What is the most appropriate age for infants to be inducted into the formal education system? A 13-member committee constituted to formulate a state education policy (SEP), chaired by Justice D. Murugesan, a former chief justice of Delhi high court, is reportedly ready to prescribe a common age for admission into pre-primary learning.

Despite the Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, prescribing the entry age for class I as six, the age for admission into class I of Tamil Nadu’s 39,300 government and government-aided schools affiliated with the Tamil Nadu Board of Secondary Education (TNBSE) and nearly 5,000 matriculation board schools statewide, is five years. With the ruling DMK government opposed to the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 for various reasons including the compulsory learning of Hindi under the three languages formula and common entrance exams such as NEET, Tamil Nadu’s SEP is likely to prescribe a lower entry level age than NEP which mandates early childhood care and education (ECCE) at three years under the revised 5+3+3+4 system.

The Murugesan Committee is likely to recommend merger of the state’s 48,000 anganwadis — nutrition centres for newborns and lactating mothers established under the Central government’s In­tegrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme — with govern­ment and matriculation schools. This means that professionally adminis­tered ECCE could begin much earlier than three years as recommended by NEP 2020.

Girija Devi, principal of Anna Gem Science Park Matricula­tion Higher Secondary School, Chen­nai, which has 1,400 students and 70 teachers on its muster rolls, wel­comes the proposal to merge under-managed and under-resourced an­ganwadis with government schools because of the increase in nuclear families with both parents working. “Enrolling youngest children into formal schools is preferable to leav­ing them in unlicensed day care cen­tres run by amateur housewives. If youngest children are inducted early into the formal education system where they receive professional care and informal education, they will be better prepared for primary educa­tion,” she says.

However, early childhood educa­tors warn that the big danger of merging anganwadis with govern­ment schools is that youngest chil­dren can be prematurely pushed into formal reading, writing and numer­acy. “If anganwadis are merged with government schools, they could lose their ECCE personalities and prema­ture teaching of the 3R’s (reading, writing and ’rithmetic) could inflict stress and make youngest children learning averse as they grow older. Therefore, great care should be taken that anganwadis — and private preschools — shouldn’t transform into formal schools,” advises Prince Gajendra Babu, general secretary of the State Platform for Common School System, Tamil Nadu.

Fortunately, members of the Murugesan Committee are aware of the dangers of merging pre-primaries with the formal school­ing system. “Optimal development of children necessitates youngest children learning joyfully at their own pace. One of the reasons for children’s poor learning outcomes in primary education is overburden­ing of infants. For a child’s cogni­tive development, play and learning through exploration and discovery is important. Therefore, the commit­tee is likely to stress that youngest children should not be pressured into formal, especially rote learning,” says Aruna Rathnam, a former educa­tion and child protection specialist with Unicef, Chennai and member of the Murugesan Committee.

With the first SEP draft of the committee scheduled to be pre­sented shortly for public scrutiny and debate, educators in the state are keeping their fingers crossed that the committee will give precedence to child-centric education rather than politics.

Shivani Chaturvedi (Chennai)

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