Chapter 1: Urban Private Unaided Schools

The private unaided school is one of three primary streams of public education in India, along with “government” and “aided” sectors. In unaided private educational institutions, school costs are paid by a private institution with no monetary aid from the government. Therefore, these schools have a high degree of autonomy in the administrative decisions they can take. However, they must meet the guidelines of the state (esp. RTE) and governing bodies like NCERT in order to obtain state recognition. The national curriculum framework (NCF 2005) is a document issued by NCERT which contains guidelines for all the schools in India, including private unaided schools. While the curriculum and syllabus are detailed, context-specific documents also issued by NCERT, the NCF guides schools on issues of democracy, inclusivity, student-teacher interactions, and the overall broad aims of education for the entire country. NCERT broadly advises Constructivist teaching methods and practices for curriculum transaction. Active learning styles are also strongly recommended over passive ones. However, specific teaching methods are purposefully not mentioned in the NCF or the NCERT curriculum, and left to the discretion of the individual schools. These are to be decided by a School Curriculum Committee comprising of the principal and selected subject teachers.

“The Board mandates that all schools must setup a School Curriculum Committee…the School Curriculum Committee would define activities for pedagogical practices, evolve a plan of assessment and mechanism of feedback and reflection and ensure its implementation.”

- NCERT secondary school curriculum, 2019-20 This leeway is perhaps vital for the autonomy of schools in choosing the form of curriculum transaction which works the best for their school. This can also be used to formulate a learning environment which cultivates Flow, regardless of the curriculum being followed by the school. The ambiguity in the NCERT guidelines facilitates a school to adopt multiple teaching methods and offer subject choices within the confines a conventional CBSE or ICSE syllables – subject content and syllabus does not inherently oppose Flow. With all this opportunity for autonomy, the observed private schools still opt didactic teaching methods and non-learner centric school environments. Perhaps the administrative pressures of running a school within a budget, need for accountability to parents and society, and the competition in the education market and the world outside pushes these private schools to encourage competitive ranking systems and extrinsic motivation models rather than intrinsic ones. The issue does not lie within the syllabus or the content or the NCERT guidelines – it lies with the schools’ teaching practices and beliefs about education. A study of the websites of ten private schools in Mysore provides a glimpse of the school’s beliefs about education. Websites display the factors they consider most important about their schools, to communicate to society and to prospective parents. Depending on the philosophy of the school, the content of the website and the imagery used varies. Some content is common across all the schools, like information regarding the school and the school Logo. Pictures of the school building, morning assemblies and annual day performances were most common. International schools tended to show more infrastructure facilities. Some schools focused on pictures with trees, or happy faces. The websites of some schools also contained ranks and exam scores. In all, the websites mainly portrayed the components of the medium the schools employ, in order to communicate the school’s accountability to prospective parents – discipline, marks, infrastructure and non-academic achievements. Their beliefs about education imply that success in education can only be communicated through this achievement – oriented extrinsic system.

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These beliefs about education lead to, and are reinforced by, the architecture of the observed private school buildings – characterised by repetitive floors of rigid classroom and corridor systems. The furniture layouts in many schools are inflexible, due to the use of long multi-seater benches and fixed blackboards. Since this architecture arose from an educational philosophy that values extrinsic motivation, the spaces do not encourage multiple teaching methods or learning styles other than the conventional didactic teaching. These rigid design practices also prevent flexibility in the kinds of interactions and activities which can take place in the school. Therefore, these spaces are inherently unsuitable for intrinsic motivation, and Flow.

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Chapter 2: Pramati Hillview Academy

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