Kushan Mitra
One of the biggest criticisms this columnist has about the United Progressive Alliance’s much-maligned Right to Education Act is not the complaint that it forces social classes together. This is, in fact, one of the good things about it. The complaint with the RTE Act is that is absolves the Indian state from ensuring that Government schools can and should be brought up to a higher standard.
There has to be praise where it is due. Deputy Chief Minister of Delhi Manish Sisodia, who is the right-hand man of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, wants to make Government schools in the national capital as good as the private schools.
This is commendable and other States too should follow suit. However, this should be done in a manner in which the independence of private schools and colleges is not harmed. Instead, Government schools should encourage accountability in the education system.
A recent Reuters report highlighted the state of disrepair in India’s medical education system. Another report pointed out how only seven per cent of India’s MBA graduates are employable. Much has been said about the state of disrepair of India’s engineering colleges. In humanities, outside large universities, most of the subjects are barely taught.
India has some excellent institutes and schools but it also has a million people who annually join the workforce and the few ‘top’ colleges barely deal with those tens of thousands graduates. And because the lower education system is so broken, with no investments made and the politicisation of hiring teachers across the country, India is only reinforcing the class divide.
Recently, in a small town of Lanjigarh, Odisha, this columnist witnessed the actual transformative power of education in a child’s life. A tribal class X student, whose name cannot be revealed for fear of Naxal retribution, impressed upon his family not only his command over multiple languages, but his teachers also informed this writer that he was an ace athlete and award-winning science student. He was the first member of his family to gain formal education.
This was possible only because a private company, in this case Vedanta, opened a school in this town, next to a huge alumina refinery. We wrote about this a few days ago, but educating children to higher standards is, unfortunately for ‘social equality’ campaigners such as the violent Left-wing extremists in tribal areas, the best way to ensure is more social equality.
This tribal boy wanted to join the National Defence Academy, but many of his 900-odd schoolmates at the Vedanta DAV International School (a majority come from the underprivileged communities) ended up joining the civil services or have become engineers or doctors. And because the current lot will have a high-quality school education, these students will, unlike many of their peers, take better advantage of it.
Reservations in educational institutions and Government services have indeed helped several communities move out of backwardness. Unfortunately, some communities seem to have cornered advantages and want to perpetuate them, as the ‘creamy layer’ of those communities keep taking the advantages. There is nothing wrong in affirmative action programmes, but the reason why so many communities want to be declared as ‘backward’ points to the fact that the system needs some serious tweaking.
And importantly, a system that also needs to serve the underprivileged communities better at a lower level. We need to encourage development of more schools in India, particularly in interior areas and we need to desperately bolster the quality of teacher-training programmes.
Many schools are already complaining about the quality of teaching staff, and with Indian students cramming for admission tests such at the Joint Entrance Examination, the National Eligibility Entrance Test and Common Law Admission Test, the best and highest-qualified individual in teaching are now brand-name superstars in various coaching institutes.
Ask any school principal about hiring science teachers, particularly in the plus-two classes, and all you will hear is a tale of woes in all but the top-most schools.
Clearly, India’s education system is not serving its young people as it should have. This needs to be fixed urgently. As a first step, there is a need to reform the RTE Act, to cover all schools and ensure that the students are not educationally left behind.