With the ambitious goal of ensuring basic literacy and numeracy for every child in the country, the newly announced Nipun Bharat Mission calls upon the role of parents in elementary education. Education researchers have known this for years – in the 1960s, a Coleman report in the US showed that household influences are more important to a child’s learning success than school influences.
However, low-income parents, many of whom have the skills they need to help their children learn, but lack the awareness or confidence, will learn how to be their children’s first teachers, and help them acquire the foundational skills. Will help what they need to make sense out of the rest. About his journey to school? The first step on a parent’s journey should be awareness that their role is important to their children – on a larger scale, this awareness can be brought about by a mass movement driven by a campaign.
There is a priority for this type of campaign. The last broad based mass movement in education with wide reach was probably ‘School Chalen Hum’. In 2006 by the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, a campaign aimed at universalizing primary education, it successfully connected communities around school enrollment. Given its wide reach and well-crafted messaging, the enrollment rate (increased from 85-90% in 2006 to 95%+ in 2020 for 6-14 year olds) along with creating awareness of the undoubted importance is with nominations for of education as a whole.
Yet today, as we have achieved near-universal enrollment, the quality of education remains a challenge. The ASER results show that even today 25 per cent of children in Class I cannot recognize letters and 43 per cent of children cannot recognize numbers. Drop out rates in secondary and high schools, especially for girls, remain high. If that wasn’t enough, we are now in the midst of a pandemic that has hindered academic progress and led to unprecedented learning losses.
But there is a hope – families have now become a part of their children’s education in an unprecedented way. Their prominent role as the first and foremost teachers of their children has finally come to the fore. Additionally, we now have better ways than ever – ASER reports that 62% of rural households today have access to a smartphone, up from close to 90% in urban India.
It is time for another mass media campaign to build on the momentum of parent involvement through the lockdown, inviting parents to participate in achieving the promise of basic education going forward. While such a campaign is to be joyful, it has to understand the considerable constraints in terms of ability, competence and confidence of low-income parents.
The jobs of these parents are physically and mentally demanding, they may not have more than 20 minutes per day to spend with their child, and they are often not convinced that they are able to teach their children. The right people for However, even those 20 minutes, used productively, can make a real difference in their children’s future.
The pandemic has allowed parents to see these consequences first hand and break down some of these barriers, but we now need to build stronger communication and social distancing to ensure that this behavior becomes a habit.
This communication and social vibe should send a message to parents that “We believe that you can play a vital role in shaping your children’s future through home education, and we empower you to play that role.” will build.” What would help is even greater if this message is delivered through the voices of role models – politicians, bureaucrats and teachers, and even celebrities.
The Uttar Pradesh government, which is taking strong steps towards basic literacy and numeracy at the primary education level through “Mission Prerna”, has brought in Suresh Raina as the face of its education mission – as a father of young children. The parents’ faces lit up with hope as they talked of being and doing learning activities with them.
It is the hope that we need to recreate and sustain the energy of over 75 million parents in India today. To nurture that hope we need a broad-based campaign on the lines of Ghar Par Bhi Padhe Hum, which does parent engagement for what ‘School Chalen Hum’ did for enrollment – at the national level. Create continual mindset change in homes and communities. which is reflected in policy and educational outcomes.
In our program at Rocket Learning, we send parents a short video activity with a call to action each day. This article is our call to action for the government and policy makers – we hope that a new tune for primary education will soon become an enjoyable daily routine for millions of parents and teachers.
Disclaimer:Namya Mahajan, Vishal Sunil and Siddhant Sachdeva are co-founders of Rocket Learning
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