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Democratic Politics Should be Concerned With EarlyChildhood EducationMANABI MAJUMDAR

Manabi Majumdar (manabimajumdar@gmail.com) is with the Centre for Studies in SocialSciences, Calcutta.Vol. 55, Issue No. 4, 25 Jan, 2020

Things in the education sector are clearly changing before our own eyes, and yet, they donot seem to gain much visibility in our democratic politics. Drawing on empirical evidencefrom classrooms in Anganwadis and private pre-school centres, three arguments arepresented here.

In his justly celebrated book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty (2014)draws our attention to the rising wealth inequality and proposes a global wealth tax tocombat it, since footloose capital travels beyond the confines of nation states, irresistiblytowards tax havens, creating a new topography of inequality. Interestingly, juxtaposingagainst physical or financial capital, a few scholars argue that human capital should also beviewed as a “21st century form of wealth” and that expanding educational opportunitiesshould therefore be perceived as an equalising tool to reduce the widening wealth gap. Inparticular, the potential benefits to early childhood education, conceived either as humancapital or a core human capability, are claimed to be substantial in both scholarly and policycircles. The advantages of an “early start,” in their children’s learning pursuits, are notescaping the attention of the parents either.

And yet, hidden below this surface-level accord, there remain many unaddressed and under-examined critical issues. For example, is the early start at once a “fair” and equitable start

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for all children, irrespective of their social position? Also of interest are issues of whether itis a “fitting” start, that is, to say a kind of playful preparation for young children to enterschool or instead, a dulling drill for an impending educational horse race. And, who will getthe children ready for school?

School Readiness and Schools’ ReadinessThe political philosopher Amy Gutmann (1982) powerfully argues that the state, the parents,and the education professionals have custodial authority over children’s education, and thatthe power of these three authorities needs to be balanced. It is well to point out that themarket, or business, is not given any direct custodial role in educating children. Indeed,even without taking an “all-or-none” view on the question of public or private provisioningof early-years education, it is possible to argue that public institutions have a first-ordersocial responsibility in providing high-quality early learning support for children. This hasbeen the case in most parts of the world that have secured vital support for all theirchildren. And, in this era of renewed social distancing and divisions, especially in countrieslike ours that already reel under a dead weight of entrenched social inequalities, theimportance of state-mediated measures of child security and development cannot beoverstated.

There is good reason, therefore, to defend, on equity grounds, social policies, such as theIntegrated Child Development Services (ICDS), to combat a rising trend, that is evidentespecially in urban India, of “premature privatisation” of preschool education. Defendinggovernment-run preschool centres, however, should not detract attention from barefacedlyhighlighting the need for their large-scale improvement. ICDS centres, therefore, need to beboth defended and improved. A recent survey of a number of ICDS centres in two selectedIndian cities finds that, quite often, small children learn in the presence of strong kerosene

fumes, as cooking takes place in the classroom itself in the absence of a proper kitchen. [1]

What is more, in several cases, in the absence of any toilets at the centre (which is often asmall, rented, one-room space of a local club) or in the vicinity, children are led to practise“terrace defecation.” In the 21st century cityscape of India, in this new era of urbandisplacement and dispossession, as we broach the idea of people’s right to the city (Harveyand Wachsmuth 2012) and to a “smart” city, at that such profound neglect of children’sneed for a decent institutional space indicates how poor our institutional resources are,especially for poorer children. It seems as though we insist more on children’s schoolreadiness, than on the schools’ readiness for children.

When Preschool is Full SchoolIf, at one end, aligning quality demands with equity goals continues to pose a majorchallenge for the perennially resource-starved ICDS centres, quality concerns also springup, perhaps counter-intuitively, in many of the low- and high-end private preschool centresin a different form. A majority of these preschools are already an unexciting replica of an

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unoriginal school, in terms of their routine rigour, age-inappropriate curriculum, excessivestandardisation and their testing culture that hardly enlivens the natural flow of creativityamong children, or recognise their cognitive diversity. It seems as though they coach andprepare children rather prematurely for a learning culture that celebrates the “first-boy-syndrome” (Sen 2015), but fails to stoke up children’s curiosity, imagination and criticalthinking. This too, is a form of quality crisis that remains rather unnoticed by many of uswho take high-quality to be a natural correlate of anything private.

