Nita Kumar, Brown Family Professor of South Asian History, Claremont McKenna College
Co-hosted by the South Asian Studies Council
India has an impressively long history of education, on record for over 3000 years. This education—controlled by states and communities that were Vedic, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic and Christian (each of different sectarian affiliations)—has been diverse in multiple ways. From the 1850s onwards, India has trodden a complex path towards modernity, grappling with its own heterogeneous past and multiple infuences from abroad. It is this last one and a half century that is actively present when we analyse the current pre-school situation in India.
Nursery and Kindergarten education was introduced in India by British colonialists. India became Independent in 1947 and has had a thoughtfully and carefully planned policy influenced by the ideologies of Gandhi, Maulana Azad and Zakir Husain. These were people educated in progressive education in Europe and also in touch with their own traditions of interactive learning, working with their hands and closeness to the community.
The more surprise, then, for our research to reveal that the state of Pre-School education in India today is quite the opposite of what could be called effective or progressive. Even at ages three to five it relies on rote learning, imitation, authoritarianism and control. Children in an average Pre-School classroom in today’s India are not merely bored, they are in pain—and so, often, are the teachers. The state seems to have thrown up its hands in its inability to improve public schools. The vast majority of private schools also have a pre-modern, un-reflexive perspective on children and childhood. The problem is not incidental but structural.
My lecture describes with ethnographic date what is going wrong with Pre-School education in India and analyses the social, political and pedagogic reasons for the situation. Because of India’s diversity and variety of educational experiences, there are many lessons to be learnt from its case for educational scholars and practitioners anywhere. I myself have been working in a school in Varanasi, North India for decades (southpoint.nirman.info) and I bring that experience into my discussion.