Learning crisis isn’t student failure, it’s pedagogical failure — and it’s fixable

India’s school crisis is not about ‘weak students’. It is about weak pedagogy and misaligned systems – something that becomes very visible every year in February and March. When learning falters, our response has increasingly been to categorise children rather than to examine how we teach, how we pace learning, and how our systems respond to struggle.

Consider Riya (name changed), a Grade 6 student in an urban school. Confident on the sports field and disciplined by nature, she managed academics reasonably well until her performance started to dip. Not suddenly, but steadily. Teachers noticed her silence. Parents were advised tuition. Worksheets increased. Pressure mounted. Still, nothing changed, until one teacher altered the approach. She slowed down, modelled thinking aloud, offered guided practice, and reduced the cognitive load for the child, engagement returned.

What happened to Riya happens every March in thousands of classrooms across India. The question is not why students are disengaging.. Rather it is about why our systems continue to misread what disengagement means.

How schools misread silence and under performance

In many schools, silence is interpreted as lack of effort. Underperformance is read as inability. The year-end academic review then becomes an exercise in sorting who will be retained, conditionally promoted, redirected, or quietly pushed out. This approach ignores a fundamental truth, struggle is not failure; it is data. That is actionable for betterment.

Yet most review meetings focus on outcomes rather than their causes. Marks are analysed, but teaching strategies are not. Students are discussed, but instructional design rarely is. The result is decision-making without diagnosis.

National data reinforces this concern. The ASER 2023 report showed persistent gaps in foundational literacy and numeracy, even after years of schooling; though the 2024 reports show marginal improvement, it is not significant. The National Achievement Survey has repeatedly highlighted uneven conceptual understanding across grades. These are not individual failures; they are systemic signals.

What is really happening in classrooms

Three interconnected realities shape today’s classrooms. First, pedagogy has not kept pace with learners.

Decades of research show that children learn best when teaching is paced to their developmental stage and supported with guided practice and feedback, not rush and repetition. Thinkers such as Lev Vygotsky emphasised learning through structured support, not accelerated coverage. Yet syllabus completion often overrides learning consolidation.

Second, cognitive fatigue is setting in earlier among young students. Indian and global studies point to rising attention difficulties in children and that can be linked to excessive screen exposure. Data from NFHS-5 and recent paediatric research indicate increased screen time even among preschool-aged children. Teachers report reduced attention span, working-memory overload, and low tolerance for sustained effort often mislabelled as disinterest.

Third, tuition has become a default response. Parents, anxious and well-meaning, turn to tuition. But tuition frequently replicates mass instruction at a faster pace. The child’s specific learning gap remains unaddressed. The loop continues classroom struggle, tuition, fatigue, disengagement.

In Riya’s case, progress came not from more practice, but from better guidance.

What school leaders must change now?

Year-end review meetings need structural rethinking. Instead of asking only who has underperformed, school leaders must ask:

● Where did students disengage conceptually?

● Was instruction scaffolded adequately?

● Were teachers supported to slow down without fear of syllabus lag?

Hence meaningful and concrete changes must include Pedagogical review alongside result analysis (what worked, what didn’t). Mandatory in-service mentoring focused on instructional strategies, not compliance. Clear guidelines against exclusionary practices disguised as academic decisions. Retention should be a pedagogical intervention of last resort not an administrative convenience.

What schools should tell parents beyond tuition?

Schools must shift parent conversations from panic to partnership. Instead of defaulting to tuition, schools should offer:

● clarity on how a child learns

● guidance on attention routines and screen boundaries

● short-term instructional support plans within school hours

Parents are not educators by training. They depend on schools for insight, not escalation.

What policymakers must prioritise?

Policy reform must move beyond frequent curricular adjustments.

Three priorities are critical

1. Investment in teacher pedagogy, not just tools through funded mentoring, instructional coaching, and protected time for classroom reflection.

2. National guidance on early digital exposure, aligned with child-development research, communicated clearly to schools and parents.

3. Consultation with experienced educators before rolling out reforms that dilute academic rigour under the guise of flexibility. Technology can support learning. It cannot replace teaching.

Teachers’ agency matters despite constraints

Teachers are not indifferent; they are constrained. Yet even within limitations, certain practices make a difference; slowing instructional pace without guilt, modelling thinking aloud, using peer observation to share strategies, identifying one learning barrier before labelling a child. When teachers are trusted as professionals, pedagogy improves.

Returning to first principles

This is not a rejection of innovation. It is a call to anchor innovation in pedagogical fundamentals.

When students fall silent, exclusion is not the answer.

When performance dips, acceleration is not the solution.

The system must pause, re-examine its assumptions, and listen to classrooms, to teachers, and to children.

(K. R. Maalathi is the Founder & CEO of Auuro Educational Services. She has been working in the field of education for three decades performing various roles as a Teacher, Head of School, Trainer, Consultant, Mentor and Advisor to several schools across India, Middle East and Africa.)

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