The 'Hidden' Factor Behind Low Learning Levels in India

In the discussion around our low learning levels, a critical factor that tends to get muted is the role of discrimination in preventing participation, engagement and academic gain. It starts with the painfully common notion that ‘poor children are not capable of learning’, as if the onus lies on them rather than the school. Anyone who has tried to connect will know that EVERY child can make progress (straw man arguments such as ‘you can’t teach every child every thing’ will not do!). And, as the NAS 2021 data itself shows, there are pockets where the poor are not performing worse (as in rural vs urban figures, or state govt vs central govt schools in places) – though we need to add that overall levels are low, and alarming.

The notion that children are disadvantaged also hides the substantial cultural capital they bring, whether it is knowledge of flora and fauna, or various crafts or folklore or ways of living or the multiple languages they know. A middle class urban child may not be able to name 10 trees that have thorns, or if a pile of rope is long enough to reach the water in a well, or how sugarcane is converted into jaggery or how to forage for food when you have to fend for yourself or communicate with three tribes/communities in their languages – all of which are by no means ‘low’ levels of knowledge. Just that these never get acknowledged or brought into classroom processes which continues on its alienating path unconcerned by this flourishing underworld of capabilities.

This extends into ignoring even children who display any ‘potential’ – e.g. when they raise their hands to answer a question, who gets to speak before the class is a good pointer to who a teacher is ignoring…. The fact that teachers rarely reach out in sympathy to the child not participating, or often only hold that child up as incompetent for not being able to answer, adds another nail into the coffin of learning. What might be preventing the child from speaking? It could be the language used (different from mother-tongue), or the content being alien, or the lack of a pre-requisite that was needed but missed due to illness / migration / domestic work / the many reasons poverty generates. Far from adapting to children’s needs (a duty the school bears to serve children’s right to education), the ‘take it or leave it’ approach imposes an impossible adjustment to school’s needs. The curriculum is complicit in this (you don’t see, e.g. tribal knowledge heritage figuring in it, and the ‘Indian Knowledge Systems’ being talked about is usually the Hindu Brahminical classical knowledge). The textbooks and assessment too are parties in this exclusion, containing seeds of bias in unexpected places (‘She was as brave as a boy’, ‘He was poor but honest’).

Finally, there is the proactive discrimination visible when teachers remind certain groups of children that they are (definitely) not fit to learn. Girls are told they’re not capable of grasping maths and science. The ‘laggard’ is told that ‘when your parents and forefathers themselves never learnt anything, where is the chance that YOU are going to learn anything?’. And if anyone does try to ask questions, s/he will be told not to ‘act smart’ and even penalized in different ways. In fact, teachers too are told by society at large that someone at a ‘low position’ of the kind you occupy has no business to go around trying to think for yourself.?

What all of this does is to institutionalize poor learning levels, especially among the underprivileged, dooming them to experience continued failure till they leave education….

Being from a poor family may be an accident of birth – but it is NOT the business of school to extend this misfortune for the rest of a child’s life!

(PS: In my next post, I’ll focus on ways to overcome this.)?