Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower (30 page)

The answer is to rethink the process of credentialing and signaling to better match supply with demand. Again, agreeing on what microcredentials could replace a traditional degree is no easy task. In many countries, the education establishment will resist in order to protect vested interests. But trying to creatively solve this challenge is hugely relevant for India, because there, as in the broad IT space, it’s already clear many employers don’t really value the four years spent in college and the diploma that goes with it. What they value are the skills an employee has and the portfolio of work he or she has created.

This trend is already clear in Silicon Valley, an economy based on attracting the top talent from around the world. But today if you go to any start-up, they’ll tell you that at the end of the day, a high GPA is a pretty poor signal of how good a programmer someone is going to be. What matters more is one’s portfolio on GitHub, the open-source online code sharing that is fast becoming the place where programmers the world over collaborate. What projects has he or she completed? How has he or she taken initiative and shown creativity? All of that can increasingly be assessed and reassessed online, independent of the traditional education system. We see it at Khan Academy, where some of our programmers, who did not do well in school or dropped out, are running circles around everybody else once they’re actually in the workplace.

Here is where India’s employers have a real opportunity to get together and drive the credentialing process in a major way. They offer the jobs that India’s striving middle class wants to secure. So if they went out and took a stab at laying down what matters to
them
, it would change the market enormously. We should probably expect a host of experiments, varying by sector, before any big push to reach a broad consensus. What’s certain is this: If the big Indian IT companies insisted, say, that if you score in the top 4–5 percent in specific introduction to computer science courses, they’ll give you an interview—that’s a signal that matters.

How fast can India expand access to online education at scale, address the tutor supply challenge, and solve the critical issue of microcredentialing? Sitting where we are in Silicon Valley, we don’t want to sound arrogant. These are massive challenges and we know we don’t have all the detailed answers.

But we have seen firsthand how effectively the blended model we envision is already working at R. N. Podar, a private school in Mumbai that’s using Khan Academy math modules to deliver more personalized instruction across multiple grade levels. We’ve seen similar promising examples at the American School of Bombay and at Akanksha, a teacher-training organization that identifies and accelerates mastery for teachers who are drawn from local communities. We’ve watched the dissemination of our courses in more rural areas. Some fourteen hundred of our videos have been translated into Bengali and another one thousand into Hindi-Urdu.

Most of all we know full well how highly education is valued by Indian culture and the passion that Indians have for pursuing it as the surest path to a better life. Nothing captures that combination of aspiration and investment more than the huge percentage of the population that isn’t elite but is middle class, learning English and willing to spend a sizable portion of its own limited resources on private education.

Throughout recorded history, the world, like India, has been struggling forward using less than 10 percent of its human potential—basically the lucky few who are able to secure a spot at a top university. But over the next two decades we expect to witness a fundamental shift in that paradigm, a shift to what we call the digital “one world schoolhouse.” It’s a world where hundreds of millions—the fat part of the bell curve, not the thin end—will be able to draw upon the best lectures and instruction, learn at their own pace, and collaborate across distances to pull one another up. Imagine the human potential that this change is going to unleash. We believe India can and will be part of this accelerating education revolution.

Madhav Chavan

Madhav Chavan is cofounder and CEO of Pratham, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing quality education to India’s underprivileged children.

Education in India is woefully deficient, both quantitatively and qualitatively. That is hardly a novel observation. Indeed, it is the reason Pratham, the organization I head, was founded in 1994, with the motto, “Every child in school and learning well.” During my years of working in this field, India has made efforts to improve the status of education, but these repeated reform efforts haven’t delivered what is needed because they are aimed at merely expanding and enhancing the existing structure and systems. The futility of these measures has led inexorably to the conclusion that the system is not only inadequate and incapable of meeting the demands of a changing India, it is fundamentally bankrupt. The traditional model of the Indian school has never served the vast swath of the student population from socioeconomically disadvantaged families, because it is designed to push out those who cannot survive the cramming grind to reach the tertiary level.

So impervious is the system to genuine improvement that for the past couple of years I have been asking my colleagues whether Pratham should perhaps change its motto to, “Every child
not
in school
but
learning well.” As shall be seen from the admittedly radical vision I propose below, I am only half joking.

Since 2005, we have been facilitating the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), which is based on data collected by volunteers in close to fifteen thousand villages around the country. Year after year, the reports
show that although very high percentages of children are enrolled in schools at the elementary level, the amount of learning they experience is appallingly low. In 2012, the overall enrollment of children up to age ten stood at 96 percent. However, less than half of those in fifth grade can read even a second-grade text, and three out of four have difficulty solving a simple division problem. Barely 30 percent of children make it to secondary school and fewer still beyond, as barriers of gender, distance, costs, and simple inadequacy of infrastructure and qualified teachers make it impossible to pursue learning. The quality of learning among those who do make it past eighth grade is so poor that two Indian states participating in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey for fifteen-year-olds still in school stood seventy-second and seventy-third among seventy-four global participants. What is worse, their modal scores in reading and math literacy were at the lowest possible level just because PISA did not allow an even lower grade.

The focus on “completing the curriculum” and imparting knowledge rather than learning skills is at the root of the problem. Most children start lagging behind from the primary stage as the teacher rushes through textbooks in front of a multigrade class or one that is full of students at vastly different levels of skill attainment. The front of the class is “taught,” while the rest simply loses interest. Predictably, by the time they reach secondary school, children in the back of the class have neither skills nor knowledge and often find themselves unprepared to advance even to vocational training, let alone tertiary education. They start manual work and somehow learn on the job what the system failed to teach them.

