Relevance : GS Paper II
The draft National Education Policy reinforces outdated ideas.
Novel features of National Education Policy, 2019
- Places focus on the early years.
- Recommends continuity between pre-primary and primary years.
- Emphasis on mother tongue-based education.
Why children fail to learn
- health and nutritional status of children
- high student-teacher ratios
- pedagogical and teacher education-related issues
Issues with the draft policy
- Reinforces outdated ideas about foundational literacy programme.
- “Emergent literacy” has been ignored.
- Recommendations are based on generic theories of early childhood education.
- Believes in the idea that any literate person can teach literacy.
Way forward for early literacy
- Requires a “balance” between acquiring the script with higher order meaning making.
- Requires pedagogical approaches such as reading aloud to children, etc.
- Needs moving beyond textbooks to high quality children’s literature.
- Teachers need to know how to differentiate instruction at different levels.
- Volunteers can be used but cannot be a primary mechanism.
- Draft should provide direction for a national curriculum framework.
Conclusion
The authors of the draft to engage with scholars, practitioners and policy-makers in the field of early literacy.
