An educative experiment

A radical revision of the primary education system in Kerala receives mixed reactions, but the overall outlook appears to be positive.

R. KRISHNAKUMAR

"Is this going to work? You are supposed to teach 20 to 25 children and there is double that number in my class. I am over 40, and they expect me to play 'aana' (elephant) and the 'frog in the puddle' before a group of second standard children!"

- Teacher to headmistress at a government primary school, in the presence of this correspondent.

"They learn nothing. At the end of the year, you produce but a bunch of good-for-nothing pupils."

- The headmaster of a prominent government school, speaking about the new primary school curriculum.

WHEN the World Bank-funded District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) was launched in the three educationally backward districts of Malappuram, Kasaragod and Wayanad in Kerala in early 1994, hardly anyone imagined that it would result in a radical and controversial revision of the school curriculum, especially that of the primary sections, for the entire State within four years.

The DPEP's major objectives of reducing dropout rates, expanding access to schools and improving learning achievement were not as relevant in Kerala as they were in most other States. Kerala has had an excellent record in the area of basic education: it has achieved total literacy and boasts of near-universal education facilities, a good educational infrastructure, a high rate of enrolment in schools, a low dropout rate, a large number of trained teachers and an alert society.

However, for some years now serious doubts have been expressed about the quality of education in the State's schools. According to the State Education Department, only 70 out of every 100 students who enrol in the first standard go upto the tenth standard. Of them, only between 20 and 30 per cent pass the Secondary School Leaving Certificate (SSLC) examination without the help of "moderation". (Moderation is a system in which a candidate whose score comes upto a certain level but is not enough for a pass is awarded additional marks so that he or she secures a pass.) Nearly 2.75 lakh pupils fail in the SSLC examination every year. A shocking finding of a survey was that 30 per cent of tenth standard students in the State had inadequate reading and writing skills of the basic kind. Predictably, a revision of the school curriculum was considered long overdue.

It was in this context that the World Bank project was implemented in the State, with the State Government deciding to utilise the Centrally sponsored programme of financial and technical assistance for efforts to improve the achievement levels of primary school children. This meant an assistance of nearly Rs.40 crores over seven years for each of the six districts concerned (three more districts - Palakkad, Idukki and Thiruvananthapuram - were added during Phase II of the programme, in 1996). According to the 1995-96 Annual Report, the DPEP in Kerala provides for improvement to the basic infrastructure of or the construction of new school buildings, organising special programmes for target groups such as tribal populations and fishing communities, tackling the problems of non-enrolment and dropping out through a variety of interventions, scientific revision of textbooks to enhance the quality of education, and training of teachers on a continuous basis in order to upgrade their skills for "improved, child-centred and activity-oriented pedagogy."

In short, the Government, which had earlier made several attempts to improve the quality of education in government schools, decided to use the opportunity to revise the primary school curriculum drastically. The new curriculum was introduced initially in 1998 in all DPEP districts and from 1999 in the seven non-DPEP districts. The former were flush with World Bank funds; in the latter districts, lack of funds affected the training of and creation of awareness in teachers and the preparation of textbooks and handbooks required for the new scheme.

S. GOPAKUMAR
Kerala's Education Minister
P.J. Joseph, officials and people's representatives sing along with primary school children at a function in Thiruvananthapuram in June at the inauguration of 'Patanotsavam-99', a Festival of Learning, marking the introduction of the new curriculum in the State.

Thus, owing to the compulsions of the project, all that was considered part of the traditional and time-tested method of teaching was abolished in government schools in one sweep. Gone was the system in which the teacher taught from the textbook and the pupil learnt what was taught. Rote learning, written exercises, reading from textbooks, writing on the blackboard, asking pupils to read aloud, asking a "bright child" to teach other children, learning the alphabet and memorising mathematical tables - all these went out of primary school classrooms. Teaching was no longer a one-way street. Acquiring knowledge for its own sake was not the objective. Examinations were not mere memory tests any longer.

WHAT was sought to be introduced was an entirely new culture of teaching and learning. This divided the State sharply into two camps, one hailing the new system as a quality improvement programme and the other condemning it outright. Its contents, critics allege, are induced by the World Bank in order "to scuttle Kerala's achievements in education" and to further capitalism's agenda of creating "an educational system that would produce but a mediocre bunch of clerks and peons." However, the Government and officials of the Primary Education Society of Kerala (PEDSK), a society that was registered particularly to implement the DPEP independent of the State Education Department, deny this; they say that the Government merely utilised DPEP funds for curriculum revision, in which process the World Bank played no part at all.

