
The latest ASER, which shifted from being an annual status of education report to a biennial one in 2016, should gladden us. The survey, which covered rural schools across 605 districts in 2024, showed a remarkable recovery from pandemic-era setbacks in primary learning levels. Larger shares of Class 3 students could read Class 2 texts and conduct simple subtractions than in 2022. More heartening is that government schools, where about two-thirds of students study, outperformed private ones on this trend. The sharpest recoveries were seen in Kerala, Odisha and Maharashtra. So far, so good.
But in our eagerness to spot the silver lining, we should not miss the clouds. Only about 45 percent of Class 8 students were comfortable with basic arithmetic, a level that has not budged since 2018. Though enrolment among 6-14-year-olds has topped 95 percent for almost two decades, those aged 15-16 and not enrolled edged up across rural India for the first time in a decade. The rise was pronounced among both boys and girls in Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Karnataka, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Rajasthan—indicating more dropouts after class 8. School infrastructure is another area where the improvement has been stodgy and uneven. Even after so many cleanliness campaigns, 32 percent of schools did not have useable girls’ toilets; a similar share did not provide drinking water.
India has had several pioneering educational innovators—from Rabindranath Tagore and Aurobindo to Jiddu Krishnamurti and David Horsburgh. A rare model that learnt from them and took it to the masses is Tamil Nadu’s activity-based learning. M P Vijayakumar, a former IAS officer, took it from a pilot project in one Chennai school in 2003 to more than 37,000 government primary schools in 2007. The approach treats every child as an active learner and promotes self-confidence; no heavy school bags, no exams, and the freedom to learn as much as a child is capable of in each stream. All other states have formally studied the model; a few have implemented bits of it. Some of its ideals tie in well with the New Education Policy. So, at a stage when children’s mental health is getting increasingly affected by performance anxieties, isn’t it time more states shifted to this approach? Only, then we would also need to find another way to measure educational outcomes.