Educational inequity in India is a complex problem that cannot be solved by any one person or entity. Addressing inequity calls for leadership at all levels of the system—children who are able to identify and communicate their needs and aspirations; teachers who have the agency to serve the specific and diverse requirements of their students; and nonprofits and governments that create policies, infrastructure, and environments enabling children and teachers to thrive. It takes a movement of leaders working collectively towards this shared vision of a reimagined education system for our children.
Building this movement of leaders and infusing talent at all levels of the education sector requires a paradigm shift in how we approach learning. What are we teaching our children, and why? How do we evaluate all types of learners? What is the role that educators, nonprofits, and governments can play? While we’ve started important conversations on equipping students with 21st-century skills and on empowering teachers to facilitate holistic learning, we may need to fundamentally transform aspects of education to allow our children and educators to be key decision-makers in the system.
Here’s how we can consider doing this:
Rethink the purpose of education
Education today tends to be transactional, competitive, and self-driven. It is largely focused on individual opportunities, such as entry into higher education and improved livelihood opportunities. While these are important aspects of school education, the purpose of education can be expanded to build leaders for today and the future. How do we intentionally create a system where children learn to uplift their peers and support opportunities for everyone?
We start by teaching our children to embrace the idea that ‘for me to win, you do not have to lose’. Allowing our children to see themselves as leaders and changemakers today is the first step.
As early as grade 5, or even sooner, children should be thinking about the problems they face, and should have the tools, mindset, and orientation to find solutions to these problems. Our curricula, by design, should look at holistic education as one that equips students with reflective tools—enabling them to identify the skills they need to grow across the following three strands:
- Self – towards a life and livelihood of their choice;
- Others – accelerating learning and growth for everyone else;
- India – working in partnership to transform communities.
We believe that an education anchored in these three aspects—which we evaluate using the Student Vision Scale—will set our children on fundamentally transformed life paths.
Reassess how to evaluate learning
Different children learn in different ways, and so they will contribute to the world in different ways. And yet we assess everybody in exactly the same manner. It is essential to observe and evaluate each student to see if they are growing holistically and gaining critical thinking and leadership skills—crucial milestones for any child’s early development. This is why we encourage students to reflect on their progress on the Student Vision Scale. What this reimagined Student Vision Scale attempts to do is acknowledge multiple facets of development and encourage children to grow along each of them. Success may be defined as a child’s ability to master the skill in a way that benefits both them and others. At our classrooms in Teach For India, this entails trusting children with change and empowering them with belief and love. This leads to demonstration of innovative ideas and leadership skills. Examples include Rehan, who worked with the municipality in his area to clean out the mountains of waste that his community had lived beside for decades, and Almas, who started a project called Basket of Joy that sourced wicker baskets woven by the women of Kamathipura, Mumbai; added organic vegetables to the baskets from farmers; and built a steady revenue stream.
Partner with children
Decisions on education and learning have traditionally been made in closed conference rooms, away from the ground. Although children are the recipients of the decisions we make, they are given no voice or agency in the system. But this can change. We can listen to, learn from, and be led by our children—they can be at the table with us, making these decisions. The next time a document like the National Education Policy (NEP) is written, we could have children’s opinions feeding into that policy document, for the perspective that children bring is unique, most authentic, and most relevant. This representation of children should not just be symbolic—we should think of them as equal partners in the drafting of policy. This may sound simple, but it is understandably a big shift to imagine children of all ages as not only the recipients, but also the drivers of their own learning and the learning of others.
What might true partnership with children look like? In the classroom, it would mean moving away from the model of one teacher issuing instructions from the front of the class to one that espouses peer-to-peer learning. Every student would be both a teacher as well as a learner, contributing what they can to others in the class. A classroom would feel like a web with everyone teaching and everyone learning. At the level of school, partnership would require student advisory boards that conduct surveys on what students think is working or not working, and then involve them in the problem-solving process. Nonprofits too could enable partnership by weaving children’s voice and agency into the fabric of the organisation. At Teach For India, for example, two student alumni sit on our board. Further, when we were drafting our next strategic 10-year plan, we asked the children what they wanted us to invest in, and what they believed we could rectify in the system.
Embracing partnership could ultimately mean that India’s 320 million children would be working alongside us to tell us why learning matters, what learning should be, and how they’d like to learn. This could be a radically different way to approach systemic change in education.
Make teaching aspirational
Programmes and policies are only as well designed and implemented as the people driving them. And yet, if we were to ask the key decision-makers about their areas of interest or focus, a select few would respond with ‘talent’ or ‘leadership’. This holds true not only for the sector at large, but also for teachers in schools. Their contribution continues to be overlooked and the potential of their role remains restricted.
My deep belief is that no schoolteacher joins the government school system thinking that they would be apathetic to the needs of the children they serve. The problem lies in the way our system has been structured since the colonial era, following a factory-model, bureaucratic, one-size-fits-all approach. This approach leaves very little room for autonomy, initiative, and deep impact. Unless we strive to change this approach to one that values teachers, celebrates their performance, and encourages their growth, many of our best, most driven teachers may continue to feel burned out and overwhelmed due to the amount of administrative work and the weight of responsibilities on them.
This is one of the reasons that teaching, historically considered a well-respected profession, is no longer an aspirational choice. India currently faces a leadership gap—a shortage of teachers, with a million teaching posts lying vacant across the country. We must reflect on this and ask ourselves what makes teaching, or any other profession, aspirational—is it pay, recognition, impact, opportunity, or the narrative around that profession? We can then take the steps needed to get our best talent interested in teaching, thinking about what would make them want to join the education and development sector and commit to doing this important and difficult work in the long run.
In order to have joyful, purpose-driven, effective teachers, we need to overhaul teacher training and rebuild our teacher training systems with the right orientations, aligned with a fast-changing world. Advancement in technology and AI demands that we train and evaluate teachers accordingly. The most recent NEP has also alluded to the integration of technology in pedagogy, and rightly so. This could help in increasing the overall efficiency of teachers as well as enable them to create better, more customised lesson plans and focus on project-based learning.
Many of the 14,000-odd teacher training institutes that are currently operational do not equip teachers with the right tools and agency to fully tap into their leadership potential. To address this gap, we need to be open to taking strategic risks with teacher education: exploring alternative accreditation models, practices, and structures that give teachers greater autonomy, or experimental models that allow non-teaching professionals to spend some of their time working with children. By investing in and placing a bet on the leadership development of our teachers, we can begin to see the ripple effects of leadership building within the classroom as well.
Positive leadership can advance the world in powerful and meaningful ways. We understand and respect this idea in many sectors. Take business, for example, where it is agreed upon that investing money and resources in talent will lead to positive outcomes. But we fail to see the urgency and importance of this in the development sector. While there are many exceptions, the social sector has not been the first or most aspirational choice for our best, brightest, or most committed talent. If we want to make a dent in solving some of our biggest challenges, specifically in education and for our children, we need our best thinkers working on these issues. This is imperative for nation building.
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