According to DPEP Project Coordinator O.M. Sankaran, the new curriculum is child-centred, activity-oriented and it was prepared after careful consideration of the standards of pupils at each level. Learning was to be closely linked to life and the physical and social environment of the child, he said. Evaluation was to take place continuously and the overall development of the child was to be a prime criterion. Classroom activities were democratised and creativity in the student and the teacher was encouraged. Sankaran said that each pupil was to get individual attention from the teacher, depending on the child's interests and pace and style of learning.

According to Sankaran, the new method of teaching encourages teachers to be less assertive and afford children greater freedom. It discourages teachers from insisting on results; instead it wants them to find whether the child responds to the process of learning with enthusiasm and interest. Its underlying theme is that "one learns better when one is ready to learn, when one not only can learn but wants to." Learning is to be more fun than work. The teacher's effort must be to create opportunities and conditions that would help the pupil "learn how to learn". The ultimate goal of any teacher is to be "students who are on the road to becoming lifelong learners," Sankaran said.

What does it mean in real terms? For example, if language teaching was done earlier with the focus on the alphabet, with even the words chosen being often out of any living context for the child, the new curriculum requires the pupil to learn by reacting to meaningful experiences. It also means that the child is to learn the alphabet (learning in the primary classes is to be compulsorily in the mothertongue) after first learning to make meaningful sentences out of real-life experiences. The language used would include colloquial forms from the dialects.

According to the new curriculum guidelines, the aim is to make the pupil confident of using the language through creative opportunities to listen, speak, read and write, without undue stress on pronunciation, clarity in writing and grammar, which is believed to impede a smooth process of language learning. Children are to be encouraged actively to engage with words and meanings, to play with them. Repetitions, impositions and rote memorisation should no longer be practised. Gone also is the once-ubiquitous practice of the teacher writing five or six sentences on the blackboard to introduce a topic - the cow, or the coconut tree, for example. Instead, second and third standard children send letters to friends, teachers and relatives, make questionnaires, write stories and poems and enact them in the class and produce class newspapers, complete with mastheads, ear panels and statements of ownership.

Sankaran says: In the primary classrooms in Kerala, mathematics is no longer an esoteric discipline. If mathematics is to become useful, children should learn it by learning how to use it in real-life situations. Its objectives are to solve problems in daily life through applications in real-life situations. Teachers understand that the means to arrive at the right answers are as important as the answers themselves. So mathematics teaching in the classroom means activities to help children learn from their own environment - stories, songs and poems, plays and puzzles, pictures and patterns.

Textbooks have undergone a transformation. They are now thinner and are designed - by top designers in the country - to be refreshingly child-friendly. Teachers' handbooks are bigger and better than earlier ones and have become essential for activity-oriented teaching. Children are to learn about the language and the environment even as they learn mathematical concepts in the same class. Textbooks do not tell them all they have to know: they only suggest activities through which children could arrive at conclusions. Most of what the children ought to learn is explained only in the teachers' handbooks, which encourage teachers themselves to learn more and more, in order to teach.

Another significant change is in the process of evaluation. Written examinations, which so far formed a major referral system that shaped the conventional pattern of teaching, textbook writing and classroom interactions, are now not the only method of evaluating pupils' performance. The teacher is now expected to evaluate each child continuously - through written and oral tests, activity tests and observation - to understand whether the child shows the required competence at each stage and is able to utilise in daily life the knowledge acquired. Instead of marks, grades are awarded to children.

THERE is appreciation for such changes, but concern too is mounting. Says N.A. Karim, former Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Kerala and one of the staunchest critics of the new curriculum: "DPEP syllabus-makers and textbook writers have adopted ideas from Western educationists in a half-baked manner, without considering the current status of primary education in the State, the limitations of the schools and classrooms, and the training and motivation levels of its schoolteachers. Curriculum reform was long overdue, but as implemented now it has been messed up by a group of experts who bypassed study-research institutions set up specifically for this purpose and radically altered the method and purpose of school education without the genuine consent of society."

Evaluating the changes in the school curriculum, Vasanta Ramkumar, Professor and Head of the Department of Education, University of Kerala, and project coordinator for several academic studies conducted under the DPEP, told Frontline: "One year is too short a period to evaluate a new curriculum. What is obvious is that though the objectives may be sound, efficient and motivated teachers are essential for its successful implementation. The subject-centred method of teaching, which was followed earlier, left a feeling of comfort in everyone concerned. On the other hand, child-centred teaching puts a very heavy responsibility on the teaching community. Teaching now requires a lot of flexibility."

Nanda Mohan, Head of the Department of Future Studies, University of Kerala, which had conducted a number of consultancy studies for the DPEP, said: "What stands out is the haste with which the curriculum change was introduced. Was there no element in the earlier school curriculum that was relevant and valid, that it had to be swept under the carpet all on a sudden? The prime consideration for such a revolutionary curriculum revision should not have been the sudden availability of funds. It would have had more relevance if the curriculum change was contemplated independent of the World Bank project, with our own resources, to suit our own purpose."

S. GOPAKUMAR
Child-friendly textbooks for the primary school and the bigger and better teachers' handbook for Standard II.

In fact a very prominent view in the State is that it is not correct to hold conventional education responsible for all the ills of school education. Karim said that what reformers have done was "to throw the baby out with the bath water".

According to him, Kerala's education reformers have been influenced also by some "strange and impractical conclusions" of the Prof. Yash Pal Committee ("Learning Without Burden: Report of the National Advisory Committee to Advise on Improving the Quality of Learning while Reducing the Burden on School Students", submitted to the Central Government in July 1993) and some other such national committees, which have submitted their reports with recommendations that may be of relevance more to educationally backward States.

Serious concern has been raised about the new approach to language and mathematics and the overdose of fantasy in the new textbooks. Critics argue that the approach to language teaching as applies to the teaching of the English language may not be valid in the case of the teaching of Malayalam, which has a phonetic script. They also point out that its utility in daily life is only one of the many uses of mathematics and the aim of primary education should be "to instil basic mathematics in young students through training." They say that it will not be wise to ignore the benefits of learning by rote, addition and multiplication tables in primary classes, for example.

Interestingly, several members of the Curriculum Revision Committee themselves are critics of many of the changes that have been brought in. Some of them told Frontline that the "reformists" were in a hurry and had refused to listen to objections, citing constraints of time. Obviously, according to them, the pressures of the World Bank project determined the pace of curriculum reform in Kerala, irrespective of the curriculum's suitability to local needs and conditions.

A psychologist closely associated with the DPEP told Frontline: "Isn't education planned habit formation? The basis of learning is memory. Therefore, rehearsal is necessary. Drilling is essential for recall. But the new curriculum says a child should learn through 'recurrence' (of lessons and activities), not 'repetition'." He added: "Why should we say that a child should not be introduced to certain concepts at a certain age, when research has established that that is the age when learning is amazingly fast?"

The psychologist continued: "Let it be drilled into his memory. Maybe it may not mean much to him at the age in which he learns it. But won't it be in his memory forever that he can use it when he really understands it and needs it in life? The element of building attention is also important for children to get focussed. But then, isn't the new curriculum trying to pamper the child, by deriding drilling and memorisation, for example? Should we consider what may not be acceptable to the child and ignore what is essential for him?"

According to DPEP officials, an activity-oriented curriculum has been introduced in the country for the first time and it has received praise from the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) as a model for other States. Although it is a novel programme for Kerala, emphasis on "child-centred teaching" and "activity-oriented learning", assertions of "intrinsic motivation", "self-direction" and "freedom of the learner", the slogan, "Don't give them the fish, teach them how to fish" and so on have been well-entrenched in school education in many Western nations and are now facing criticism on grounds under the common label of "developmentalism".

Some of these concerns have found expression in a 1996 article "Developmentalism: An Obscure but Pervasive Restriction on Educational Improvement", published in Education Policy Analysis Archives, a United States-based peer-reviewed, scholarly electronic journal (Volume 4, Number 8, April 21, 1996), may be of interest to critics and reformers of the new primary school curriculum in Kerala, who now seek to alter radically the entire curriculum up to Standard XII on these lines. (Already, textbooks of Standards V and VI have been thoroughly revised for introduction in the current school year.)

One of the concerns expressed in the context of the operation of similar curricula in U.S. schools is: if teachers are deemed responsible to afford experiences and opportunities that are compatible with the child's proclivities, rather than try to shape the child to suit social and academic norms, who will then ensure that such experiences will result in effort and achievement? There are other questions too that are being raised. Should not teachers attempt to influence children at all even in the face of noticeable deficiencies or problematic conduct? If teachers are prevented from intervening, would influences exerted by peers and by the entertainment and recreation industries not have an overpowering effect? Will this not become an impediment to maturity, character development and the growth of the sense of personal responsibility?

S. GOPAKUMAR
Learning about rain. Under the new curriculum, learning is to be closely linked to life and the physical and social environment of the child.

Some other concerns raised are:

* If teachers are prevented from inducing children to put time and effort into learning, or are expected to tackle pupil inattention and apathy with herculean efforts to stimulate interest and enthusiasm, and if deficient outcomes are countered by reducing expectations to the level of whatever the pupil seems willing to do, does the new scheme require only the teacher to work and not the pupil?

* Are pupils expected to make an effort only if they feel interested and enthused? It is understandable why study should be "more like fun than work", but if children waste time and educational opportunity because they find school work boring and if their behaviour is to be not merely tolerated but understood and excused as a result of insufficiently stimulating instruction, would not teachers be burdened with an unattainable expectation?