The study mentioned above has observed teaching and learning activities in the classroomthat happen in a number of government-run and privately managed preschool centres inurban, suburban and rural settings, collected study materials and teaching aids that areused, and examined the tools of evaluation that these centres draw on in order to gaugechildren’s progress. It shows that even amidst resource constraints, a number of Anganwadicentres make use of innovative pedagogic methods in the classroom, or in the adjacentangan, to help children attain pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills in a fairly stress-free andpleasurable manner. In contrast, the ambience of an average private preschool, of a low-feevariety in particular, is quite monotonous, where the tedium of mainstream school educationhas already commenced, taming bubbly children through dulling drills of memorisation,repetition and rigidity.

One such preschool included in the survey has already introduced the semester system forits young learners, putting up on the wall the prescribed syllabus for each semester. Thefirst two semesters are meant to focus on conversation—mainly in English—that includesthemes like “make sound,” “show actions,” and questions such as: “How many hands haveyou?” “How many legs have you?” “Which fruit is called the ‘king of fruit?’”, and “Whichanimal jumped tree to tree?” It is perhaps not much of a concern for the authorities of this“budget” school that these sentences are full of errors, which will have damagingconsequences for the learners. In the next two semesters, the students are expected, amongother things, to “name three colours of National Flag,” “name five kitchen things,” “namefive station things,” and “name our national emblame” (italics supplied). In their eagernessto ensure an early exposure to English-language training for their children, parents ofmodest means appear to choose a low-fee private preschool from within their alreadyconstrained “choice set,” with an additional informational disadvantage regarding schoolquality. In fact, the quality and suitability of early-learning support is not something that isdiscernible through isolated, individuated exercise of choice. Rather, an understandingabout educational quality, necessarily linked with its purpose, develops through apainstaking process of collective discussion, argumentation and judgment, which arerevisable. Hence, lending a collective voice towards shaping the idea of quality pre-schooling is a precondition for making a sensible private choice.

One important element of high-quality early childhood education pertains to the quality ofassessment tools themselves that are used to evaluate a child’s progress. Such tools need tobe sensitive to cognitive diversities and “multiple intelligences” that both experts and

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commoners find among children. Regrettably, the “one-size-fits-all” kinds of tools used inmany full-school versions of preschool do not assess children’s progress in terms ofemergent literacy and emergent numeracy; rather, these are the measuring rods of full-fledged literacy and numeracy. The progress report that an elite, in fact, a “brand”preschool uses for the evaluation of its students is quite revealing, as it is intimidating. Itshows that mathematical skills that are evaluated include knowledge, among others, ofsphere, cube, cone, cuboid, cylinder, place value, bar graphs, and so on. One wonders, a bitderisively, but also with a genuine concern, whether one day, calculus will be included in itsambit. Such downward extensions of school education into the preschool level perhapsexplains why we also find in this study that a sizable section of early learners, studyingeither in private or government-run centres, also go for paid private tuition at a very youngage. The early start seems to have taken the form of both pre-schooling and pre-tutoring,suggesting that this nascent educational journey is already a fiercely competitive race.

Things in the education sector are clearly changing before our own eyes, and yet, they donot seem to gain much visibility in our democratic politics.

Bringing Politics Back InIt is difficult to disagree with Nielsen (2017:169) when he asserts that “Early childhoodeducation is an easy policy to support from almost any normative viewpoint.” But, does itmean that children’s well-being and their rights easily find a place at the centre of attentionin our democracy? Evidence suggests otherwise. That is to say, child-related issues aresimply missing from our ballot-box-centric democracy, since children do not vote. To put itdifferently, what seems missing is a politics of impatience and outrage with regard to basiccapability deprivations that so many children in our country suffer from.

While discussing how the ICDS has been hit by the recent budget cuts (partly reversed lateron), Dreze (2017) pointedly asks why the “axe” falls so heavily and not so infrequently onchildren, and also gives us a clue by alluding to a senior officer of the Finance Ministry whocommented that he had not noticed such a pattern, and that they made the cuts in a hurry,the details of which had not been “thought through.” Such absent-minded budget cuts vis-à-vis child-related schemes indicate not just policy insensitivity, but a far more disconcertingsymptom of societal and political indifference in our country towards children’s welfare.

