is being done to promote these curricular guidelines and model textbooks in State-run schools?

The NCF is certainly not meant only for elite schools. Its approach and recommendations are for the entire system. A number of its recommendations, in fact, focus on rural schools. It is true that the syllabus and textbooks based on it are being used by all the CBSE schools. But several States, such as Goa, Sikkim, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, have already sought copyright permission to reprint them. So, NCF-based material is also being used in many State schools.

More significantly, quite a few States are currently preparing their own plans for syllabus and textbook reforms. Kerala, Bihar, Mizoram and Punjab are examples of this kind. Within the next few years we expect to see an NCF-oriented curriculum design in these States.

The NCERT had given a one-time grant of Rs.10 lakh to each State in the country to promote NCF in the language of the State and to compare its current syllabus with the syllabus we have proposed, so that a plan for future reforms can be made. Several States have taken up this challenge. This exercise is being carried out with the involvement of State Councils for Educational Research and Training (SCERT) and District Institutes of Education and Training (DIET). The most recent experience is that of Uttar Pradesh, which organised a seminar in Lucknow and invited all the DIETs to participate in the process of analysing the NCF and its relevance for the State.

Which are the areas in which change is not up to the expectations – such as examination reform and teacher education, both of which will impact the implementation of NCF 2005?

These are two sectors that need urgent attention. A modest beginning has been made in examination reforms. The Council of Boards of School Education (COBSE) has made an effort to build consensus among the 42 school boards in India, on some basics like improving the quality of questions. This is no small matter, and I am happy that the CBSE has taken some concrete steps to include at least some questions of a reflective nature in the examinations to be held in March. It is not clear whether all the subjects will show evidence of this effort, but I am hopeful that the change will be visible. Among other boards, Kerala has taken some measures. Let us see how much change they bring about. Evidently, examination reform is a complex exercise and India has a long way to go before its children can benefit from an improved strategy to assess them. The NCF’s recommendations on other aspects of examination reforms have received scant attention. For instance, it recommends a staggered examination calendar, offering children the freedom to take some papers in March, the remaining later on.

Similarly, the NCF says that children who repeat Class X should have the option of taking a school-based exam for Class X rather than the Board exam if they wish to do so. Schools have welcomed this recommendation, but no Board has moved in this direction. The NCF’s focus group on exam reforms talks about several other measures to reduce stress and to make examination an educative process.

If progress in examination reform has been slow, the case of teacher education is worse. The sector is facing a grim situation, with rampant commercialisation on the one hand and a lifeless, uninspiring B.Ed. curriculum on the other. Quality teacher education programmes such as the B.El. Ed. of the Delhi University, focussing on the specific needs of elementary education, are rare. We need drastic reforms in B.Ed. and other teacher training programmes for primary and pre-primary classes. We are currently designing a new course structure for our own Regional Institutes of Education. It will be a modest beginning. The real power to bring about major changes in this sector lies with the National Council of Teacher Education.

Would you agree that for young people looking for opportunities, teaching is the last option, and a woman’s option? That is, given the status of women, it is not a “serious” profession.

These are very negative trends. Frankly, I feel quite worried about the state of teacher education in the country today. We are in a situation far worse than when the Chattopadhyaya Commission took stock of the issues of ghettoisation of the profession. They made significant recommendations for making teaching attractive and for teachers’ welfare. But after the 1990s and globalisation-related structural adjustment programmes, teaching lost out both in terms of status and in professional autonomy.

And this has happened even as the teacher’s responsibilities have greatly increased. Society does not recognise the contribution of teachers in dealing with the problems that children face today, with many stresses in the social fabric and in families. Nor does the state. With the result, statutory reforms for improving the available provisions for teachers have remained neglected. The profession is in a deep crisis today and in certain parts of the country it is in shambles, with unqualified, part-time para-teachers serving in place of professionally committed teachers.

The CABE discussions were followed with considerable interest. They ranged from girls’ education and inclusive education, universalisation of secondary education, autonomy of higher educational institutions, integration of culture education in school curriculum, regulatory mechanism for textbooks and parallel textbooks taught in schools outside the government system and financing of higher and technical education. Also, there were discussions on the often repeated promise of neighbourhood schools for all, the Common School System. What is happening to these recommendations?

