An Educationist’s Take on Early Childhood Development Policy in India: What’s Missing?

Childhood is magical. 

In a few short years, a microscopic blob of cells, clinging to the walls of the mother’s womb, transforms into a thinking, feeling, understanding, questioning, acting individual. It will become capable of courage, care, compassion, commitment and conviction; curiosity, creativity and connection; meaning-making, self-regulation, problem-solving, imagination, integrity and leadership; joy, sorrow, hope and fear; empathy, resolve, resourcefulness and resilience.

These are not just words. Those who watch over children as they are growing up know that these big-sounding ideas show up so endearingly in their day-to-day actions, in their random thoughts and in the way they think, act and relate to others. They can be kind and cruel, sharing and grabbing, laughing and crying, self-assured and lost, leading and following, making and dismantling, falling and getting up, failing and succeeding — all the while exhibiting this amazing range of capacities.

And they learn most of it by themselves, propelled, as Khalil Gibran famously said, by “life’s longing for itself”. From latching to the mother’s breast at birth, to crying for milk. From using her body to crawl and stand, to walking and maneuvering past obstacles and climbing trees. From understanding the words cooed to her, to making herself understood by mostly clueless adults. From making up fanciful stories, to making sense of the world around her and her own place in it. The child makes an amazing, explosive and deeply personal journey of survival, discovery and learning in the first few years of her life.

For those of us who have forgotten those days from our own lives and learned now to turn to the nearest mentor, or a reference book, or Google, or Chat GPT, it is not easy to understand how invested the child is in learning, or to remember how extraordinarily existential the learning challenge is for the child. They don’t think about learning, they don’t plan on it, they don’t make timetables — they just learn. 

That is the magic of childhood.

What, then, is the place of us adults at this stage in the child’s life? 

Adults are the foundation of Early Childhood Development (ECD)

Of course, we adults want our children to grow up whole, to succeed in their lives and perhaps to help others succeed. Some adults might imagine that children figure out so much of the growing up on their own that there is little need for them to do much. Others, fearful that the children won’t get all the benefit of their wisdom, might believe that they need to hold them firmly by the hand and direct their every move — so that they grow up into exactly who they wish them to be.

Then to adults, understanding Early Childhood Development (ECD) is a fascinating journey of our own.

That journey involves discovering what children need and don’t need from us, what kind of environments help them thrive and how we can support their learning journey so that they acquire the wisdom, dispositions and skills they will need to be happy with themselves and have a meaningful presence in society. It tells us who we need to be so that our children thrive and flourish.  

ECD is not a set of activities, or even a few programs, strung together to keep children engaged. It is not just helping children read and recognize numerals. It is not merely having them memorize songs and stories and recite them for visitors. It is not only feeding them a mid-day meal that will keep them from stunting. It is not just making sure that they receive the medical attention that will keep them from sickness. It is all that but much more. Much more that we ignore at our peril.

That “much more” calls out to us every day we watch children grow up. Understanding the nature of their world and building a meaningful relationship with it, the value of collaboration among human beings and between humans and nature, a scientific temper, the ability to see, listen and reflect, the ability to think critically and creatively, the ability to build physical and emotional resilience through a focus on well-being: these are all critical to a child finding fulfillment in life. 

Building this cannot be deferred past the “Foundational Stage.” Outlined in India’s 2022 National Curriculum Framework for the Foundational Stage, it refers to the first five years of formal education between the ages of three and eight, when a child’s cognitive, physical and socio-emotional growth is shaped. By ignoring them at this stage, we are doing a great disservice to an entire generation.

And there is something else, even more urgent because it is even more foundational. We know that children at this stage (or at any stage) will learn little unless they feel supported by a network of relationships that spell physical and emotional security and safety. They will learn little unless there are responsive adults around who care about what the children feel and think and who are willing to make space for it in the learning journey. They will learn little unless what they learn connects with their experiences and environments in meaningful ways. 

We also understand that adults who are not currently experiencing the same themselves — belonging, security, validation, support and safety nets — are unable to offer them to others, including to children. The adults, too, need physical strength, emotional resilience, mental fortitude, artistic expression and technical mastery. They, too, need to learn all this in meaningful ways that connect to their world and experiences. They, too, need to experience relationships. And they need to experience all of it in the communities they belong to – the village, the urban sprawl, the organizations they work in, the support networks, the containers of their existence.

The future of ECD depends on all of this.

What does the future of ECD look like? 

There seem to be promising recent developments for the future of ECD in India.

The promotion of the Nurturing Care Framework by the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the World Bank Group in 2019 provides an important basis with global credentials for early childhood interventions to be more holistic and responsive to children’s needs than they have been.

The explicit acknowledgment of the Foundational Stage in the National Education Policy (NEP) of India in 2020 was a significant departure from the concerns of the past educational policy. It was a major step forward in giving ECD its rightful place. It brought the attendant hope that commitment of resources and the necessary policy congruence across different public initiatives might become possible.

Since then, there have been more insistent calls and some policy actions in India for more widespread teacher training and curriculum development in early childhood education, and such training seems to be reaching a larger number of front-line workers than was the case earlier.

The easier and increasing availability of technology and internet bandwidth has made the challenge of reaching the vast Indian front line somewhat more tractable.

Unfortunately, these green shoots obscure much that is distressingly missing in our vision of ECD today.

The expansive imagination of the Foundational Stage in NEP has given way to a narrowly defined Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) construct, so much so that FLN is actually being used in several places as a synonym for early childhood education.

The Nurturing Care Framework is often considered met simply because we have initiatives for mid-day meals and vaccinations in place.

Front-line capacity-building continues to use approaches that have already proven ineffective over decades, fostering neither the necessary skills nor generating the needed motivation and enthusiasm among the participants. 

