Rethinking and reorganising education for social justice and local community needs
By: Satya Kumar Dontamsetti
Tags: Wfe5, Education Policy, Education, Education Reform, Reimagining

UCL’s Institute of Education’s Prof Stephen Ball has emphasised that political control and economic progress as the two main reasons that Governments fund education. Reorganising education with a centralised approach will be fundamentally flawed for any country and we need a policy based on a different set of organising principles that unequivocally abandon the current education policy infrastructure. We need to re-establish local democratic control of education and educational planning in ways that recognise diversity and local needs, and reconnect schools to their communities in direct and practical ways. One fine example of a School that has done this is in the remote Indian Himalayan area of Ladakh is SECMOL https://secmol.org/about/

In the paper on Education, Justice and Democracy, Prof Stephen Ball notes that “The political process of rethinking education for the 21st century, related to our real social needs and in relation to our real economic problems, will only come about by unleashing the innovative potential of schools, teachers and communities”. He further goes on to say that school development that includes social justice must address the process of change to contain meaningful collaborations and purposeful leadership, that is collaboration, among the teachers but also involving other staff, students and parents, that is in effect the local community.

Prof Stephen Ball also quotes Andy Hargreaves, on Teaching in today’s world which “must include dedication to building character, community, humanitarianism, and democracy in young people; to help them think and act above and beyond the seductions and demands of the knowledge economy”.

Teachers and Schools, and even Parents, succumb to the tyranny of curriculum and do not question it. For example, curriculum does not account for the differences in socio economic backgrounds of the children and different learning abilities or learning styles. Students are encouraged to perform and performance is recognised and rewarded to the detriment of slow learners and different learners. Curriculum must be relevant to the local community needs and solve local problems. A Teacher who has done this single handedly is Ranjitsinh Disal who won the Global Teacher Prize 2020 and shared half of his US$ 1 million prize with nine other finalists. Besides learning the local language of the village in order to translate class textbooks into his pupils’ mother tongue, he has created unique QR codes on the textbooks to give students access to audio poems, video lectures, stories and assignments, greatly improving school attendance. He is most well-known for demonstrating scientific experiments from the science lab he has built in his home. Official numbers from Microsoft show that Ranjitsinh has taught an incredible 85,000 plus students from over 1400 classrooms in 83 countries via these virtual lessons. His work with the community has ensured that there are no teenage marriages in the village. Read more here.

The fundamental rethinking on policy must be accompanied by training and capacity development of Teachers and other community leaders concerned with education. Unless the mindsets of Teachers and community leaders changes, any rethinking and reorganisation of schooling will not succeed.