Private tuition, home tasks and class boundaries

PRIMARY SCHOOLING: II - Private tuition, home tasks and class boundaries

AMARTYA SEN

Private Tuition and Curricular Load There has been a real regression, as opposed to progress, on the dependence on private tuition. The proportion of children relying on private tuition has gone up quite a bit (64 per cent from 57 per cent for the students of standard primary schools, and 58 per cent from 24 per cent for Sishu Shiksha Kendra children). Underlying this rise is not only some increase in incomes and the affordability of having private tuition, but also an intensification of the general conviction among the parents that private tuition is "unavoidable" if it can be at all afforded (78 per cent of the parents now believe it is indeed "unavoidable" — up from 62 per cent). For those who do not have arrangements for private tuition, 54 per cent indicate that they do not go for it mainly — or only — because they cannot afford the costs. India is one of the very few countries in the world in which private tuition is thought to be necessary even at the earliest stages of primary education. Reliance on private tuition for very young children is unknown not only in Europe and America, but also in many developing countries. I had some difficulty in explaining to students at Peking University in Beijing what exactly I was talking about in referring to private tuition for the youngest primary school students, since the phenomenon appeared mysterious and incomprehensible to the listeners. However, in a number of economies in Asia and North Africa, including Japan, Republic of Korea and Taiwan, there has been, in recent years, an increased use of private tuition even at the primary stage — though typically not for the youngest children. This development is seen as having resulted from the pursuit of the perceived competitive benefits of privately tutored children over others. Even in those cases in which private tuition operates only to supplement and advance good primary teaching (rather than acting almost as a substitute for organized schooling, as in many in cases in India), it can be shown that it has a significant adverse impact on the educational system [5]. The harm, however, is much greater when private tutoring becomes "essential" (rather than merely competitively advantageous for the fortunate), especially — as in India — when most families of first-generation school-goers are not able to afford this artificially generated "essentiality". The advent of private tuition in school education may not be harmless even for Japan and Korea, but it is radically more harmful in India, when it eliminates, in effect, the right to basic education for all children (since the primary schools come to depend on such supplementation even for the basic education to be imparted). The question must, thus, be asked with some urgency why this problem remains so strong and takes this form in primary education in India, and in the context of this study, in West Bengal, and why, rather than weakening, the evil has actually strengthened over the last decade, despite all efforts to eliminate the system. Why has dependence on private tuition come to take the place of what can be easily done in the class, and for which the schools are actually devised? Our judgment based on extensive discussions with teachers, the unions, the parents, educational administrators and the general public is that one important reason for this is the heavy load of the imposed curriculum regarding what has to be taught at the primary level. Indeed, the load is so heavy and ambitious for primary schools that (1) students need supplementation even at the end of the school day, and (2) teachers have to spend a lot of their energy and efforts in imparting specialized knowledge even when basic literary and accounting skills (such as reading, writing and simple arithmetic) remain underdeveloped and insufficiently engaged. The proportion of primary educated students in classes III and IV who cannot read is still 17 per cent, those who cannot write is 19 per cent, and the proportion who cannot do simple arithmetic is 26 per cent, despite their schooling. Indeed, many of those who do have proficiency in these simple and basic skills have often acquired them with the help of private tutors, rather than just from regular schooling [6]. The limited reach of teaching during the school hours may not come as a surprise, since the necessity of "home tasks" for even very young children is standardly accepted in India, including in West Bengal, whereas giving "home tasks" for very young children is typically not the practice in the rest of the world (that is, at least not before the end of the first few years of school education). Something, we would submit, has gone fundamentally wrong in the way we think about the discipline of primary education for young children, in our country, including in this state Dependence on private tuition for school education in general, and for early primary education in particular, is, of course, a terrible affliction for reasons that have been extensively discussed in our previous reports. In particular, private tuition divides the student population into haves and have-nots; it makes teachers less responsible and it diminishes their central role in education; it makes improvements in schooling arrangements more difficult since the more influential and better-placed families have less at stake in the quality of what is done in the schools (thanks to the supplementation outside school hours); it effectively negates the basic right of all children to receive elementary education and replaces it by seeing effective education as a privilege, reserved for the better placed in