The CABE was a remarkable exercise, and has performed a very important role. If the recommendations given by its sub-committees over the last four years are implemented, they would move India towards a national system of education with improved quality. But the CABE, like the NCERT, is an advisory and not a statutory body. It is only an instrument of dialogue, and has no executive authority.

And yet, despite the different political scenarios and viewpoints, a national consensus was achieved in the deliberations over the NCF in September 2005. The CABE also approved several other reports submitted by its own sub-committees.

The Eleventh Plan has received enormous inputs from these reports – for example, on girls’ education and on incorporation of culture in the curriculum. The report on regulatory mechanisms for textbooks used outside the government system of schools was also approved, but the States have done little in the matter of the recommendations.

On higher education, the CABE approved a range of good proposals, but this is an even more difficult sector for reforms than school education, apparently not only because of its commercial potential but also because several basic reform ideas have been neglected for a very long time. Curricular reforms belong to this category, and it includes the question of orienting college teachers towards communicative and interactive teaching.

The CABE had recommended a Right to Education Bill to implement in the 86th Amendment to the Constitution. Are we anywhere near passing this Bill? Will the Bill be passed by the Centre or the States? How will the Bill negotiate the difficult space of jurisdiction over schools, given that education is a State subject?

That is a moot question. The Right to Education Bill, even if it is passed by the Centre, will have to be implemented in the States. So the Government of India decided to formulate a Model Bill for the States to pass. But the States’ response has not been positive. The Fundamental Right to Education Bill has yet to be notified in order to get enforced.

Centre-State relations in this crucial area are complex and have not been properly defined or even examined in the current context. The Centre provides broad orientations and the States are supposed to look after execution plans. We need far greater clarity, we need to put our minds together. It is not so much a political but an administrative issue, which has remained unaddressed since colonial times. For instance, the Kothari Commission back in the 1960s recommended a pattern of 5+3+ 4 years of schooling. This has not happened everywhere. More than 10 States continue with the practice of four years of primary education. Similarly, there are multiple boards of education.

In Tamil Nadu, for instance, there are as many as four boards, or streams. We have a backlog of reforms in education, both of structural and administrative nature. As for the Bill to enforce the right to elementary education with financial support, we need Central legislation.

We live in a very divided society. People just defend themselves and their own interests in everything. (Points to bottled water on the table) We even drink different kinds of water, and education is like that. It all depends on class, caste, gender. For at least two decades there has been a high value placed on education even by the poorest. But the system has not evolved to the point where their children get the attention they deserve.

This interview first appeared in Frontline Vol. 25, Issue V, March 1-14, 2008. It is reprinted here with permission.

Assessments have become a bad word in our society. At most they qualify as a ‘necessary’ evil. But this needn’t be the case. Assessments for students are like competition for companies – we can regard them as evil and unnecessary – but we also see them as something that allows us to benchmark, that positively eggs us to do our best, and thus can benefit society as a whole. Of course, it may be a while for this view to be more widely accepted.

Much of our negative view of assessments stems, justifiably, from the dreaded ‘Board Exams’. Since the NCF Focus Group paper on ‘Examination Reforms’ deals with this aspect of assessments, we can examine some aspects of Board Exams and the recommendations in that paper.

The author is Managing Director of Educational Initiatives Pvt. Ltd., which provides research based offerings on student learning and assessment. He can be reached at sridhar@ei-india.com.

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Shruti Sircar

In school, we often find that learners need to grapple with concepts and ideas presented in English. They are expected to learn new concepts in a second language and also simultaneously improve their language. How do students cope with complex subject matter in a language they do not know very well? Where does the difficulty lie – in the unfamiliar concept or in the unfamiliar language?

To answer this question, let us begin at the very beginning. In primary schools, children learn to read and write in their home language (L1) and English. Literacy training starts even before they enter school. Many children become aware of the association between print and sound, when they start recognising products from the characters written on the labels.

The author is Reader, Department of Linguistics and Contemporary English, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. She can be reached at shrutisircar@gmail.com.

