by

[email protected] former director of Curriculum, Ministry of Education

This article is a tribute to all those engaged in providing preschool education. It seeks to analyze why children of disadvantaged homes suffer from retention, dropout and failure in schools. We know very well that the journey starts very young. The wisdom of the 2008-2009 budget lies in its realization that, in spite of giant strides of progress in education, pre-primary education is the Cinderella of the scenario. Still the children of the poor either do not attend preschool or attend those that suffer from poor curriculum, poor teaching and poor management. At least 10% of our children do not attend a pre-primary school and are not attended to at home by active parenting. Poverty is easily dismissed by condescending pity with millions of rupees feeding a few NGOs, which are unable to understand the dynamic link between poverty and school performance.

Higher education for mothers

It is a fact that mothers who have completed higher levels of education have children with better language and communication skills. Research has also shown that those whose mothers have not completed secondary education score significantly lower than children whose mothers have a secondary School Certificate in applied problem solving and calculation assessments.

The active presence of both parents is yet another boost to the acquisition of language and cognitive skills. Lower income children recognize fewer letters and words than their more affluent counterparts.

Children?s growth and development include:

● language and communication skills

● cognitive development

● health/physical well-being

● social skills

● attitude towards school and learning

● early school success

● self-esteem

Why can?t the children of underprivileged homes perform well at school ? The negative influences on the child?s learning growth include:

● maternal health problems

● high maternal anxiety maternal authoritarian child-rearing attitude

● poor mother-child interaction

● mother with less than secondary education or none

● l head of household with semi-skilled or unskilled occupation

● absent father

● poor self-esteem

● many stressful life events during the first years of child

● large family size

By contrast poor parents who are able to foster well-performing children are able

● To assess their children?s strengths and weaknesses

● To interact with them to set and enforce plans

● To enhance their children?s success

● To advocate for their children with their teachers and school officials

● To participate in their children?s lives as guides and friends

Such parents are able to overcome the effects of poverty. A few children are also resilient to the debilitating effects of poverty. Resilience is a dynamic progress encompassing adaptation within the context of significant adversity. Resilience does not result from immutable personality traits or dispositions, but rather reflects social processes through which individuals overcome difficulties in their environment. We need to learn from this analysis and reengineer schooling for the poor. What are the areas of intervention? ZEP schools have a signal opportunity to implement new processes for enhanced teaching and learning. The emphasis must be on promoting parenting. A broken home is not a finality, but only a different opportunity to operate otherwise. At times single parents can do better than two. Not all parents know and can enact the role of parents towards the acquisition of skills. What are parent mediators for if they do not help illiterate parents to parent effectively? It is important for parents to show an interest in what the child does at school. It is not necessary that they should have a high level of education; though having it is a great advantage. The mediator?s responsibility in ensuring the physical presence of the child at school everyday is of paramount importance.

At school teachers must know that children learn through the senses, that pedagogy should exploit the auditory, the visual, the tactual and the kinaesthetic. The merit of Bridging the Gap guidelines lies in encouraging learning by doing. It is a pity that computers are found in a laboratory, which is frequented on special occasions. This is the best way of killing the use of IT across the curriculum. In fact every pre-primary class must be equipped with one or more PC so that technology is integrated to learning.

The disadvantaged child with poor language skills, poor mathematical skills, poor social skills and with little independence or autonomy needs an interaction with the teacher who has an esteem for him. It is unfortunate to hear abuses flung at the children of the poor by teachers who are forced in a mixed class to treat all learners alike.

Little capital is made of cooperative learning. High ability learners can carry children with poor concept formation skills with them in collaborative exercises much better and faster than teachers can if they use the course magistral methodology. Teachers need to plan activities around learning concepts and allow children to exploit their intra and interpersonal capabilities with a group. Observations have shown how our teachers at Primary are ill-prepared to teach groups. If ?Bridging the Gap? is intended for qualitative improvement of teaching and learning our teachers must learn how to drive concepts across different groups within a class.

Poverty is an opportunity, not God?s curse. The driving force that our own parents who lived in poor conditions had was their conviction that education was the only saving grace out of poverty. In fact the issue of poverty has not been adequately addressed in our schools. How can we explain that though books are distributed free to all children, 8% of our school going children do not come to school with books. Our schools are not places for the poor because their learning style is not respected; their identity is crushed under the weight of more fortunate children who have more developed potential for communication, autonomy, interpersonal dynamics, calculation, social behaviour and finer sensory skills. Apart from the resilient few, the disadvantaged learn otherwise.

Our pre-primary children must be respected according to their endowments. Skills developed by young children provide the building blocks for developing additional skills that have been linked to a lifetime of benefits, including acquiring more education, receiving higher earnings and reducing dependency on social welfare programmes. I would be in favour of children spending an additional year in preschool to reduce skill gaps and later achievement gaps.