The most famous American automobile executive, Lee Iacocca once said that “In a truly rational society, the best of us would be teachers, and the rest would have to settle for something less.” Mostof the developed economies recognized the value of teacher education and viewed it as an important avenue for national development. They made significant investments in the furtherance of teacher education. There was a time when some of these countries even set goals for themselves to make sure that every student has an access to qualified, competent, and caring teachers. Some of them were so determined to accomplish their goals that they set up outstanding teacher training institutions to organize both pre-service as well as in-service teacher training programs. In addition, they set up various curriculum groups comprising top-class scientists and school teachers of proven merit. These groups were tasked to revamp a whole lot of school curriculum and pedagogical processes to improve teaching and learning.
Regrettably, we neither had a national system of education nor a well-established system of teacher education at the time of independence in 1947. There were very few teacher training institutions with limited provincial focus. Since there was no national focus on education, the need was felt to establish an institute of education to deal with teacher preparation in the country. This is how the Central Institute of Education (CIE) was born out of that concern in 1947. Teacher education was considered such a major concern at that point in time, that even the University Education Commission (UEC), 1948-49, included a complete chapter on professional education wherein it underlined the significance of teacher preparation for school education. This was the time when school education in the country was not handled holistically, rather it was dealt with by multiple agencies like Bureau of Textbooks, Bureau of Fundamental Education, Bureau of Secondary Education, Bureau of Educational and Vocational Guidance, Bureau of Guidance and Counselling. All these Bureaus were operating independently from different locations.
The major weak point in school education was the lack of coordination amongst various Bureaus that were operating independently. This concern was noted by the government and decided to have an overarching body to deal with school education holistically by bringing all these Bureaus under it. So the government envisioned the birth of the NCERT leading to its establishment in 1961. The NCERT was given the mandate to assist and advise the government of India on matters about education, particularly school education. It was envisioned truly as a professional body to play the advisory role to the government on school education. Initially, the NCERT was founded in the form of the National Institute of Education (NIE), but later it was rechristened into NCERT with an extended mandate of research and training.
The Secondary Education Commission (SEC), 1952-53, made a number of significant recommendations for the improvement of school education. It changed the concept of secondary education and recommended 11-year of multipurpose higher secondary education, leaving one-year out of 12 years with the university education. It also recommended the diversification of education after class 8th, introducing technology-based vocational education in areas such as home science, agriculture, commerce and fine arts. Classes nine, ten, and eleven were made part of higher secondary education.
The diversification of higher secondary education as a consequence of SEC’s recommendation necessitated the establishment of different kinds of teacher training institutions in the country. Accordingly, the government decided to establish four Regional Institutes of Education (RIEs) along with four Demonstration Multipurpose Higher Secondary Schools (DMPHSS) with the dual objective of offering 4-year integrated teacher training programs in sciences, social sciences, and commerce and of innovating newer models of teacher preparation which could be implemented in other teacher training institutions as well. The DMPHSS were envisioned as laboratories for the RIEs where they could organize pre-internship training programs for their trainee teachers. The RIEs were envisaged as leading teacher training institutions in the country. So much so that they were conceptualized on the concept of the land grant universities of America with sprawling campuses. Three of them were established in 1963 at Mysore, Bhubaneswar, Ajmer and the fourth one was established in 1964 at Bhopal, along with Demonstration Multipurpose Higher Secondary Schools, as their laboratories for the internship of teacher trainees. Since the RIEs were to be affiliated with the local universities to award degrees and universities could affiliate only colleges and not institutes, they were renamed as Regional Colleges of Education (RCEs). Initially, the RCEs were not the part of the NCERT, they were rather under a separate project.
The failure of the multipurpose higher secondary education in the country led to handing over of the RCEs to the NCERT. But within a year of their establishment, the government set up the B.D. Nag Chaudhary Committee to review the structure and functioning of the RCEs in 1964. Quite unexpectedly, the Committee recommended the closure of all the four RCEs since it found that the programs offered by them were too expensive to be continued as an independent teacher preparation program. This recommendation put the government in a quandary about what to do with such a massive infrastructure that was created with an enormous amount of investment and gusto under the erstwhile reforms.
Since the erstwhile reforms met with a strong roadblock, the government set up a one-man Commission under the Chairmanship of Professor D.S. Kothari in 1965 with an indication to resurrect the four-year science programs. So a case was made for the continuation of the four-year science program with a great deal of effort. The RCEs suffered a lot due to massive reviews carried out a number of times by different committees like B.G. Kulkarni Review Committee, Bose Review Committee, etc. They were reviewed quite frequently by various committees. In pursuance of the recommendations of the Abbreviated Review Committee of the MHRD, the RCEs were renamed as RIEs in 1995, as envisaged in the original plan.
