New Delhi: A study that attempts to compare primary education in India and China, which together account for nearly a third of the world’s population, suggests that the former is ahead of its neighbor in terms of policy steps towards quality schooling. Almost 20 years behind.
study A working paper published last month by the United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economics and Research (UNU-Wider) – a Finland-based think tank – was conducted by two scholars, Naveen Kumar and Vinita Varghese of the University of California San Diego. University of Illinois, Chicago.
It seeks to trace “key lessons” to be learned from China two decades before India’s new National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 took effect, which shifted its focus from ‘quantity’ to ‘quality’.
The authors state that China “new curriculum reform India’s NEP 2020 20 years ago has put China on the path of achieving equitable development of ‘quality’ compulsory schooling.
However, it adds that “NEP 2020 has components that have the potential to improve the quality, equity and efficiency of the education system”.
India’s ‘Late Realization’
The study noted that in the 1950s, India and China were almost on equal footing in terms of approach to education – focusing on higher education, particularly science and technology.
However, according to the study, China prioritized overcoming illiteracy in the 1960s, while India continued to emphasize higher education in science and technology. According to the study, India brought free and compulsory education in the form of Right to Education (RTE) in 2009, decades after China.
As a result, between 1961 and 1981, China’s literacy rate increased to 43 percent to 68 percent, while India rose from 28 percent to 41 percent during the same period.
India’s focus on higher education came at the cost of “addressing mass illiteracy”, the study said, adding that the issue was exacerbated by “unequal access to education”.
The gap between the literacy rates of the two countries has narrowed. According to the World Bank, by 2018, India has a literacy rate 74 percent while China’s was 97 percent,
Most of India’s improvement in literacy has happened in recent years, while China’s has gained in the past thirty years, the UNU-Wider study said.
“China has been close to the 100 percentage mark since the early 1990s and India has improved from a 62 percent literacy rate (aged 15-24 years) in 1990 to 92 percent in 2018. Gain gap in youth literacy rate in India Elementary education boils down to delay in playing of policies,” it says.
Approach to Elementary Education
The next important difference between these countries, says study, is their attitude towards Primary education.
In the 1970s, the Working Paper states, China made education compulsory for all, and as a result, its school enrollment rate increased. By 1985, China’s gross enrollment rate – the ratio of the number of children in school to the number of children in the appropriate age group for the school level – had reached 100 percent.
China’s push for primary enrollment showed progress in the 1990s, when its secondary school enrollment increased. The study noted that the increase in enrollment in secondary schools in India occurred only after the early 2000s.
The study noted that since the 1990s, an average 25-year-old Chinese has always had nearly two years more schooling than an Indian.
China’s investment in quality
In 2001, China began to reform its education policy, focusing on quality education as opposed to exam-oriented rote, the latter system facing backlash from students’ parents with increasing enrollment. Well, note the author.
As part of its new education policy, the Chinese government invested in infrastructure, changed its curriculum, reduced the focus on exam-oriented education, and provided incentives for teaching in rural areas.
Although India invested in compulsory and free education, mid-day meals, separate toilets for girls and boys, increasing the number of schools, etc., according to the authors, the approach has mostly been to address quantitative measures.
“India’s race to increase school access and infrastructure at the expense of efforts to improve the quality of teaching has created a widening gap between India and China on quality, equity and efficiency measures,” the study said.
This has led to “increasing isolation of children from less privileged social classes” and school-going children displaying “poor learning outcomes” in both public and private schools.
road ahead
The authors believe that India’s NEP has potential to improve. From Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE), to improving teacher recruitment and training, to standardized tests (measuring learning outcomes using a common benchmark in Classes 3, 5 and 8), the NEP is the key to India’s education system. Can provide quality push to the needs. The author says.
But the authors do make some policy suggestions – adding more workers to each pre-school center, and changing the way teachers are recruited, trained and rewarded. They also recommend that steps should be taken to ensure that standardized test scores are free from data manipulation.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
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