society. Indeed, the necessity of stopping the dependence on private tuition has been the subject not only of our reports, but also of public pronouncements, governmental instructions, and general moral lecturing, along with various organizational proposals for improving the quality of what is offered in the schools to make private tuition redundant. These are not useless attempts, and we strongly support and encourage efforts in these directions. The point that is being made here is that no matter how strongly we pursue these remedial courses of action, the dependence on private tuition would be hard to eliminate unless basic curricular reforms are undertaken. That is something we do stress in this report, without in any way undermining what we have recommended in the past to reduce this debilitating dependence, and without trying to undermine what is being done through other means to fight this dependence. We are very aware that streamlining and simplifying the curricular demands at the primary stage of education would worry some people who see ambitious attempts, even if not successful, as good ways of performing better. We are not against anyone trying to do more than what is required from the compulsory school curriculum. If intelligently planned, a reduction of curricular load could still leave open the opportunity for better performing students to try more, particularly at home, perhaps with guidance from teachers. What is being argued here is that for normal primary education, "home tasks" should be completely unnecessary (but supplementary study at home would not, of course, be "banned" for those who would want to do more), and in particular, the primary students' success at examinations and school tests should not have to rely on what the children have to do at home, outside the school. This is the way Europe and America have educated their children in primary schools when they were at the same stage of educational development as India is today, and this is how they still do it across the world right now to make basic school education accessible to all, even though the ability of the families themselves to help young children with home work has grown as the overall population have become more and more literate. Home tasks for school children begin at various ages across the world, but hardly ever at the very basic stages of early primary education, where the concentration has to be on reading, writing and simple arithmetic. This is where the particular issue of curricular overload in early primary eduction in India is critically important. The report discusses some issues of overload that are particularly worth addressing. However, for effective planning and implementation, it would be necessary to investigate carefully the issue of syllabus reform for early primary education, bearing in mind the major goal of making children able to learn the elementary skills of the three R's on which everything else depends. There should be no room here for dependence on — and demand for — home tasks for very young children, for which parental help may be necessary (which many parents cannot give), or assistance from private tutors (which most parents cannot afford). There is a great deal of expertise on the subject among teachers and educational experts — and indeed among many parents — and it should not be too difficult a job to rise to the challenge of reasoned curricular reform, with a view to altering fundamentally the dysfunctional system of primary education we have in operation at this time. No one should expect that the practice of private tuition would go away with proper curricular reform (the attraction of competitive advantage of the privately tutored would be hard to eradicate), but the basic dependence on private tuition for elementary education — for what could easily be done in the class — has to be eliminated through a variety of means, in which curricular reform has to be included. This is a crucial issue that has not been discussed adequately — or at all — in critically appraising what has gone wrong in the delivery of primary education in India in general and in West Bengal in particular. Taking Note of Class Divisions The differential reach of primary education emerges quite strikingly in our studies. Bearing in mind the fact - discussed earlier — that belonging to scheduled castes or scheduled tribes, and coming from Muslim families, is not merely an indicator of caste or community background, but also, statistically, something of a proxy for class-related handicap, we can use the differences in educational performance of these groups vis-à-vis others, as partly a reflection of class handicap. It is, thus, important to note that while 13 per cent of scheduled caste children in classes III and IV could not read, and 25 per cent of Muslim children and 29 per cent of scheduled tribe children could not either. For the rest of the population this proportion was merely 8 per cent. Similarly, compared with 8 per cent of the group of "others" in classes III and IV who could not write, 13 per cent of SC children, 27 per cent of Muslim children and 43 per cent of ST children could not manage any writing. While there is nothing to celebrate in the fact that 8 per cent of children other than from SC, ST and Muslim families could not read or write, the much higher proportions of educational failure of deprived groups demand concentrated and urgent attention. This general picture of class-related disadvantage (along with its correlates) calls for a variety of remedial measures. We have stressed in our past reports the importance of having greater facilities in schools and SSKs in which the proportion of class-disadvantaged children is high and which are often neglected in