One of the most pertinent observations on teacher preparation, made by the Kothari Commission in 1966, was that teacher education in the country cannot improve as long as it remains in isolation within itself, in isolation from school education, and isolation with higher education. Furthermore, the Commission observed that it is not an experiment to be attempted in stand-alone institutions. This was such a vital recommendation that it was also reiterated by the Justice Verma Commission in 2012. But it still remains unimplemented across the states. It is only partially attempted in 2014 when only a couple of central universities started offering four-year integrated teacher training programs after a little gentle persuasion. But obviously much more needs to be done to make this a reality.
NCERT has undoubtedly done a commendable job in areas like teacher education, textbook development, talent identification, vocational education, the survey of research in education, guidance and counselling, achievement surveys, educational surveys, education for the needs of different social groups, etc. The NCERT was always held in high esteem by the successive governments for its professionalism and monumental contribution in school education. But somehow its professional reputation as a national resource institution got some setback in the recent past and more so ever since its initial mandate was extended to assist and advise the government in planning and implementing its policies and programs on the recommendation of the Madhuri Ben Shah Committee in 1982. This has profoundly changed the role and function of the NCERT, as the implementation of government’s policies overshadowed its invaluable advisory role.
The four-year integrated teacher preparation programs offered by the RIEs have caught up the attention of the new education policy. Without looking into the reasons as to why this innovative model of the four-year integrated program has not gone beyond the four walls of the RIEs for the last fifty-eight years, the policy has stressed that by 2030, four-year integrated B.Ed. degree will be the minimum qualification for a school teacher. The four-year integrated program has several issues relating to its framework and integration of cognate subjects for curriculum and pedagogy that have not been properly deliberated upon even by the current regulator. This is one of the serious shortcomings which at one stage even forced the regulator to put the entire program on hold.
The RIEs are also responsible for this malaise to some extent since they have not made any efforts for the spread of their 4-year integrated teacher preparation model across other teacher training institutions, even though they have implemented it very successfully in their own institutions. Another shortcoming on the part of the RIEs has been that they have not come up with any other innovative model of teacher preparation in the last fifty-eight years that could have fulfilled the requirements of teacher education with the changing times, although they were expected to continually innovate and bring out newer models for the use of mainline teacher training institutions across the states.
NCERT can do much better a job if its initial mandate of assisting and advising the government on issues pertaining to education, particularly school education is restored and the task of planning and implementation of policies is transferred to provincial agencies. Besides, RIEs should also have substantial links with the NCERT headquarters. The department of teacher education of the NCERT should assume a significant leadership role in developing innovative models of teacher preparation in active collaboration with the RIEs. Together, they should re-examine and revisit the structure and design of the four-year integrated program to suit to current requirements of contents of higher secondary education and relevant pedagogical concerns.
NCERT should work in close collaboration with the RIEs and revive research component which seems to have been relegated to the background. RIEs should also be associated with the NCERT both in textbook writing and survey works. RIEs should take upon themselves the responsibility of developing state reports covering all aspects of school education that can provide necessary inputs to the state governments to initiate timely interventions to improve the overall quality of school education besides keeping a tab on the general health of school education. In addition, RIEs can also act as a stimulus to creating similar kinds of institutions in the region as NCERT did in the establishment of the SCERTs across the states. NCERT and the RIEs should collectively identify issues and trends that will have impact on prospective teachers to become effective workforce especially promising innovations in education to cater to the requirements of children coming from diverse backgrounds. They should come up with newer teacher training models that can be successfully replicated across the states.
The NCERT and the RIEs should take help from some of the outstanding members of the faculty of education, commerce, social sciences, mathematics from across the universities and Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs) whilst redesigning the framework and course contents of the four-year integrated teacher education program. IISERs are supposed to be pioneers in science education as is evident from their nomenclature. A country should be benefitted through their research in science education. They are the institutions ideally suited to undertake the tasks of promoting science education in the country. They should form a consortium and divide amongst themselves the areas like physics education, chemistry education, life-science education, etc. to promote science education at the school stage. They will be doing a great service to the nation not by operating like any other university but by promoting science education in its entirety. Teacher education should become a collaborative venture between the NCERT and all the leading institutions of higher learning in the country.
Teacher preparation is the most important area but it has remained the weakest one as it has suffered from decades of neglect. If teacher training institutions continue to operate in the stiff archaic style then no other reforms can do any good to school education. As it is, most of our schools are not able to produce the kind of learning that is required in present times. Transition rates and academic attainments continue to be abysmally poor. Still, every class happens to be a terminal class for many. There is undeniably a valid reason to give very high priority to teacher preparation program. It becomes all the more necessary when we are still a very long way from achieving the goal of universalization of school education and more so when the current circumstances demand teachers to deliver beyond the conventional modes of teaching and learning.
The writer is former Chairman, UGC. Views expressed are writer’s personal.
