The Importance of Childhood Education in India: Challenges and Solutions
More than one million neural connections are created each second in the first few years of life. The time period between 0 to 8 years of age are periods of exponential growth. It’s a pace at which it never repeats again afterwards in life.
However, we are unable to empower children to reach their true potential. UNICEF data shows that 43 per cent of children under the age of five will never be able to live upto their true potential’s expectations. This is how severely unhealthy educational enviornment impacts the children's development further in life.
Why is Childhood Education so Important?
In early years, when children are given a safe learning environment many favourable outcomes are produced. They prove to be more effective adults in economic, social and civic life. It improves their cognitive abilities, provides a strong base of other learning-related skills, and grows them to be healthier and more social with higher self esteem. Therefore, it can be rightfully said that the importance of childhood education is quite high.
What Makes Getting Childhood Education Difficult in India?
Children face many barriers that deprive them of education. One of them is unideal economic and social conditions. These create fragility and conflict in the children’s life making them more prone to be cut off from academic endeavours.
In some places, this situation gets exacerbated by poor infrastructure, lack of awareness about the importance of childhood education, and lack of resources (like unoptimum teacher-student ratio and unplanned syllabus).
Methods That Create An Effective Childhood Education Possible in India
In India, the problems the spread of education has decreased over the years. However, there is a long way to go. At Sampark Foundation, with over 20 years of experience in dealing with these issue at grassroot level. Here are some solutions we found to be cost-effective and scalable for sustainable impact across communities and regions:
- Stakeholder Inclusion: We involved everyone who could create an impact and will be impacted. This included students, teachers, parents and administrators.
- Communal Effort: Our programs are a collaborative effort between the government and us to ensure that the progarm is well-monitored by important pillars of society.
- Easy to Use Resources: Providing resources that are actually usable by educators with relative ease prove to be better investments than complicated technology. Our six innovations are designed to be just that.
- Thorough Teacher Training Programs: Everything falls in line when the front-row warriors of education meaning the teachers are well-equipped not only with resources but with knowledge to utilise them at maximum capacity.
- Active Support: Our employees (known as SPARKs) enable implementation of our teach-easy pedagogy, resource use and classroom engagement to assist teachers.
- Consistent Monitoring: Change is built over the years. Hence, we monitor the progress of all schools and classrooms to identify areas of improvement and work on it while keeping the spirit of a friendly competition among schools.
Improving the Reach of Childhood Education in India Moving Forward
Currently spread across eight states and 1.30 schools, our mission is far from complete. We have been constantly looking for avenues of improvement and growing the reach of our educational innovation to the remotest section of India. You can join us in this mission today by becoming a volunteer! Click here to know more!