The education minister’s first ball sixer

The article’s word limit constraints the author from expanding the unimaginable benefit that’s in the pipeline, but enough to highlight three important gaps that EdWG needs to fill.
For representational purposes
For representational purposes

As the baton of the G20 Presidency was handed over by Indonesian Prime Minister Joko Widodo
to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in the holy land of Bali, the signals were clear for the troika’s trishakti.

India, predecessor Indonesia and successor Brazil form a synergistic troika of developing nations for the first time in the history of G20. Various reports have emphasised the learning loss suffered by poor and low-income nations, and the socio-economic cost of this loss is reported to be mind-boggling. From this perspective, Prime Minister Modi’s G20 speech indicating intent to be inclusive, ambitious, decisive and action-oriented is in perfect alignment.

It is with this background that education, which is still grappling with its own post-pandemic resettlement, needs to be viewed by this troika in particular.

In a proactive and progressive policy leap, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, while attending the Education Working Group (EdWG) meeting in Bali in September 2022, had independent bilateral talks with his Brazilian and Indonesian counterparts on various dimensions of education, innovation, entrepreneurship and research.

Early last week, he chaired a high-level meeting to prepare the ground for the EdWG to contribute significantly to the upcoming G20 education ministers’ meeting. This is India’s opportunity to become a contributor rather than a consumer as it prepares itself to make a meaningful EdWG report leading to the G20 education ministers’ meeting on June 28, 2023.

The role of digital technology in education and the future of work are the twin themes of the EdWG, and the forthcoming months shall churn the best minds to work on four carefully identified areas in education—foundational literacy and numeracy with a focus on blended learning, capacity-building through lifelong learning, collaborative and inclusive technology-enabled learning, and collaborative research and innovation.

All four dimensions are not only independent but also mutually exclusive. It is in this intertwined yet individual foundational pillar wherein lies the EdWG report’s structural supremacy.

The combined population of India, Indonesia and Brazil is almost two billion, which is 25 per cent of the global humanity, and any effort of the troika to touch the lives of many through education shall be one of the largest contributions of the EdWG.

India’s lead in this is tellingly visible from the Ministry of Education’s four-dimensional charter. The key to the four dimensions is the operatively transformational approach through the blended, lifelong, collaborative and innovative approach towards meeting various educational outcomes aligned to the double-barrelled ammunition of digital technology and the future of work.

This resultant multiplicative factor of eight is going to be EdWG’s might, each capable of creating an exponentially impactful outcome. The article’s word limit constrains the author from expanding the unimaginable benefit that’s in the pipeline, but enough to highlight three important gaps that EdWG needs to fill.

First is the accelerated learning loss triggered by the pandemic at the school level, creating a gap between an already-weak schooling system and an excessively aspirational industry that adds high levels of stress to the higher education ecosystem.

Second is the gap between the ‘illiterate’ employers and ‘literate’ employees that’s visible from various employability and entrepreneurial talent reports. The third is the gap between the digital haves and the have-nots. All these three gaps are closely intertwined with the four areas rightly identified by Pradhan. Policy tools that will individually and collectively reduce the gaps and create a collateral concatenation of benefits are essential.

Reduced learning losses reduce stress on higher education which, in turn, improves other forms of innovative and entrepreneurial outcomes from the high-education ecosystem, which through digital empowerment, can also prepare a workforce for the future workspace.

With the G20 presidency tenure of one year beginning on December 1, 2022, low-hanging fruits such as co-located school-higher-education campuses called Special Education Zones (SEZs), collaborative competition and co-innovation models to spur research and innovation in higher education institutions, cherry-picking on some of India’s massive ‘Digital India’ success stories, etc, can be the NEP 2020-triggered policy shots for EdWG.

The forthcoming months are crucial for India’s EdWG and the first ball-sixer by the Union education minister has clearly pumped the education adrenaline that will make India’s G20 presidency not only transformational for the nation but also for the world.

S Vaidhyasubramaniam

Vice-Chancellor, SASTRA Deemed University

vaidhya@sastra.edu

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