May 25, 2023
Dear Professor Yogesh Singh,
cc: Dr. Vikas Gupta
We are writing to express our alarm at plans to abolish Delhi University’s impressive
Bachelor’s Program in Elementary Education (B.El.Ed.) and replace it with a uniform
Integrated Teacher Education Program (ITEP). We ask that these plans urgently be
reconsidered.
Schools have a vital role to play in preparing young people both for employment and for a
future as thinking citizens of a democracy. For this purpose, schoolteachers need the
independence and confidence that thorough academic and professional training can provide.
In colonial times, training and inspection systems for Indian schools deliberately denied
schoolteachers professional status and autonomy. The colonial regime sought to make
schooling an instrument of social and political control. But in an independent, democratic
India, authority to devise programs of professional training for teachers properly belongs not
to politicians or bureaucrats, but to academic specialists in education.
Despite a constitutional commitment to prioritise elementary education, in contemporary
India governments of all stripes have neglected the country’s schools. Elementary school
teachers mostly receive only rudimentary, sub-degree-level training. This is typically
provided in stand-alone diploma-awarding institutions (DIET), or in low-status university
B.Ed. programs segregated from the academic mainstream. The result is a teaching work
force mostly deprived of the knowledge, skills and autonomy that teachers need.
The B.El.Ed. Program at Delhi University, established in 1994, has pioneered efforts to bring
a new professionalism to elementary school teacher education. As India’s first
comprehensive, university-level pre-service program for elementary school teachers, the
B.El.Ed. integrates teacher education with undergraduate studies in various disciplines. As
such, the program implements the recommendations of major commissions that have
reviewed teacher education in India.
The B.El. Ed has been a model for programs offered by prestigious colleges of liberal arts
and sciences nationwide. It offers a dynamic combination of instruction in subject
knowledge, educational theory, child development, psychology, sociology, philosophy,
linguistics and more. Amongst its notable innovations are compulsory courses on story-
telling, drama, gender and inclusion. B.El.Ed. alumni are renowned for their excellence and
are much sought after by a range of employers in the education field and beyond.
By comparison with the B.El.Ed., the new ITEP program offers a greatly reduced grounding
in the study of education. Adopting a 3+1 approach, the ITEP requires students in the first
three years to follow regular, undergraduate studies, with teacher education offered only in
the final, fourth year. The educational courses available to ITEP students in that final year
lack the breadth and rigour of those offered by the B.El.Ed. Classes in educational and
learning theory; child development; drama; gender and inclusion; philosophy and more will
be abolished. In their place, ITEP students will study ‘communication skills’. Instruction in
psychology, philosophy, sociology, politics or history as they relate to education will be
minimal at best.
By comparison with the B.El.Ed. program at Delhi University, ITEP thus represents a
significant dumbing down. It reflects a conception of the teacher as a mere conduit for
delivering pre-approved subject content, rather than as a socially responsible and autonomous
professional capable of interpreting and adapting the curriculum and inspiring her pupils.
Teaching in the ITEP mode threatens to become a robotic exercise in ‘transacting the text’.
In contexts where teacher education has hitherto been poor, the standardised ITEP model may
contribute to a certain ‘levelling up’. But there can be no justification for ‘levelling down’ an
outstanding program such as Delhi University’s B.El.Ed., which continues to exemplify the
vision of education to which all institutions in India should ultimately aspire.
We therefore appeal to you to abandon plans to replace the B.El.Ed. with the ITEP. Where
innovation promises an advance on existing arrangements, then by all means innovate. But to
abolish a program renowned for its excellence with an inferior alternative is unwarranted and
pointlessly destructive.
Yours sincerely,
Edward Vickers (UNESCO Chair Professor on Education for Peace, Social Justice and
Global Citizenship, Kyushu University, Japan / President, Comparative Education Society of
Asia)
Henry Giroux (McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest, Ontario,
Canada)
Chaise LaDousa (Professor, Department of Anthropology, Hamilton College, NY, USA)
Paul Morris (Professor of Comparative Education, UCL Institute of Education, London,
UK / former President, Hong Kong Institute of Education)
Christopher Winch (Professor of Educational Philosophy and Policy, King’s College
London)
Ken Zeichner (Boeing Professor of Teacher Education Emeritus, University of Washington,
Seattle /Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison)