SPECIAL PANEL "INDIA'S DISTRICT PRIMARY EDUCATION PROGRAMME: AN ONWARD MARCH" (GOVERNMENT OF INDIA)
"India's District Primary Education
Programme,
an Onward March"
(Government of India)
Key Elements
* Delegating Responsibility
* The Need to Listen
* Local Teachers
* What is Taught and How
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Chairperson: Dr. A.K. Sharma, Joint Director, National Council for Educational Research and Training, India
The Panelists: R.V. Vaidyanatha Ayyar, Joint Secretary, Department of Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development, India.
Gennet Zewide, Minister of Education, Ethiopia
Fay Chung, Chief of Education Cluster of UNICEF, and former Minister of Education, Zimbabwe
Victor Ordonez, Director of Basic Education Division, UNESCO
Manzoor Ahmed, Associate Director, Programme Division, UNICEF
Wadi Haddad, Senior Adviser, Office of the Vice-President for Africa, World Bank
Jyoti Singh, Director, Technical and Evaluation Division, UNFPA
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On the last afternoon of the Pre-
summit meeting, the Indian hosts
organized a panel discussion around
the District Primary Education
Programme (DPEP).
This gave the opportunity for the
Indian participants to share experiences with specialists from the
UN agencies, the World Bank, and
educationists from other countries, on
efforts to achieve EFA.
As Dr R.V. Vaidyanatha Ayyar, Joint Secretary of the Department of Education, said: "We are, after all, in this great common enterprise of EFA together." The DPEP, launched in 1993, seeks to operationalise the strategy of district level planning, in accordance with India's Eighth Five Year Plan (1992-1997). Emphasis is placed on local area planning with the district plans being formulated in their own right rather than being derived from a state plan project document. The programme is being built on the experience of previous projects run with overseas assistance. These included the Andhra Pradesh Primary Education Project, implemented with the British ODA, which addressed issues of teacher training, child-centred learning and school buildings; the Shiksha Karmi, helped by SIDA, which looked at problems of teacher absenteeism and Mahila Samakhya, supported by Holland, which tackled women's empowerment and education.
Key Elements Key elements of the DPEP are: local planning with community participation; a holistic approach; a 'matrix' of networking between district, state and national institutions as well as between educational, management and social science institutions; an emphasis on capacity building; rigorous professional input and a focus on girls and other socially disadvantaged groups. The DPEP will target some 250 educationally backward districts with low female literacy levels and the districts where the Total Literacy Campaigns have been successful, so the project can take advantage from the increased demand for elementary education. The objective is to gradually extend the twin criteria for coverage. The attempt would be to start the programme in at least 110 districts in the Eighth Plan with an estimated outlay of Rs. 195 million, of which Rs 172 million are proposed to be drawn from resources.
"In a continental nation like India, universalization has to be in context; what needs to be done in a state like Kerala with social indicators akin to Scandinavian countries is different from that in the Hindi heartland," said Dr Ayyar.
The panel contributions focused mainly on decentralization, participation, motivation and quality. Drawing from her experiences as Education Minister in Zimbabwe, Ms Fay Chung, now Chief of the Education Cluster of UNICEF, said it was essential to delegate responsibility to district level.
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Delegating Responsibilities A district education officer in charge of 20 30 schools should know every school head and every teacher. He or she should know their strengths and weaknesses, should get to know parents and find out if they support their school. All this is only possible at the local level. Personnel must be of high quality, but realistically, it is unlikely that DEOs have much more than two years of secondary education. In Zimbabwe for instance, the government attempted to overcome this deficiency by a distance training programme.
"We engaged the good offices of the Commonwealth of Learning for courses leading to a diploma or degree in education which will not take them away from their jobs", explained Ms Chung.
Mr Wadi Haddad, Senior Adviser to the World Bank, said he was pleased that the DPEP was a home-grown project. "That is very important as no programme succeeds unless there is a local commitment to it". International agencies only had a supporting role and ultimately projects had to be sustained by national governments with the help of the community.
India's ambitious goal of basic education for all to the age of 14 meant that a great degree of decentralization and local management was absolutely essential, asserted Dr Manzoor Ahmed, Associate Director of the Programme Division of UNICEF. This did not mean a shifting of the burden downwards, but of, clearly identifying tasks and reorganizing responsibilities. With the enactment of the 73rd and 74th Amendment Act (Panchayati Raj Act), 1992, the focus is now concentrated on democratically elected bodies at the district, sub-district, panchayat and municipal levels. These Panchayati Raj bodies, which are to have adequate representation of women, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, minorities, representatives of' parents, educationists and appropriate institutions, will have the responsibility of preparing development plans and implementing educational programmes besides dealing with subjects closely related to education, such as health, social welfare and women and child development. The Act also envisages the formation of panchayats for a village or a group of villages. Each one will have elected representatives and constitute a Village Education Committee (VEC) responsible for the administration of education programmes at the village level. Ensuring participation in primary education of every child in every family is one of the prime aims of the VECs. Observing that DPEP had not yet reached village level for planning, management and control, Mr Ahmed suggested that small administrative units with a population of' around 50,000 would be necessary to achieve the government's goal. These would have 8 to 10,000 school-aged children with around 2,000 in primary school. Only then would it be possible to get families involved in their children's education and for officers to identify, register and monitor pupils' progress. This would need an integrated plan over four or five years.
The most salutory example of 'how not to do it', was put forth by Ms Gennet Zewide, Minister of Education for Ethiopia. A few years ago her country allocated "hundreds of millions of dollars" to a literacy campaign. It was handled from Addis Ababa, the capital, through government agencies including a national literacy board. The community was forced to help fund it, people were obliged to go to the literacy centres and teaching was
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compulsory for students who had completed two years of their degree courses. "After six or seven months, each literacy student relapsed and the programme failed because there was no commitment on the part of the community; no one believed it would hell) them. That was a big lesson".
The Need to Listen She urged her audience to listen. "Let's listen to the students and find out what they want to learn - if students enjoy what they're learning, they'll learn. Let's listen to the teachers. What do they want to teach? This way we can motivate them."
She was also keen for teaching time to be flexible. "Let us find out what is the best time for them. Community participation means listening and incorporating people's recommendations in your plans and in evaluating what is going on."
Local Teachers Mr Haddad stressed the need to improve the motivation and the quality of teachers. He floated the idea of teacher maintenance', saying that teaching was one of the few professions where it was assumed that training was it one-off, relatively short-term effort. But teachers' skills, methods and knowledge needed updating.
Ms Chung suggested greater emphasis on recruiting teachers from the locality because they are interested in uplifting their own People". But that raised questions of quality. However, she preferred to start from reality and engage people as para-professionals and take ten years, if necessary, to raise their professional level. Later in the discussion, Mr Shakti Sinna, Director of Education of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, agreed with this point. He had found that qualified teachers who were strangers to an area were only interested in leaving. It was better to take local people and upgrade them.
With regard to the curriculum, Mr Jyoti Singh, Director of the Technical and Evaluation Division of UNFPA, concentrated on the kind of values that he considered essential to be imparted to boys and girls from an early age. These must form part of the curricula designed by the education authorities to be used in the DPEP, he said.
What is Taught and How Some of the most important subjects outlined by Mr. Singh concerned the inter-relationship between the population and the environment, equality between women and men, household responsibilities and a respect for the dignity and worth of all human beings, irrespective of race, caste, colour or sex.
These topics formed part of the population education projects funded by Mr. Singh's organization in 100 countries with around 1.2 million teachers trained to use them. More than 400 teacher manuals had been created in 17 languages of the Indian sub-continent. The project will extend to the non-formal sector over the next four years, especially to young girls who were more likely to drop out of school.
Mr Victor Ordonez, Director of Basic Education Division in UNESCO, also turned to the content of curricula and textbooks, and, by implication, the quality of teaching.
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"What if, at the end of the journey, there is nothing inside the vehicle? We must look at what is happening in the classrooms, what the children are taught and how they are taught. Children walk away from school usually with experiences of how, not what they are taught." He said many people spoke of teaching pupils about peace and democracy, yet where could you find a less democratic place than a Grade One state school classroom?
Most textbooks, he said, were not conducive to real learning. Does the book give the child options? For example if the assignment is to study a flower, is there a choice of flowers? Does it encourage small group work? Does it make children write? Does it involve the family in the child's learning -hearing a child read a poem, for example? Teachers must also learn to see the children as building blocks - To build on what he or she has learnt before coming to school.
"They will know how to milk a cow, count the chickens and pigs. Build on that. My message is quite simple: let us not think of the vehicle, or the progress of the vehicle, but its contents, what is taught and how. If learning is bringing children from the darkness of ignorance to the light of knowledge, it should be an experience of joy and happiness, not a daily grind".