terms of amenities. The SSKs, in particular, demand special attention, and would need to be upgraded at some stage to regular primary schools, both for general enhancement of facilities, but also because SC, ST and Muslim children depend on them disproportionately. Schooling can be a major force in breaking down class barriers, and we have to be especially careful that instead of that, the educational system with differential facilities does not end up perpetuating the rigidity of class boundaries. It is also very important to establish minimal norms, such as having at least one teacher per classroom. The issue of home tasks and private tuition also relates to the question of class divisions. The need for home tasks is particularly difficult to meet for parents from disadvantaged classes — these children may be the first generation to receive school education. Parents with the disadvantage of having received little education find it especially difficult to do anything for their children in helping them with their assigned home tasks. It is not surprising that they long for the ability to engage private tutors for their children, but of course very often they cannot, in fact, afford to help their kids in this way. The result is not only frustration and despair, but also continued transmission of education backwardness from one generation to the next. The necessity of home tasks for early primary education has to be comprehensively challenged for young children engaged in learning basic reading, writing and arithmetic, in primary schools and SSKs. If the case against home tasks for young children in primary schooling is strong on grounds of educational effectiveness (as has already been discussed), the case becomes even stronger when the impact of the divisiveness of class is taken into account in planning elementary education for all children as a basic human right. A Concluding Remark There is no magic bullet to solve the manifold problems faced by primary education in West Bengal (and, for that matter, in India in general). We need a multi-pronged approach to deal with the diverse sources of educational under-achievement. There is nothing defeatist in this recognition. Indeed, the significant improvements that have already happened in West Bengal over the last seven years between the surveys of 2001-02 and the resurveys of 2008-09 give strong indication that informed diagnoses and determined policies can bring about a substantial change quite rapidly. Even though the new focus of this report has stressed the need for a radical reform of primary school curriculum to make home tasks redundant for very young children and to eradicate the necessity of dependence on private tuition, and has also emphasized the importance of taking explicit note of class divisions, the older policy recommendations, presented in our earlier reports, have continuing relevance. Even in those areas in which much success has been achieved, for example in instituting regular arrangements for serving cooked mid-day meals, and in making greater use of parent-teacher meetings, still more can be fruitfully done — to expand their reach and quality. Similarly, the success of SSKs show the positive force of participation of the wider community in the enterprise of schooling, and that constructive force has to be consolidated, even as the SSKs are ultimately upgraded to regular schools. We present, with all humility, a variety of recommendations in this report, some of which carry forward what were discussed in earlier reports, and we have tried to spell out the reasoning behind them explicitly. We hope they will get attention from the government, the unions, the public and the media — as indeed we have been fortunate to receive in the past. I will, however, end by emphasizing the special plea for urgent consideration of two central issues that we have particularly stressed in this report, drawing both on our surveys and resurveys, and on extensive consultation with teachers, parents, administrators, educational experts and the public at large. There is, first, a particular need to recognize the fierce urgency of curricular reform at the primary level to make home tasks redundant and private tuition unnecessary. The importance of recognizing explicitly the role of class barriers in educational under-achievement — a second point of focus — also stands as being in pressing need of recognition. These two issues, it has also been argued here, are closely interrelated. More generally, there is, in fact, a basic complementarity between the different components of the kind of multi-pronged approach for which we are arguing. The complementarity gives us further reason to believe that multi-pronged action based on clear diagnoses will bring major results — and bring them fairly quickly. There is indeed need for some urgency here, since the problems are serious and involve long-standing injustice to millions of young children that call for rectification. Patience can be, alas, another name for continuing injustice. December 2009 CONCLUDED Notes 5. On this see Mark Bray, Adverse Effects of Private Supplementary Tutoring: Dimensions, Implications and Government Responses (Paris: International Institute for Educational Planning, UNESCO, 2003). 6. However, private tuition holds more promise for anxious parents than they, in fact, manage to deliver. Some children obviously benefit from this extra help to learn what the schools were devised to teach them, but our recent survey also shows that a significant proportion of those who could not read or write have in fact had the alleged benefit of private tutoring.

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Palash Biswas
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