The system reflects Industrial Revolution–type thinking of a factory assembly line, wholly unsuited for modern times. Classes are regimented, with the goal of passing mass examinations. We focus on language and grammar rather than communication; we focus on cramming laws of science while ignoring the understanding of technology—a linear process that kills initiative and curiosity. Children are neither learning the basics required in the past century, nor are they being prepared with life skills required to navigate a much more challenging future.

Thus the Right to Education (RTE) Act, enacted in 2009, is proving
to be a “right to schooling” act with very poor correlation between years of schooling and the actual learning/education acquired. Unfortunately, RTE followed previous (unsuccessful) efforts to set things right. The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (educational for all mission) was aimed at enrolling all children age six to fourteen by guaranteeing that primary schools would be located within one kilometer of all homes and would provide students with a proper midday meal as an incentive for continued attendance. Although enrollment levels have been high, and over 87 percent of schools provide hot cooked midday meals, attendance in many states is between 50 and 80 percent, indicating that the enticement of food is not adequate to spur participation in a dysfunctional academic system. Before that was the National Policy on Education of 1986 that supposedly made primary education a national priority, including the allocation of substantial new resources. The Constitution of India itself directed the state in 1950 to provide free and compulsory education to all children up to the age of fourteen within ten years. At the center of all these initiatives was the “school,” which was to take charge of children’s education.

Although we acknowledge the African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child,” our schools and colleges are isolated from society. Barring a small percentage of exceptional individuals, those appointed to teach at any level have neither the knowledge nor the skills to educate; meanwhile, the human resources of skilled and knowledgeable people in other occupations have no role to play in transferring their competencies to the next generation. This is purely because the process of certification is monopolistically controlled by boards, universities, and government institutions that are hidebound and barely changing.

The National Policy on Education of 1986 said in its very first paragraphs that linear approaches will not suffice to meet the challenges of the future. Open universities and open schools have arisen, but they are
the system’s stepchildren. Even though they have opened doors to those who cannot enter mainstream institutions, they are burdened by all the features of traditional universities except for the distance-learning materials they provide.

All the above raises a question, the mere asking of which may strike some as bizarre: Why are schools and colleges needed at all?

Their job ostensibly is to transfer knowledge. But they also serve two other functions—not terribly well, but better than their provision of instruction. First, they provide day care for young children, keeping them safe and out of trouble as parents go about their work. Second, they provide an environment in which to learn social skills. These are important functions that need to be taken seriously and developed systematically with significant contribution from human resources in the surrounding community, while reorganizing the learning process from early childhood to adolescence.

Fortunately, the development of new information technologies offers significant opportunity to change the organization of the overall learning process. By creating new pathways for children to learn in nonlinear ways, with interactions and access to the wider world that current schooling doesn’t provide, technology helps to enable a rethink of the whole system.

Here, then, is what I propose.

First, we should move away from the age-grade system that is now formalized in the RTE act. Instead we need an age-stage system that allows children to meet learning goals in both the social and academic spheres when they are ready, transitioning to each stage at their own pace.

I envision three main stages. The first stage, for children up to the age of eight or ten, would be to learn to socialize and attain basic learning skills including elementary reading, writing, and math along with speaking, expressing, and thinking. Such “schools” would have many features of day-care centers, with parents and/or older siblings taking turns participating in the classroom. This would be as much for the sake of the children’s learning as for improving the ability of mothers and fathers
to deal with children and help them learn at home. The role of parents in bringing up and educating children deserves much greater emphasis. Just as maternity leave is now recognized as a necessity, allowing time for parents to participate in their children’s learning—with compensation for daily wage workers if need be—should be possible. After all, we have a Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. Why couldn’t parents be compensated for this work of national importance? Teaching basic learning skills is not rocket science. I would expect older children to deal with texts and problems at a simple level more or less independently and be able to use computers or tablets to retrieve and enter information. I see this neighborhood day care–cum–school catering to no more than one hundred children, which is about the average size of an Indian primary school.

At the second stage, for children as young as nine to as old as sixteen, the “school” would really be a social hub or a children’s club. It would cater to about five hundred children from different communities, with community spokes that are learning centers with digital learning equipment and a couple of facilitators supervising about one hundred children in batches. Half the children would be playing, painting, or engaging in other enjoyable activities at the club while the other half would be working at the learning centers. Local artists, craftspeople, and athletic coaches would engage children at these clubs while counselors would help with issues of growing up. Online assistance and audiovisual material created by expert communicator-teachers in different subjects would be available so that children could plan their studies with the help of mentors. There would be no need to learn an entire curriculum at any particular age; rather, students would navigate studies in one subject or skill at a time and get certified in phases by varied authorities whenever they are ready for examinations, which could be taken multiple times in a year.

In tertiary education, for children sixteen and above, online courses accompanied by availability of licensed tutors would become the norm. The tutors would be compensated with vouchers, either given free by the government or by donors, or purchased depending on the students’
family circumstances. For example, a student might choose to learn accounting online and hire a tutor locally or online to help out. If the student is learning sciences, a facility with laboratory equipment should be accessible.