Another Republic Day has come and gone. Schools pulled out the national flag and organised events. It feels good to be able to celebrate a Constitution that in its very Preamble states that India is a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic.
Many 12-year-olds from the neighbouring state middle schools at Vallipuram, where I work in a private residential school, often say they would like to be doctors (“I want to come back and improve health conditions at my village”), engineers, and teachers, or join the police force. The reality is that most girls who pass Plus-2 get employed as contract labourers in nearby companies. Some become nurses or laboratory technicians. Boys have a harder time finding something that their education equips them to do.
But it feels good to think that each child in India is free to pursue a dream, to become an engineer, a doctor, a policeman/woman, and a teacher – and that the country is committed to supporting them in this. The question I often ask myself as a teacher in a developing country is, “How?”
It is for these reasons that as a teacher who facilitates learning for two Boards (Cambridge A Level and NIOS Senior Secondary) at Plus-2 level, I felt dismayed in recent weeks and months watching the sequence of decisions made in India around the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) assessment for eligibility to study medicine. The latest in these is the contested declaration by the Medical Council of India (MCI) that debars students passing examinations through distance mode from even sitting for NEET. It was with some relief that I read on January 24 in a newspaper that the government is planning to revise the MCI order.
NEET, seeking as it does to better the skill level and knowledge of entrants into this most pristine and compassionate of professional qualifications, the MBBS, is a laudable effort. It seems right to assume that skill transfer in this professional course has to be of the best quality, given that human lives are at stake here. The enormous advances in healthcare and the deep challenges in the public health sector also make the MBBS a sought-after professional qualification. How must the country be prepared to meet it?
I often ask, as a schoolteacher of Plus-2 for nearly three decades — what must come first? Preparation for certification or transaction and mastery of skills? Of course this chicken-or-egg question has only one answer — both.
But what must be the sequence of planning for this important effort to improve standards in medical education? Surely, facilitating a year’s prior preparation at State level for this shift would have had to be mandated and monitored – special materials for Plus-2 Science candidates, sample papers, examination skills – before declaring its necessity across India, particularly for government schools: this is part of the commitment to equity promised by the Constitution. Gifted students from the poorer sections of society who worked hard to get top marks to fulfil their dreams would have been very glad for this help. As with the Cambridge Board, it would have been wonderful if there had been a teacher/learner support site evolved by the MCI, with its access to expertise, which helped both teachers and students across various Boards (even perhaps with specific and special inputs for government school candidates) to access the necessary skill and content levels.
In relation to the decision regarding NIOS, the newspaper report quoted an MCI official thus: “Since the NIOS syllabus does not have a practical component, there is no matchability with regular students.” “NIOS students have been enjoying the privilege (in the context of NEET), but we thought it was not justified, so we came up with the order this year.” It is not that there are no practicals . I can vouch for this as a teacher in a school that grooms private candidates for NIOS science subjects – and possibly NEET. The Biology and Chemistry teacher from my school, who has an MS in Biological and Biomedical Technology from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, and who teaches both at A level and Plus-2 NIOS, vouches for the fact that the practical component mandated by the NIOS is good and the content on a par with or in places having more detail than the State Board. In effect, it is strange that an official spokesperson of the MCI said this without even checking the present science syllabi of the NIOS.
The word “privilege” seems an interesting one, almost colonial, coming from an Indian official in a public capacity to a newspaper. Is writing an open competitive examination a “privilege”? In this relation, given the vision of our Constitution, there would need to have been some clear communication to the NIOS Board, which is a Central Board, to ensure that practical examinations of a certain number or range must be fully completed, even suggesting modifications to the syllabus as needed – perhaps six months at the very least, before the declaration debarring these students from writing the examination on the basis of limited practical experience and “stream, curriculum and duration of the course”. It would have been good to let all stakeholders know in advance, so that some amount of help may have been offered to students and to the system.
NIOS students at the Plus-2 level from my school have been preparing to sit for NEET, and the government communique comes as a small relief to them. Our institution opted for the NIOS as a parallel stream for Plus-2 for a variety of reasons. One of the dominant ones was equity. As a private school of some repute, it was with a sense of pride that we offered NIOS to some of our students who were happy with an Indian Board. It certainly helped that the vision of NIOS was, in keeping with national policy, “to build greater equity and justice in society” and “to invest in a learning society” (source: NIOS website). As of 2016, the NIOS profile stated that there were around five lakh enrolments in academic courses across India and seven other countries, including UAE (14 accredited institutes), Nepal (4) and Saudi Arabia (1). The Plus-2 courses according to official government estimates have about two lakh enrolments, with 3,000 successful NIOS science stream students appearing for NEET. Of these, a small number (the exact numbers vary in various sources) have got through NEET and been enrolled in medical colleges. They are lucky the idea of “privilege” had not seeped in at the time.
A monolithic approach to quality-improvement is perhaps what ails our school education system. All learning is connected. Learning requires a secure and overlapping gradient of skill transfer across classes. Learning requires above all the motivated learner . With the active learning frame nominally in place as a process across Tamil Nadu, the important challenge seems to be to unite pedagogy, textbook, assessment and classroom transaction across schooling, right up to the time tests such as NEET have to be attempted. It would also be imperative that there is an investment in the attitude and training of the teacher, to ensure that what has been planned, works on the ground.
Tamil Nadu has taken up this challenge. It is again laudable that well before the painful truth embedded in the Ariyalur Plus-2 schoolgirl Anitha’s suicide over her failure in NEET, the Tamil Nadu State Board had undertaken to revamp its curriculum and its approach to evaluation and pilot digital assessment.
Whatever the legitimate impatience with ignorance and limited knowledge and practical learning in systems of public schooling and open schools for the poor, the process and sequence of humane and egalitarian planning cannot be dispensed with, as it causes the destruction of the very hope that such schooling is built upon – the resilience and potential of the young learner, regardless of caste, creed, race, economic class or gender. It is obvious here that the challenge in India is to build vocational viability (this runs across economic class), something that the NIOS is uniquely providing through its vocational stream. We need to decentralise our efforts – a chance made possible by several Central initiatives to open up skill-building and digital opportunities – where, as the Prime Minister said, “the world looks to India for the next big idea”, and where “1.2 billion connected Indians drive innovation”. It is clear that certification alone is not working: in 2016, India Today published a study by a New Delhi-based employment solutions company on 1,50,000 engineering graduates that said they were not skilled enough to be a productive part of the economy.
When the NIOS received the Commonwealth award for institutional achievement in 2016, part of the dream embedded in the Constitution of India received a fillip. We are finally at a point where an open board of certification is receiving recognition in its efforts to improve the chances of countless open school students to move on with their lives with what the Constitution promised – a life of dignity and opportunity for all. We are one, diverse India.
The author was a teacher in The School KFI from1988 to 2013. Since 2013 she works as a teacher and Coordinating Academics and Outreach at Pathashaala, the school under the umbrella of Krishnamurti Foundation India, located in the villages of Elimichampet and Vallipuram in Tamil Nadu. Email: sumitra.m.gautama@gmail.com