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Mini Krishnan

Some may fear World War III
Some may fear growing old and bent
But the future I fear the most
Is a continued present
Christine Pangen (age 15)

The greatest concern of adults is raising the next generation and guiding them by interpreting the world to them. All our plans, the things we put by, our own inheritance whether material, creative or religious, are things we want to pass on. Why? Because we believe they are the really precious things. The moment a child arrives, parental anxieties and ambitions bloom. We graduate in our worries for them. From “Will she sleep through the night – will he survive childhood illnesses – what if she coughs and chokes to death while I’m asleep?” to “Should he be a vegetarian – what languages should she know – what should I tell him about money?” we find ourselves taking hourly decisions on how to raise the children in our care.

The author is Editor Translations, OUP India and Concept/Series Editor, Living in Harmony, an eight Volume Peace and Value Education Programme for Indian Schools. She can be reached at minik@airtelmail.in.

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Dr V Yoga Jyotsna

Former President Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam and a galaxy of intellectuals envisioned a “developed India” by the year 2020. It envisaged a “major transformation of our national economy into a world-class economy; where the countrymen live above the poverty line, their education and health is of high standard, national security is reasonably assured… adequate attention is paid to the development of special human resource cadre in the country to meet these objectives.

Let’s look at the significance of Political Science in school to facilitate the creation of such a “knowledge society” within a “developed India.” The first part of this analysis relates to the abridged version of the vision statement for education envisaged by the Planning Commission, the second describes the scope of Political Science and the last section deals with the purpose and significance of Political Science for creating a better, more knowledgeable and developed India.

The author is Professor, Department of Political Science, Osmania University, Hyderabad. She can be reached at yogajyotsna@gmail.com.

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‘We have learnt how to make a living, but not a life: we have added years to life, not life to years. We have conquered outer space, but not inner space.’ – George Carlin

Have you noticed that these days there are few risk takers? People think twice before taking a risk. They ask, ‘what do I gain from this?’, ‘Is it danger free?,’ ‘Is there a safer way of doing this?,’ ‘Is there a guarantee of getting a good grade or job?’ There are more competitions and reality shows than ever before but very thin tolerance to rejection and failure. Naked curiosity is put to shame by the information overflow. Respect and honour belong to an older generation and patience, sincerity, and hard work are now passe. Every day, our emotional actions and reactions affect every aspect of who we are and how we live. Having control over our emotions enables us to pursue and achieve our goals. Do we realise that we are fuelling a self-destructive system of human society? We have the wherewithal to create a better society but are we using our skills and technology to do so?

The author is reader, GVM College of Education, Goa. She can be reached at aneena2007@gmail.com.

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A school represents an organic web of relationships between teachers, administrators, students, parents and the community. Look deeper and you will find emotional, social, psychological, spiritual and physical overtones in the interactions that take place in a school daily.

The ability to perceive, access and manage your emotions and those of others is called emotional quotient. In a school it is to be nurtured in a child for his/her holistic development and can be used as a powerful relation building tool for administrators.

Just as a school has a physical presence and an ambience it also engulfs an emotional space which can be tapped to provide energy and motivation to reach its goals.

The author is working with AV Foundation, Bengaluru. She can be reached at sundhya@yahoo.com.

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Maya Menon

“…The most recent attack occurred Monday, when an eighth-grader stabbed an 11^th-grader in the shoulder and chest at Central School No. 1, a government school in New Delhi, police said.

The victim, a boy named Rahul, said he was trying to break up a fight. “Some kids were fighting and I just went there to stop them. Suddenly one of them turned around and stabbed me even before I could realise,” said Rahul, wrapped in gauze bandage, on the NDTV news channel. He underwent minor surgery.

In December 2007, a 14-year-old boy was fatally shot by two other boys in a hallway of the upscale Euro International School in Gurgaon, a suburb of New Delhi, police reported. Standard 8 Students kill Classmate: 2 Boys in Gurgaon School pump 4 bullets into 14 year old ‘bully’, declares a leading newspaper reporting the incident.