Alarmingly, among influential sections of policymakers and implementers, the availability of technological solutions has prompted a flood of initiatives that essentially side-step the inconvenient, long-haul but foundationally important challenge of building good teachers. They hope to replace them with screens, apps and canned content, in blatant disregard of a mass of early childhood research and our intuitive understanding of the needs of our children.

And as we rise to safeguard our future and address the challenges that have been outlined here, as we resolve to tend that sacred fire and gather around it, we must remember that there currently exist important tacit, largely unnoticed assumptions about how the world should be ordered. They affect all of society and, therefore, do not seem to engage our attention when we think specifically about ECD, but they affect ECD in foundational ways. 

I call them the four “tions”, four important mechanisms of social organization that we have been taking for granted in education. 

Institutionalization of education

The first of the “tions”. Much of public policy has promoted the idea that the only learning worth our children’s time and our money is the one that is provided in pre-schools, schools, colleges and universities. 

Across most of the world, this has made learning information-centric and uncritical. It has packed children into rows and columns in classrooms and made them unfamiliar with their surroundings. 

It has taken them away from productive use of their hands and bodies and valorized “brain work” which, in turn, has created an artificial crisis of periodic unemployment. It has snapped their connections with their land, their environment, their culture and their communities — replacing them with words in ink on paper. 

It has given rise to a deep sense of disempowerment among most of our communities as far as education is concerned, the feeling that they don’t know enough to be meaningful contributors to their children’s learning. 

While there might be some justification for this where aerospace engineering or robotic surgery is concerned, its extension to ECD is alienating for the children and alarming for society. For ECD to have a future, we must discover how much there is to learn for children in communities, on land, in relationships and in discovery and invention, even outside schools and pre-schools.

Urbanization of communities

The second “tion”. The worshippers of urbanization have led us to believe that the ghettoization of people in cities and towns is inevitable as we “develop.” 

With economic and social policies in most countries oriented towards this shibboleth, we have seen unhygienic and alienated living grow exponentially in the cities, even as rural communities have been devastated by the loss of populations. Mental health challenges in urban communities have become alarming, accentuated simply by the inhuman stresses that accompany urban living. 

For the very young, it has meant few physical spaces for wholesome growth and play, little opportunity for meaningful community engagement, a social landscape tragically barren of nurturing experiences and distressingly few ways of developing a resilient personality. 

For ECD to have a future, we must reconsider how physical communities should be laid out, how large they should be, how they should harmonize with the surrounding landscape and how their cultural, economic and political sinews should function.

Globalization of society

My third “tion” is the globalization of our society. We have also been fed the inevitability of globalization, almost as a primal force. It is true that it promises economic efficiency, but we have, in the process, lost much. 

Diversity is the essence of risk reduction and long-term survival and thriving, whether at the level of an individual, an organization, a community, a nation, or indeed, the evolution of life itself. In a few short decades, blinded by the promise of economic efficiency, we have traded diversity away for massive inequality and loss of local skills, trades, crafts, self-reliance, agency and autonomy. 

Our textbooks, the only source of information promoted by our policies, have consistently failed to ignite an examination of the underlying assumptions and their all-too-visible outcomes among our children. 

The globalizing impulse, being un-moored in authentic experience and unresponsive to local needs, has thus led to the loss of entire education systems including, unfortunately, those that address the very young.

As a result, they have fostered and valorized the creation of an alienating and alienated elite. The reaction to that is a distressing level of anti-intellectualism throughout the world. That, of course, creates the fodder for the assembly line that is perhaps the holy grail of the globalizing philosophy in the first place, but it also creates a dangerous level of instability and irrationality in society that can eventually only tear everything apart. This is not just a possibility. It is happening now, around the world. 

For ECD to have a future, we must acknowledge the primacy of the “local” in the lives of our children, help them celebrate their uniqueness and foster the confidence that will allow them to reject the totalizing impulses of our world today.

Standardization of processes and outcomes

The final “tion” is the standardization of processes and outcomes in education and is, in some sense, the inevitable outcome of the first three. 

While establishing a standardized set for seventeen-year-olds taking a calculus course may make some sense, it is singularly inappropriate for all five-, six- or seven-year-olds to be assessed based on a single set of learning outcomes, or for them to be subjected to one set of learning activities or processes. 

Such standardizing, almost by definition, violates the space that growing up requires at this stage. 

Once launched, these standards can become more and more mindless. This was seen when all the tens of thousands of anganwadis (government-run childcare centers in India), in a particular system, were expected to be “teaching” the same lesson at, say, 11 AM on Friday, November 20. Elaborately constructed textbooks were thus distributed to ensure that this standardization was implemented. The inertia of the system, thankfully, kept it from actually happening in most places, but the intention of the standardizers was clear. More importantly, significant opportunities for the students’ learning were undoubtedly lost.

Standardization is beguiling because it is easy for someone with little contact with children, and little understanding of their ways of learning, to imagine and decree. Its implementation does not result in any learning simply because that is not how learning happens at this stage. 

But it is not harmless. It does distort adult behavior, both of teachers and parents, toward their children, replacing empathetic, supportive and nurturing adult-child learning interactions with meaningless choral shouting in regimented classrooms and anxious parents demanding performance on utterly meaningless standardized tests. 

For ECD to have a future, we must firmly reject standardizing impulses and seek to provide our children opportunities to explore their world at their own pace, supported and inspired by affectionate adults.

To summarize, education is the primary mechanism that drives long-term change in society. ECD forms the foundations on which all of it is built. For ECD to have a future and for us to have a future, we must hold and cherish ECD in a way that protects and strengthens children today and the society tomorrow.

[Yaamini Gupta edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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