In the light Annual Survey of Education Report 2019, a reworking of curriculum in the country is urgently needed for the age band from four to eight years. Justify (200 Words)
Refer - Financial Express
Enrich the answer from other sources, if the question demands.
IAS Parliament 5 years
KEY POINTS
· The 2019 Annual Status of Education Reports (ASER) report focuses on ‘Early Years’ (ages 4-8) since these are critical to later-stage learning.
· Experts argue cognitive development in the pre-school years is key to learning outcomes in school, and, thus, children entering schools early the Right to Education law and the new National Education Policy both set 6 years as the age when a child should enter formal schooling (Standard I)—will be at a disadvantage compared to those who did so at the appropriate age.
· Indeed, Early Years points at the same, with older children in the same class demonstrating sharper cognitive abilities, and, consequently, higher learning outcomes.
· ASER 2019 shows how poor the quality of education in government schools is even at the foundational levels. While only 6.7% of government school students in Std I who were aged 4-5 could correctly do early language tasks, this figure was 24.1% for private schools. In cognitive skills, too, government institutions lagged their private peers by six to 18 percentage points when performance of 5-year-olds was compared.
· India has one of the largest pre-school care programmes in the world—the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), but it remains primarily focussed on nutrition/healthcare/immunisation, with early learning often neglected at the anganwadis.
· Moreover, as the report notes, the approach to this is quite flawed, with content knowledge and instruction being the preferred method when research shows that play-based activities geared towards building memory, reasoning, and problem-solving abilities have a much larger impact on building the foundation for later learning.
· India needs to aggressively bolster its early education programme—in FY20, the Centre budgeted $3.9 billion for the umbrella ICDS programme while in 2017, China was spending nearly $19 billion on just early childhood education.
Manojkumar B 5 years
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IAS Parliament 5 years
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Shivangi 5 years
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IAS Parliament 5 years
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Shantanu tiwari 5 years
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IAS Parliament 5 years
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