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Human Rights Is a Child’s Issue
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Indian school system is in a shambles. Few can afford the
private schools, and the government run schools are more of an
apology. If
India failed to
act in time, it will only be doing what the Talibanis do. Only,
it will be more effective. They deny education to girls,
India
denies it without any gender discrimination. |
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 At a time when the Indian government has been incessantly
talking of high growth rates and the signals are that the country is
trying to escape the worst effect of meltdown, the talk of SEZs,
malls, international airports as the symbols of a new and resurgent
India has somewhat melted into the back ground. Whether it is
because of the meltdown or whether the politicians understand that
it is good policy to talk less of malls and SEZs when the real
India
is expected to soon trudge to the election booths to press buttons
on the electronic voting machines is besides the point.
But we must take benefit of this window of opportunity in
which the rhetoric of development has been somewhat muted and other
voices can be heard too. Well known academician scholars A. De, J.
Drčze, M. Samson, and A.K. Shiva Kumar recently have come out with a
report from the grass roots explaining the real condition of the
Indian education system at the primary level.
They posit the question very effectively: How would you feel if half of the buses
and trains that are supposed to be running on a particular day were
cancelled at random — every day of the year? Quite upset, surely
(unless you can afford to fly).
 Yet
a similar disruption in the daily lives of children has been quietly
happening for years on end, without any fuss: in rural north
India, on an
average day, there is no teaching activity in about half of the
primary schools.
In 1996-1997, the Public Report on Basic Education (PROBE)
team surveyed primary schools in about 200 villages in undivided
Bihar,
Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. In 2006, we revisited
the same areas to find out whether and how the schooling situation
had changed over ten years. There were many signs of positive
change.
First, school enrolment rates have risen sharply. Secondly,
social disparities in school enrolment have considerably narrowed.
The gap between boys and girls has virtually disappeared at the
primary level. Thirdly, the schooling infrastructure has improved.
Fourthly, school incentives are reaching many more. These include
free uniforms, free textbooks, cooked mid-day meals etc.
But they have pointed out that the quality of education
remains abysmally low for a vast majority of Indian children. To
start with, school enrolment does not mean regular attendance.
Almost everywhere, children’s attendance as noted in the school
register was far below enrolment. Actual attendance, as observed by
field investigators, was even lower.
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If half of the buses and trains are cancelled on any single
day, there will be unprecedented brouhaha all over
India. YV
channels will go berserk and government will have difficulty
answering why it all happened. If it happened for one week in a
row, there will be calls for the govt’s resignation. Yet, it has
somehow become okay for half of India’s primary schools to have
no teaching activity for even a single day of the year.
Teacher-less schools, blackboard-less classrooms, room-less
classes have become the norm. A principal-less school does not
even make for news. This is the biggest human rights abuse that
we have become apathetic to. Of the many ways to produce
terrorists, one is to terrorise a group or community enough that
its youth pick up arms. The other is to deny it any education.
Why is India doing this when the world wants to fight a war
against terror? |
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Further, classroom activity levels are very low. One reason
for this is the shortage of teachers. Despite a major increase in
the number of teachers appointed, the pupil-teacher ratio in the
survey areas has shown little improvement over the years. The
proportion of schools with only one teacher appointed has remained
much the same – about 12 per cent. In 2006, an additional 21 per
cent of schools were functioning as single teacher schools on the
day of the survey, due to teacher absenteeism. Aggravating the
situation is the fact that teachers often come late and leave early.
Even when they are present, they are not necessarily teaching. In
half of the sample schools, there was no teaching activity at all
when the investigators arrived – in 1996 as well as in 2006.
Even in the active classrooms, pupil achievements were very
poor. Teaching methods are dominated by mindless rote learning, for
example, chanting endless mathematical tables or reciting without
comprehension. It is therefore not surprising that children learn
little in most schools. Barely half of the children in Classes 4 and
5 could do single digit multiplication, or a simple division by 5.
Some quick fixes have been tried, but with limited results.
One of them is the appointment of “contract teachers,” often seen by
State governments as a means of expanding teacher cadres at
relatively low cost. In the government primary schools surveyed,
contract teachers account for nearly 40 per cent of all teachers.
Owing to the contractual nature of their appointment, and the fact
that they are local residents selected by the Gram Panchayat, these
contract teachers were expected to be more accountable than
permanent teachers. This has not happened. The inadequate training
and low salaries of contract teachers affect the quality of their
work. In some schools, they were certainly more active than the
permanent staff; but not in others where they were protected by
their connections with influential people in the village.
 Another way of improving school performance, related to the
first, is to promote community involvement and decentralised school
management. Village Education Committee or some other committee of
this sort have helped to improve the school infrastructure, select
contract teachers, and supervise
midday meals.
However, they have been much less effective in improving the levels
of teaching activity. Power in most committees rests with the
President (generally the sarpanch) and the Secretary (generally the
head teacher), who need to be held accountable in the first place.
With the exception of Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs),
representation of parents in these committees tends to be nominal,
and their active involvement is rare. The survey found numerous
instances where committee members did not even know that their name
had been included in the committee.
This
does not detract from the importance of community participation in
reviving classroom activity. But active and informed community
participation requires much more than token committees, especially
in India’s
divided and unequal social context.
A third quick fix is greater reliance on private schools. The
proliferation of private schools in both urban and rural areas often
creates an impression that this is the solution. A
 closer look at
the evidence, however, does not support these expectations. The
quality of private schools varies a great deal, and the ’cheaper’
ones (those that are accessible to poor families) are not very
different from government schools. Their success in attracting
children is not always a reflection of better teaching standards;
some of them also take advantage of the ignorance of parents, for
example, with misleading claims of being “English medium.” Further,
a privatised schooling system is inherently inequitable, as
schooling opportunities depend on one’s ability to pay. It also puts
girls at a disadvantage: boys accounted for 74 per cent of all
children enrolled in private schools in the 2006 survey (compared
with 51 per cent of children enrolled in government schools).
Private schooling therefore defeats one of the main purposes of
’universal elementary education’ – breaking the old barriers of
class, caste, and gender in Indian society.
Despite the recent mushrooming of private schools, about 80
per cent of school-going children were enrolled in government
schools in 2006 – the same as in 1996. This situation is likely to
continue in the foreseeable future, which makes it imperative to do
something about classroom activity levels in government schools,
instead of giving up on them.
The need of the hour is to consolidate the momentum of
positive change and extend it to new areas – particularly those of
classroom activity and quality education. The forthcoming Right to
Education Act may help. But the first step is to stop tolerating the
gross injustice that is being done to Indian children today. Wasting
their time day after day in idle classrooms is nothing short of a
crime.
25
February 2009
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