The author is Director, The Teacher Foundation. She can be reached at mayamenon@teacherfoundation.org

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To the passing eye these would look like regular schools – children wearing uniforms, regular classrooms with benches and desks, a teacher in each classroom engaged in various subjects, a small playground where children are playing during what would be the PT (physical training) period. Nothing striking or unusual so far…

On the top floor of the Seven Hills Public school in Bhopal, is a balcony that has been enclosed with a grill. One can see 4-6 year olds playing with mud, clay, various toys and a teacher in the background observing the children, occasionally participating in the activity they are doing. This is the school’s “Learning Center”. This is their attempt to engage children in activities that would help them explore their kinetic and motor skills, spatial intelligence, simple arithmetic, social skills. The teacher observing them develops an understanding of what each child is learning and this informs her engagement with the same children in class.

The mathematics classrooms in the Vidya Bhawan schools, Udaipur are remarkably different from most other mathematics classrooms. There is an active use of physical material – toys, boards, abacus and other educational tools to demonstrate not just basic arithmetic but also relatively complex mathematics. The attempt is to build a child’s understanding of mathematics stemming from the concrete to the abstract.

Little Angels is a similar school in the town of Pondicherry. Over the past 2 years they have been assessing the conceptual learning of their children and revisiting their teaching-learning and assessment methods. This year they have incorporated an assessment process that focuses on conceptual learning rather than memorisation. This assessment is done on a continuous basis so it informs teachers and helps them in the teaching-learning process. Obviously they had to engage in an intense dialogue with the parents to explain the changing nature of their tests. Over the past few months the parents’ response is changing from concern to interest; some of them are probably not entirely convinced yet.

One could argue that there is nothing notable about these examples in themselves. Quite a few people have created complete schools that are constantly evolving, learning and using progressive methods of engagement with children. More importantly the culture in these alternative schools is remarkable in being participative, based on dialogue and essentially democratic and empowering for a child. These schools have set aside the traditional definition of a school and have redefined the idea of a school to be what it should be. Most mainstream schools have a long way to go before they achieve what these schools have achieved…

This is true, but what is notable about these three and many other examples of “mainstream” schools, is the self-initiated attempt to engage in a process of reflection and self-analysis. They have now embarked on a journey of change. A journey through which they desire to liberate themselves from the mainstream school culture and the popular notion of what a good school should be like. This is not an easy task!

A school is a complex system with multiple stakeholders – children, teachers, management, parents, the community and other competing schools. The power of status quo is immense and any step towards breaking norm is not an easy one. The school needs to deal with internal pressures and resistance, the strong influence of a popular understanding of education, societal pressures and on top of all this, there is the need for a school to continue to exist and remain popular in the eyes of the parents. This causes immense emotional and intellectual churn and requires drive, confidence and an innate belief in what they are aspiring for.

Most important in this process is the trigger. What initiates this need for change? It could be a person, an event or a challenging situation. Once this trigger creates a zone of discomfort and some things are taken up by one individual teacher, others join in the thought process and very soon there is a felt need to structure things and create a concerted intervention. An intervention whether from within or by an external agency, provides an outsider perspective, insight into other similar experiences, a source of knowledge, skills, techniques, research and literature that initiates and continues to catalyse the process of change.

There are examples of schools like Vidya Bhawan where some teachers have got together to form a core group that plays the role of a catalyst and an intervener. In other situations it is an organisation like Eklavya or Educational Initiatives driven by a desire to reform the education system that plays the role of a mirror, an observer, a guide and initiates the process and helps the school create systems that will help them continue with this process of change.

Wipro has been working with more than 20 organisations across the country in a similar way. Over the past few years we have learnt that the process of school reform is a gradual and intense process and proceeds in an organic manner. Each school depending on the context it resides in, its need, the community it caters to, takes up some aspects of their school and starts working on them. It could be a change in pedagogical methods, in classroom culture, in assessment, the introduction of a more engaging parent-teacher interaction…the possibilities are numerous. And naturally, teachers are the crux of any idea of school change.

Slowly the success of each change influences, tempts, coaxes and cajoles everyone in the system to participate in this process. This process requires constant re-fuelling and re-charging, so the onus continues to lie with the school. The intervener has to play the role of a catalyst.

More schools across the country have started engaging in this process, and I believe this desire for reform will spread organically. Over time it will result in a new way of looking at education and a changed notion of what a school is – a space where constant reflection, learning and change is the norm. And this is when the line between alternative and mainstream will start blurring…

The author is with Wipro Applying Thought in Schools. He can be reached at iyer.prakash@wipro.com.