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The Union education ministry has said that the NAS data “will help states in taking remedial measures, both short-term and long-term”. With social and economic activity returning to near normal after the pandemic, one of the critical challenges is to extend the post-Covid recovery to the classroom. India witnessed one of the longest school closures in the world. For the better part of the past two years, teachers struggled to cope with the pedagogical challenges posed by the switch to online classes. The country’s digital divide proved to be a hurdle for a large number of underprivileged learners. Field reports by private agencies and state government bodies have indicated that this disruption resulted in an alarming regression in children’s foundational skills — reading, writing, doing simple mathematics. Now a study commissioned by the Centre, the National Assessment Survey (NAS), details the magnitude of this learning crisis across the country. Conducted in November 2021 among students of more than one lakh schools in 720 districts, the NAS shows a sharp dip in the performance of students in almost all subjects during the pandemic years. Worryingly, it reveals that the breakdown affected even states that traditionally do well on educational parameters. The average scores of Delhi’s Class V students in mathematics, for instance, were well below the national average.
The Union education ministry has said that the NAS data “will help states in taking remedial measures, both short-term and long-term”. The first step should be to acknowledge that children are returning to schools with diminished skills as well as recognise that some learners may have experienced more setbacks than their peers. Planners and school administrators should give teachers the freedom to adopt creative approaches that turn classrooms into spaces where students can shed the anxieties of the past two years and regain skills at their own pace. This would require re-imagining pedagogical practices and a shift from syllabus-centred approaches of the past to learner-centric methods. The New Education Policy 2020, announced in the first year of the pandemic, recognises this imperative. Unfortunately, however, the public health emergency seems to have put on the back-burner the implementation of school education reforms envisaged by the NEP. Funds for training teachers have been slashed by nearly 50 per cent in the current budget and the outlay for the Mid-Day Meal Scheme — whose positive impact on school enrollment, student retention and nutrition of children is well-documented — has come down by almost 10 per cent. Instead, there seems to be an over-reliance on e-learning. But as the NAS shows, these methods cannot be a substitute for the interactions in a classroom.
Several studies, including the annual ASER reports, have underlined that most of the failings of the country’s educational system stem from the lack of connect between the lived experiences of most students and what is taught in classrooms. The pandemic-induced crisis — no doubt formidable — is an opportunity to apply correctives. Failure to do so will imperil the academic future of an entire generation.
This editorial first appeared in the print edition on May 27, 2022 under the title ‘Relearning to learn’.
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