It is evident that children across our country face serious challenges in learning to read and write well. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has brought issues related to foundational literacy and numeracy to popular attention, but more fundamental changes needed for delivering high quality teaching and learning continue to elude us.
To shed light on significant issues with the quality of early learning environments and practices, the Tata Trusts recently supported the Language and Learning Foundation (LLF) and its partners in conducting a Teaching Learning Practices Survey (TLPS) in 1050 government school classrooms (Grades 1-3) across 9 states and 21 districts. The 2025 study reports that over 70% of classrooms do not use children's home languages for instruction, and more than 65% offer no opportunities for independent reading. The survey highlights that despite policy guidance, children learn to read and write in classrooms with very limited amounts of print material, and with few opportunities to develop oral language through conversations and discussions. Classroom time often centres on choral response activities, copying letters down from the blackboards, and tasks with limited opportunities for deeper thinking.
It is my contention that we are not going to fix these issues of quality by assessing students more frequently or stringently. That is akin to believing we can fix children's nutritional needs by constantly tracking their health indicators but never improving the weekly menu. We will also not fix quality by providing teachers with stand-alone inputs delivered in fragmented ways. Instead, we need more coherently planned reforms of meaningful teaching is deeply human, relational, and responsive early learning curricula, pedagogy, teacher preparation, and coaching.
The first challenge that needs to be fixed is one of imagination - the limited vision of what we view as "foundational" skills. Early literacy is often reduced to the acquisition of scripts recognising aksharas (letters), words, sentences, correct spellings. Our teaching methods flow from this narrow notion. But what if we imagined literacy differently? What if we worked backwards from what we hope "literate" citizens of a democracy would be able to do? Literacy would include communicating fluently, thinking critically, appreciating stories aesthetically, and using literate practices to participate meaningfully in society. These capabilities are not add-ons to be developed later; they must be nurtured from the early years themselves - they are foundational in the truest sense. But is it possible to engage very young children with thinking critically and expressing aesthetically? For this, access to libraries and children's literature is central. Children who are read to or engaged with through rich storytelling and discussions naturally form opinions about what they hear. If invited to express their opinions, they discover what they think and feel. As American educator Louise Rosenblatt advised, teachers should ask children not only about what happened in the story, but about what happened within them as they heard it. Once children are "hooked", literacy becomes meaningful - they want to express themselves, to read, to write.
Contrast this with classrooms where children spend substantial time reading and copying words from the blackboard mechanically, and the difference becomes stark. In classrooms across the country, teachers believe that words with fewer aksharas and maatras are "easier" for young children than words with longer or more complex spelling patterns. Thus, a picture of an elephant might be accompanied by the word "gaj" rather than "haathi"; or water could be represented by "jal", instead of "paani". In each case, the word corresponding to young children's oral language is considered to be more difficult to read than the more formal version of the same. Thus, young children spend years copying down words that may not yet connect to their everyday language experiences.
Another challenge is recognising that knowledgeable teachers are needed for the deeply human work of teaching well. We often mistake teaching as "transfer of content", rather than as adults socialising children to make sense of a world of people, nature, objects, ideas, thoughts, feelings and relationships.
If teaching were primarily content delivery, it could easily be replaced by technology or AI But meaningful teaching is deeply human, relational, and responsive. Fixing gaps through short-term modules or centrally developed materials cannot substitute for sustained investment in teachers' professional development, mentoring, and classroom-based coaching.
Even the best teaching-learning materials (TLMSs) can become formulaic if not placed in the hands of knowledgeable teachers. For example, in a classroom in tribal Odisha, I watched Grade 3 children reach into a beautiful, hand-crafted bamboo bowl to "fish out" aksharas. The materials had been developed locally and in the children's mother tongue. Yet the activity felt oddly familiar - a mechanical exercise repeated endlessly across the country, offering limited scope for meaning or engagement, simply dressed-up in local materials. Students were asked to identify aksharas that they had long-mastered, or to answer routine questions about the local materials: "What is this?" "What colour is it?". Rarely were they asked richer questions such as, "How do you use this at home?" or "Who makes this in your community?" or "Have you seen it being crafted?". The bamboo bowl was just another prop for rote work. Children's lived experiences, stories, and cultural knowledge were never invited into the learning process.
Teaching young children well is serious Work. Strengthening foundational literacy will require us to move beyond isolated interventions and towards a more coherent ecosystem in which policy, teacher development, curriculum, and classroom practice meaningfully reinforce one another. At the heart of this ecosystem is a simple idea: early education must be designed around how young children learn best by creating conditions for meaningful learning to take root. India has already articulated an ambitious vision through the NEP; the opportunity now is to translate that vision into everyday classroom realities. By steadily aligning our systems with the needs of young learners, we can build primary classrooms that nurture confident, curious, expressive children and, in doing so, lay the foundation for a more thoughtful and equitable society.
- Dr. Shailaja Menon
The author is Language and Literacy Expert, Tata Trusts. Views expressed are personal.
This article was published on Hindustan Times on May 27, 2026.
