Give them their dreams
VIMALA RAMACHANDRAN
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Enrolment is not a big issue in primary schooling anymore. Most urban poor and rural children spend a lot of time working, which adversely impacts their learning outcomes.
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In the last few years the Educational Resource Unit has had several opportunities to interact with children in the school-going age. One of the issues that invariably props up is the question of the work children do. Travelling across the country, doing research in primary education, we came across school-going children who worked and out-of-school children who were not engaged in any full-time work. We met "rescued" child workers who were not sure what would happen to them after they were through with schools, tribal children who have really no school worth mentioning in their area, and urban children in night shelters and drop-in centres. Whether it was Mirzapur, Kundapur, Nizamabad, Warangal, Hyderabad, Sitapur, Surguja, Lucknow, Ajmer, Bikaner, Udaipur or almost any other place we visited, children from poor families who are enrolled in school said that they work before and after school. Girls worked on zari/gota work, cooked, cleaned, rolled beedi, harvested crops, took care of children — work they said they were doing before enrolling in school. Boys worked long hours grazing cattle, carrying heavy loads, assisting in family occupation and many of them were "bonded" for short periods of time to pay off loans.
Yes, enrolment is obviously not a big issue anymore — most children in the 6+ age group are formally enrolled in school. What is indeed worrisome is regularity of attendance, transition from one grade to the other, completion and learning outcomes. These are the big issues in school education. For example, in a recent study we found that 71 per cent of the children who entered class 1 in 1998 reached Class 5 in 2002 in Karnataka. In Uttar Pradesh it varied between 11 per cent in an urban slum to 58 per cent in a well functioning rural primary school. In Andhra Pradesh it ranged from 23 per cent in urban slums to 43 per cent in a rural school. However, once we moved beyond the "official" records, conversations with teachers revealed a more complex picture. In all the three states the teachers are reluctant to admit that children drop out and hence many children are shown in the registers and some of them are marked as long-absentees. Many of them are marked present and even automatically "promoted"!
Children from poor households are not regular. They tend to absent themselves for a range of reasons. Parents admit it is difficult for them to "force" their children to go to school, especially when nothing much happens in schools and children learn very little. Some parents said that they need their children at home for small chores — especially during the peak agricultural seasons, when a child is sick or when they have to migrate for work. Many children above the age of six in the surveyed households and attending government schools reported that they work before as well as after school (See the table). The burden of work was most severe for the first-born — especially if she is the eldest daughter. There was no appreciable difference between Muslim/ Hindu and Tribal/ non-Tribal families. Apart from sibling care, children support their families with care of milch cows/ goats, fetching fuel wood/ fodder, water, running errands and looking after sick family members. As a result, children either get late for school or miss it altogether. The gender division of work and added responsibility of household work on older girls in the family was marked in all the three states. In Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh we met boys who were in temporary bondage to pay off a loan taken by the parents. Engaging in full-time work during weekends and holidays is a fairly routine activity among children.
If such is the situation with respect to children and work, what implications does this have for primary schooling? The community is aware of the need for educating their children yet the children are burdened with work before and after school, during holidays and vacations — both household/domestic chores as well as work outside the home or in home-based occupations. Children do not get time to revise their lessons, especially girls who are higher up in the birth order. Given the nutritional status of most poor children, energy levels are low and impact upon children's ability to concentrate in school. The impact of working and yet attending school needs to be examined with reference to its impact on learning outcomes.
In Uttar Pradesh we observed that most children in classes III, IV and V were neither able to read fluently from their textbooks, nor could they solve simple addition or subtraction sums. For instance, let us take the example of the 11 (out of 18) children attending the GPS from the 18 households in the urban sample. Five children attending classes II, III and IV showed poor learning levels. Three children from class II were unable to recognise alphabets or numerals. The two children in class III were also unable to read, write or count, though they knew certain lessons by rote. "Earlier class II pass could read postcards, now they can't even write their names," complained a father during the FGD in urban Sitapur. "What is the use of sending him to school? I pulled him out after class IV and he now helps me with my work."
The situation was not dramatically different in Karnataka or in Andhra Pradesh. Yes, a few more could read, but on further investigation we realised that children with literate parents (especially mother) or those who attend private tuition classes are the ones most able to read.
Children who are first generation school goers barely manage to recognise alphabets and can, at best, read a few words. Group discussions in the community revealed that most parents feel that the quality of teaching has declined, that teachers do not really care if the children of the poor learn to read or not. Also teachers are not made accountable for learning outcomes of children, especially in the primary and middle schools where there is no board examinations. Other research studies have also made similar observations, most recently the Pratichi Education Report (2002) brought out by the foundation established by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.
A lot more needs to be done to ensure children not only enrol in schools, but also have a fair chance to learn and benefit from schooling. We need to move well beyond definitions of what constitutes child labour and listen to what children are saying about schools, about work and about their dreams and aspirations.
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