– Professor J.S. Rajput is a well-known educationist and former director of NCERT and NCTE

For the country’s estimated 15 million class X and 7.7 million higher secondary school-leavers, admission cut-offs into India’s 35,000 undergrad colleges — and especially into the few dozen top-ranked institutions of higher education — range between 95-100 percent, a dismaying reality.

The mere mention of cut-offs intensely demoralises and depresses children even of the very best schools. Millions of them push themselves hard in their teen years in the hope of getting into the too-few best colleges, often sacrificing every other interest to focus on achieving 90 percent-plus in the annual school-leaving board examinations. The fortunate few who can afford undergrad studies abroad, payout an aggregate annual sum of $7 billion (Rs.44,446 crore) to foreign universities which evidently welcome them. The loss to the nation is not only financial, it also hinders the development of creative talent and the growth of India’s cognitive capital as many students in higher education abroad never return. Is there no way to prevent this continuous flight of capital and talent erosion?

There is, and schools can do it. During an education tour of the erstwhile USSR, this writer visited special physics and music schools. In the former Soviet Union and I daresay contemporary Russia, primary students who show signs of exceptional musical, physics and chemistry, science and technology capability, are sent to secondary/higher secondary special (residential) schools. There while they follow the common school curriculum, they are also given intensive tuition in their exceptional intelligence through peer learning and interaction with experts. Such early identification of talent and special intelligences of children is possible in India’s Central government schools — the 1,094 Kendriya Vidyalayas and 600-plus Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas — and in India’s Top 800 mainly private schools annually rated and ranked by EducationWorld.

Discussions and debates relating to how schools can identify and nurture the special intelligences of children elicit excuses about the paucity of time, and passing the buck to eminent professors in institutions of higher education. Yet when the District Institutes of Education and Training (DIETs), conceptualised under the National Policy of Education, 1986 were established, one of their main duties was to assist elementary (class I-VIII) schools to conduct research, surveys, studies and encourage classroom innovations.

But DIETs function under the administrative control of state governments and receive generous Central government funding. Unfortunately, because of archaic recruitment rules and processes, unsuitable teacher educators have been recruited into DIETs. Therefore most of the proposed initiatives, particularly research and classroom innovation, have remained elusive.

Nevertheless whatever the current situation, DIETs still have the potential of transforming into hubs of talent identification, localised research and innovation. If given committed leadership and sufficient resources, they could positively impact the country’s 1.2 million elementary schools. Properly functional DIETs are the answer to one of the major problems of primary/elementary education: how to nurture the inherent curiosity and latent love of learning in children crushed under curriculum loads and intensifying pressure from all stakeholders in education, to ensure they max their school-leaving exams. 

The bottom line is that talent can be kindled by teachers who retain their own love of learning, exploration and research and willingness to work with children. Ideally, ‘project work’ should provide children and teachers opportunities to augment their knowledge. Continuous teacher education and encouragement of peer-to-peer learning could achieve excellent results if project assignments are designed with creative insight and vision, with teachers trained to suggest mid-course corrections and modifications. Cooperative student-teacher project assignments offer to learn opportunities to alert and conscious teachers to identify the exceptional intelligences of their students.

The plain and generally unacknowledged truth is that there’s so much to be studied within schools beyond the prescribed syllabus. Every school would be greatly enriched if its faculty acknowledges that a huge talent pool of students and teachers remains undiscovered. Undoubtedly in all schools, there are chemistry teachers who are also excellent artists and history teachers who are brilliant with numbers. If their catholic extra-curricular interests can be harmonised with the special intelligences inherent in all children, there would be an explosion of talent identification within the student and teacher communities.

In this context, it must be noted that a growing number of progressive private schools are focusing on talent identification in areas such as music, technical, creative skills, painting, sculpture and the like. Restoring the status of studies, surveys and research in DIETs and in schools themselves will prepare children for research in higher education. There’s no escaping the reality that national economic growth rates are dependent on the development of cognitive capital in the nation’s elementary schools.

Also read: National development dependent on teacher training institutes – JS Rajput