It may be that a great deal of damage has been done by calling the pre-school programmes non-formal education. That has encouraged, especially in government programmes, the notion that anything goes, including listless children waiting aimlessly to go back home. In this view, the “formal” education in schools has principles and guideposts, while the “informal” pre-school learning has none.
However, at its heart, learning at all ages – pre-school, school, university or adulthood – is primarily about having the opportunity, and developing the competence, to make meaning. The reason why we are so terrified that pre-school will become more like school is that most school education is so devoid of that primary attribute of learning.
The so-called academic orientation of school programmes is a misleading label for what functions mostly as a waste of childhood. Kabir says, “Kabira so dhan sanchiye jo aage ko hoye” (accumulate that which will stand with you for the future). Schools function as prime examples of how to accumulate stuff that you are eager to throw out at the first available opportunity.
It seems to me that rather than creating a binary between school and pre-school education, it would help to emphasize their common objective of meaning-making and make a determined effort to change school education processes accordingly. That, unfortunately, has received practically no attention in the post-NEP period.
The ECCE community has, or should have, a deep interest in how school education is imagined. Otherwise, we will continue to wage a helpless battle against “schoolification” of pre-school, while the parents and the communities continue to be seduced by the prevailing model of school education and the pressure to change ECCE to conform keeps building.