What masks this “democratic deficit” is a propensity to view social policies as disconnectedfrom their intrinsically political nature, and to treat them instead as mere technicalinterventions. Surely, policies need to generate concrete programmes whose effectiveimplementation requires practical skills of governance. Indeed, it is owing to thecommitment and managerial skills of some of the frontline administrative and educationworkers that some Anganwadi centres in the country provide us with inspiring examples ofhigh-quality support for early-years learning. Yet, the recognition of their contribution as aprofessional workforce, and consequently of the need for their further development and a

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decent honorarium is unforthcoming in policy discussions and almost missing in electoraldebates. It is this culture to treat child-related programmes as mere schemes immune to theheat and dust of democratic pressures that makes it urgent to bring politics—evencontentious politics—back in.

Again, to turn to the recent proliferation of “budget” private preschools that are claimed tofulfil the unmet needs of the so-called “have-little” parents, it is arguable that in the urge tocelebrate “parentocracy,” that is, the power of parental choice, what has fallen off ourdemocratic radar are the myriad ways in which business has come to school. Some of theseprivately-run preschools are stand-alone micro-enterprises operating as informal outfits,while others are part of a for-profit, transnational business network catering to the elite.This commercial turn in preschool education; this stratified nature of the preschool market,do not feature in our public debates. Neither is there much collective engagement with therising demand—perhaps supply-induced demand—for supplementary private tutoring forpreschool children, who are still developmentally at a pre-literacy and pre-numeracy stagethat is distinct from literacy and numeracy, and hence are not up for remedial coaching. Ittherefore warrants public discussion on whether paid additional tutoring at this stage isremedial or proactive. Speaking more generally, such silent processes of “marketisation bystealth” render what should be a collective choice about goals of preschooling an isolated,atomised individual choice. In standard political-economy discussions, voice and choice arecontrasted as a weapon of a citizen and a strategy of a consumer respectively. But, when apolity has to arrive at a social choice, with respect to its educational purpose, collectivevoice expressed through democratic channels has to lend itself towards shaping thatcollective choice, and hence, the need for democratic politics to swirl around the idea andpractice of child empowerment.

Early childhood education, like many other social programmes, is embedded within a socialtopography of unequal power emanating from caste, class and religious disparities andhence, is a politically challenging problem. Simplifying such a complex political problemdriven by unequal power will not guarantee a fair and fitting start for all. To give a quickexample, finding a decent institutional space to house the Anganwadi centre in a city is notmerely a matter of a technical fix, but linked to political-economy forces of urbanisation,including gentrification, the power of real estate lobbies, and the counter-demands for“spatial justice.” The vision of preschool education and the surrounding debate, therefore,needs to get closer to the structural dynamics of inequality that Piketty, in a differentcontext, draws our attention to.

This also entails the need to examine the role of the state in the lives of India’s childrenthrough a critical lens. On the one hand, the state seems to roll back, and not roll out, manyof its child-related social policies and programmes. On the other, by offering privatepreschool outfits a regulation-free zone, the state seems to reward private interests at thecost of child welfare. It is, however, important and inspiring to point out that India isdifferently developed and differently democratic, and that small children in some parts of

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the same national universe get an opportunity for an early start, a fair start and a fittingstart. The rest of India can draw lessons from that school of democracy.

End Notes:

[1] This study, funded by the Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi, hasbeen conducted in the States of Karnataka and West Bengal, respectively, by the Centre forBudget and Policy Studies, Bengaluru, and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences,Calcutta.

References:

Dreze, Jean (2017): “Giving Short Shrift to Children’s Rights,” Hindu, 28 March,https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/giving-short-shrift-to-childrens-r....

Gutmann, Amy (1982): “What’s the Use of Going to School?” Utilitarianism and Beyond,Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp261–77.

Harvey, David and David Wachsmuth (2012): “What Is to Be Done? And Who the Hell isGoing to Do It?” Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to theCity, Weil Brenner, Peter Marcuse and Margit Mayer (eds), London: Routledge.

Nielsen, Eric R (2017): “Human Capital and Wealth Before and After Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, Heather Boushey, JBradford Delong and Marshall Steinbaum (eds), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,pp 150–69.

Piketty, Thomas (2014): Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer,Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Sen, Amartya (2015): The Country of First Boys, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Image-Credit/Misc:

Image Courtesy: Modified. NeedPix/PublicDomain

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