A child’s failure in school exams is the system’s failure

A 10-year-old child in class V must be held responsible for her learning outcomes. If her learning outcomes do not meet the 'benchmark' or 'expected level of learning', she must be ‘detained’. What should be regarded as the failure of the pedagogy, curriculum and the collective system of schooling has, in effect, been shifted onto the child or the individual learner.

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The systematic dilution of the Right to Education (RTE, 2009) through successive amendments and the National Education Policy (NEP-2020) is a testament to this shift. The first amendment granted local governments the authority to 'ensure class-level learning', prompting 19 state governments to wholly reject the 'no-detention' policy. The recent abrogation of this policy for centrally governed schools is merely another step toward its inevitable denouement.

Over six decades ago, John Holt authored the seminal work, 'How Children Fail'. Since then, the discourse surrounding education has evolved, gradually acknowledging that no learner, irrespective of his/her situation, is intrinsically unwilling to learn — he/she simply does not wish to be 'taught.' A child cannot, with deliberate intent, choose not to learn.

The educational narrative has also moved, to some extent, away from solely emphasising intelligence quotient in favour of a broader understanding of multiple intelligences. There is no child who is inherently 'slow', 'weak', or a 'failure'. Rather, it is the inadequacy of the learning environment that prevents the child from realising his or her full potential. In this sense, it is the failure of the system, not the failure of the child.

Examinations should never serve as instruments of exclusion. Yet, each time we design an exam, we do so with a fixed understanding of merit, deeply rooted in the belief in the ‘normal probability curve’. This framework tends to measure and categorise the learner based on rigid, prescriptive standards. Once a student is marked as 'below average' or labelled a 'failure', she is relegated to repeating the grade and the collective gaze of teachers, parents and peers begins to regard her as 'undeserving' or 'fit to fail'.

Multiple studies have revealed that repeating a grade does little to enhance a child's 'learning outcomes' or 'learning abilities’.

The promise of additional resources or strategies for improvement — beyond the superficial provision of 'special' attention or reducing the learner to an object of pity — remains murky at best. Simply revisiting the same syllabus for another year fails to address the core needs of the learner, reinforcing only the hollow logic of 'meritocracy'.

What is considered merit is often dictated by those perched in positions of power. If monkeys were to define 'ability' as the capacity to climb a tree, all fish would inevitably fall short. In much the same way, a learner's abilities are shaped not merely by innate potential but also by their 'cultural capital'.

As Bourdieu and countless sociologists and psychologists have pointed out, the learner's capacity to learn is intricately tied to their socio-historical, economic and cultural background — factors over which they have little, if any, control.

Access to quality education, a rich curriculum and effective pedagogy is often determined by the learner's 'social assets'. In India, these assets extend beyond gender and physical abilities to encompass religion, caste, language and geography.

The growing clamour for a uniform system of one nation, one education, one curriculum and one examination will only amplify the struggles faced by the already marginalised learners. Take, for instance, a differently-abled, tribal, Muslim girl in a conflict zone. Her ability to meet the prescribed learning expectations under the 'normal probability curve' is not a matter of will or intellect but of a convergence of obstacles beyond her control.

India, with its vast network of over 15 lakh schools and a student population exceeding 25 crore, paints a paradoxical picture of promise and neglect. Among these, 1.17 lakh schools operate with a single teacher, while a staggering two crore students remain deprived of access to what can truly be called 'quality' education. The teacher-student ratio is alarmingly skewed in several states, with recent reports revealing that 16 per cent of teacher posts lie vacant. This figure includes the patchwork addition of 'contractual' teachers.

If salaries and recruitment processes were indicators of teaching quality, the disparities would be nothing short of scandalous: 23 per cent of schools lack the requisite number of teachers and even more suffer from a deficit of professionally trained educators.

Despite lofty proclamations of education as an 'investment', budgetary allocations have persistently missed the mark, falling far below the recommended six per cent of the GDP. The numbers are stark — 79 per cent gross enrolment at the secondary level, yet 3.6 crore children remain out of school. To compound this, 11 per cent of the schools function without electricity and 13 per cent are without libraries, eroding the infrastructure critical for holistic learning.

The abolition of the no-detention policy is, therefore, not merely an epistemic injustice, it is also a grave social betrayal. The children who are envisioned as the architects of a developed India by 2047 are, in reality, ensnared in a system that fails them at every level.

This is not a call to abandon the procedures that assess learning, but rather an invitation to reimagine the very constructs of ‘pass’ and ‘fail’, of ‘retention’ and ‘detention’. To declare that 'schools are no longer centres of learning but merely mid-day meal distribution hubs' is not only a dismissal of the crushing poverty faced by our people but also a betrayal of the profound human aspiration to cultivate knowledge within these spaces.

The delicate interplay between being a learner and a knower — a dynamic already fragile — risks being irreparably blurred with the dismantling of the no-detention policy. A child may 'fail' as a learner, but under no circumstance should her inherent agency as a knower be stripped away.