The Quality Dimension:
Even as the system attempts to reach every child, the
issue of quality presents a new range of challenges.
The belief that quality goes with privilege is clearly
irreconcilable with the vision of participatory
democracy that India upholds and practices in the
political sphere. Its practise in the sphere of education demands that the education available to all children in
different regions and sections of society has a
comparable quality. J.P. Naik had described equality,
quality and quantity as the ‘elusive triangle’ of Indian
education. Dealing with this metaphorical triangle
requires a deeper theoretical understanding of quality
than has been available. UNESCO’s recently published
global monitoring report discusses systemic standards
as the appropriate context of the quality debate. From
this point of view, the child’s performance needs to be
treated as an indicator of systemic quality. In a system
of education that is divided between a fast-growing
private sector and a larger state sector marked by
shortages and the uneven spread of resources, the issue
of quality poses complex conceptual and practical
questions. The belief that private schools have higher
quality treats examination results as the sole criterion
for judging quality. This kind of perception ignores
the ethos-related limitations of the privileged private
schools. The fact that they often neglect the child’s
mother tongue warrants us to wonder about the
opportunities that they are able to provide to the child
for constructing knowledge in meaningful ways.
Moreover, the exclusion of the poor from their
admission process implies the loss of learning
opportunities that occur in a classroom with children
from diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds.
Physical resources by themselves cannot be
regarded as an indicator of quality; yet, the extreme
and chronic shortage of physical resources, including
basic infrastructural amenities, in schools run by the
state or local bodies does present a serious quality
constraint. The availability of qualified and motivated
teachers who perceive teaching as a career option
applies to all sectors of schools as a necessary
precondition for quality. Recent suggestions for the
dilution of standards in teacher recruitment, training
and service conditions articulated in the NPE, and,
before it, by the Chattopadhyaya Commission (1984),
arouse anxiety. No system of education can rise above
the quality of its teachers, and the quality of teachers
greatly depends on the means deployed for selection,
procedures used for training, and the strategies adopted
for ensuring accountability.
The quality dimension also needs to be examined
from the point of view of the experiences designed
for the child in terms of knowledge and skills.
Assumptions about the nature of knowledge and the
child’s own nature shape the school ethos and the
approaches used by those who prepare the syllabi and
textbooks, and by teachers as well. The representation
of knowledge in textbooks and other materials needs
to be viewed from the larger perspective of the
challenges facing humanity and the nation today. No
subject in the school curriculum can stay aloof from
these larger concerns, and therefore the selection of
knowledge proposed to be included in each subject
area requires careful examination in terms of
socio-economic and cultural conditions and goals. The greatest national challenge for education is to strengthen
our participatory democracy and the values enshrined
in the Constitution. Meeting this challenge implies that
we make quality and social justice the central theme of
curricular reform. Citizenship training has been an
important aspect of formal education. Today, it needs
to be boldly reconceptualised in terms of the discourse
of universal human rights and the approaches
associated with critical pedagogy. A clear orientation
towards values associated with peace and harmonious
coexistence is called for. Quality in education includes
a concern for quality of life in all its dimensions. This is
why a concern for peace, protection of the
environment and a predisposition towards social change
must be viewed as core components of quality, not
merely as value premises.
