NN46, September 2011
Towards a New Global World of Skills Development? TVET's turn to Make its Mark
Vocational Education: Tangled Visions
By Krishna Kumar, Delhi University
Email: anhsirk.kumar@gmail.com
Keywords: attitudes to manual work; different discourses of Labour & HRD; National Curriculum Framework; patterns of recruitment to skills development; turf wars.
Summary: Skills development whether through schools or industrial training institutes continues to be affected by negative associations with manual work, and by the turf wars of two different administrations, Labour & Human Resource Development (HRD). The current reforms miss the point that most recruits to skills development come from poorer backgrounds and therefore need as holistic a curriculum as anyone else.
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Vocational education has attracted successive generations of educational planners in India, but mainly for its potential to relieve higher education of its burden. Academic excellence being the focus of vision-building in higher education, planners have felt tantalized by a mechanism capable of sifting brains from brawn during school itself. Not surprisingly, the idea that a substantial proportion of high school graduates could be lured into vocational courses at the higher secondary stage just did not work. The stigma that the caste system places on manual work, including skilled work, meant that no one—not even the sons of highly skilled craftsmen—wanted to join the vocational stream. A mid-1960s vision of siphoning off into the vocational stream as many as one fourth of the entrants to the higher secondary stage over the next two decades met with grand embarrassment in most of India’s 28 States. The small proportion of Grade 10+ students who end up taking vocational subjects do so because they are deemed to be unfit for science, commerce and even the arts streams. A still smaller proportion of the cohort are admitted to Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs). These constitute the other major educational vision of early planners of India’s economic development. Less than 2000 in the whole country, the ITIs are governed by the Ministry of Labour whereas higher secondary schools, including the ones which offer vocational courses after Grade 10, are under the Ministry of Human Resource Development. This distinction implies that the Directorates governing these two types of institutions in the States are governed by two different Ministries.
During the last part of my term as the director of NCERT (which comes under the Ministry of HRD), I was asked to head a sub-committee set up by the Planning Commission to prepare a vision for vocational education in the context of skill development. It was not easy to accommodate the two institutional structures described above in the new discourse of skill development. And there was yet another discourse to accommodate: NCERT’s own National Curriculum Framework (2005) which argues that pedagogic modernism calls for bridging the gap between academic and vocational learning.
The problems faced by ITIs and higher secondary schools with vocational options are remarkably similar. First, there is a great shortage of teachers and teacher training facilities. Vocational/technical teachers get far lower emoluments than what academic teachers get. Second, the curriculum is mostly obsolete and narrowly defined, in that it seeks to impart skills without sufficient knowledge and often without adequate opportunity for hands on experience. The curriculum is also narrow in another sense, that it has little room for communication skills, knowledge related to health, safety and civic issues, and offers no awareness of gender issues. Vocational courses available for girls reinforce entrenched social stereotypes. Thirdly, linkage between learning and actual work sites is weak. Fourthly, opportunities for upgrading one’s learning a few years later or for enrolling in an academic programme do not exist.
A lot is expected to happen in vocational and technical education over the next few years under the new banner of skill development. A national qualification framework is being developed (by the HRD ministry). ITIs are being upgraded, multiplied (mostly in the private sector) and their relationship with industries strengthened. Partnership between public and private investors is being looked at with great expectations. What continues to be missing in current debates is the acknowledgement that those coming to vocational programmes are mostly from poorer backgrounds, that they need as holistic an education as anyone else. The other missing element is the awareness that the biggest challenge for this sector is in rural areas. The sub-committee I chaired has recommended that skill development ought to be a major goal of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA)-related activities (see Unni, this issue). One major sphere in which such linkage is needed is that of India’s traditional crafts. Like vocational and technical education, the crafts too have been a victim of tangled visions and turf wars.
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Cite article as: Kumar, K., (2011) ‘Vocational Education: Tangled Visions’, in NORRAG NEWS, Towards a New Global World of Skills Development? TVET's turn to Make its Mark, No.46, September 2011, pp. 41-42, available: http://www.norrag.org
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