The forthcoming season of peace and goodwill is also a period of considerable anxiety for legions of young parents aware of the critical value of high quality and professionally administered early childhood education, for orderly growth and development of their children into successful and socially beneficial adults. This is the time when the country’s top nurseries and preschools begin to issue admission forms to parents anxious to enroll their little ones into early education. And with the much-too-few top-ranked preschools admitting an average of 40 children per year to maintain favourable teacher-pupil ratios which permit individual attention, the mad annual scramble for preschool admissions is expected to assume manic proportions. Here are the India Preschool Rankings for the year 2013: “During the past two decades, appreciation of the worth and value of professionally delivered learning in the formative years has grown by leaps and bounds within urban India’s fast-expanding middle class. With double income parents now sending children as young as 18 months to ECCE (early childhood care and education) centres, the demand for preschools — especially professionally managed ECCE centres — is way behind supply. Therefore for young parents in metros, particularly Delhi and Mumbai, the next two months are likely to be a period of anxiety,” warns Abha Adams, former director of Delhi’s top-ranked The Shri Ram School (1993-2006) and currently education adviser of the also high-ranked Step by Step School, Noida. At the risk of being accused of blowing our own trumpet, a substantial degree of the credit for generating public awareness of the vital importance of professionally administered early childhood care and education in India can justifiably be claimed by Education-World. Since this publication was launched 14 years ago with the mission to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”, we have been continuously advocating greater government and household investment in education in general, and ECCE in particular. In a paper titled Policies to Foster Human Capital (2000), Dr. James Heckman, awarded the Nobel for economic sciences that year, presented a wealth of data to illustrate that social returns for every dollar invested in ECCE are significantly higher than subsequently in the education continuum. “The real question is how to use available funds wisely and the best evidence supports the policy prescription: invest in the very young,” wrote Heckman. Inevitably while OECD countries have reacted expeditiously to contemporary research studies and are currently spending between 1.4-2.3 percent of their GDP on ECCE, in India until very recently official and general belief was that children should not be burdened with early learning and given the freedom to engage in unstructured play until 3-4 years of age. This mindset perhaps explains why while every sector of the economy is subject to Central and/or state government control and strict supervision, ECCE is wholly exempt from official scrutiny and regulation. The country’s 1.35 million anganwadis — early childhood nutrition and maternal care centres promoted under the Central government’s Integrated Child Development…