* So long as study and effort are considered important only if the pupil feels so inclined, would the self-discipline that is necessary to put "work before pleasure" not disappear from the academic regimen? Instead of developing a work ethic, would children not start expecting significant accomplishments with minimal effort?

Some of these concerns may seem to be exaggerated, considering the fact that the curriculum was introduced only last year. However, significantly, they are raised in a society that had tried different variations of "developmentalism" in its schools over the decades. The question in Kerala today is, therefore, should the choice between a method of instruction that seeks to optimise the development of the child irrespective of academic norms and one that is educationally appropriate have been made so suddenly and without sufficient debate? (Of course, a few seminars and discussions were arranged on the eve of the introduction of the new curriculum.)

THE question of the curriculum has divided Kerala society deeply also because the parents of the majority of school-going children cannot afford the option of sending their wards to unaided schools, the majority of which continue to impart education in the conventional mode, for the Kerala Education Rules also allow children to be taught at home up to the level of Standard IV.

Karim said there was a tendency evident in these reforms to imitate practices followed in the West, without in any way ascertaining scientifically whether they were appropriate to local conditions. "Under the beautifully vague expression 'releasing the creative energies of our children', they have discarded the academic framework of primary education in Kerala and introduced a lot of things that should have gone into the pre-primary stage. It can only help decelerate the pace of learning in our children at a stage when their ability to learn is enormous."

However, according to Vasanta Ramkumar, studies conducted by her department in DPEP and non-DPEP districts have only helped make "an assessment of change" and not reach a conclusion about the impact of the new curriculum. "We could find that learning was certainly not worse in classrooms than what it was before the introduction of the new curriculum. Results on learning in mathematics and Malayalam from different districts did not tally with one another. But we went to schools from one end of Kerala to the other and found that under the new curriculum, in rural areas student enthusiasm was high, there was movement in the class, there was a real learning environment in the classrooms and a lot of music and activity. Teachers were not very confident but they were learning to cope. But activity and interest both of pupils and the teachers waned in schools in the urban centres. In many schools teachers were middle-aged; there was no upward mobility for them in the system, and child-centred curriculum made such demands on them that the majority of them seemed unwilling to meet these. The curriculum required workspace, but classrooms were small and there were often no partitions between them in many schools. Monitoring and evaluation, both of teaching and learning, seemed to be the weakest links."

A teacher who was a member of the DPEP's curriculum committee says: "On the one hand, we have this conventional and time-tested method of teaching and learning, with its well-known drawbacks, which we have decided to brush aside completely, without even taking a second look at the positive aspects that have stood generations of students in good stead. On the other, we have introduced a new system whose so-called positive aspects are all in the realm of speculation or at best are brash assumptions, without any valid research data on their effectiveness in Kerala conditions."

" The new slogans," the teacher says, "seem idealistic and do have an intellectual appeal; the system does have some positive aspects. But it has also drawbacks. Can we afford to neglect the formal part of education and concentrate on the informal part alone, as the new curriculum does? Egged on by the rosy promise of funds, we have opted for the other extreme instead of prudently trying to strike a balance between the conventional and the progressive."

Yet, as some exciting instances of teacher motivation and student learning in DPEP schools and a sprinkling of elite private institutions that follow similar child-centred, activity-based syllabus indicate, in the end, the new curriculum may fail to deliver not because of the academic concerns that it has raised but because of the sheer weight of the demands that it places on the teaching community and the over-burdened educational infrastructure in the State.

Consider the average primary school teacher in Kerala. Until a year ago the textbooks told him or her exactly what to teach and what to look for in his or her pupils in order to evaluate them. Their duties probably ended there. But today, with no increase in emoluments or status, the teacher is expected to become the dream teacher, spend a major part of his or her earlier "leisure hours" attending training sessions, evolve daily strategies for classroom activities, create poetry and stories to suit the learning context, discover child-friendly learning materials, provide special assistance to needy students, organise field trips and projects and strategies for parent participation, evaluate each and every student in her mega-class "continuously", and generally be ever-prepared to answer questions as out of the blue as "if bats are mammals and hang on trees, won't their children fall splash to the ground at birth?" In short, she must be prepared to handle any eventuality that is unleashed by the new learning environment she herself is supposed to create.

It is not a reassuring feeling, especially to the average primary schoolteacher, who is not properly trained or motivated. As a result, most teachers merely go through the motions of meeting the new curriculum's many requirements or, as one teacher told Frontline, "simply teach the way we used to." In the context of the new, activity-oriented textbooks, parents have no idea what their children are supposed to learn or are really learning in the classroom. The headmaster's comment about producing a bunch of good-for-nothing students at the end of the year suddenly acquires a ring of reality.