Unequal education

Lack of room inside the school building has meant that some pupils of a government higher secondary school at Kariapatti, in Virudhunagar district, Tamil Nadu, have classes under the trees. A file photograph.-S. JAMES

Educational administration is not a field that has been looked at with any degree of seriousness, not by planners, not by policymakers and not by teachers.

AND as they heard these things, he added and spake a parable, because he was nigh to Jerusalem, and because they thought that the kingdom of God should immediately appear. He said therefore, A certain nobleman went into a far country to receive for himself a kingdom, and to return. And he called his ten servants, and delivered them ten pounds, and said unto them, Occupy till I come. And it came to pass, that when he was returned, having received the kingdom, then he comman ded these servants to be called unto him, to whom he had given the money, that he might know how much every man had gained by trading. Then came the first, saying, Lord, thy pound hath gained ten pounds. And he said unto him, Well, thou good servant: because thou hast been faithful in a very little, have thou authority over ten cities. And the second came, saying, Lord, thy pound hath gained five pounds. And he said likewise to him, Be thou also over five cities. And another came, saying, Lord, behold, here is thy pound, which I have kept laid up in a napkin: For I feared thee, because thou art an austere man: thou takest up that thou layedst not down, and reapest that thou didst not sow. And he saith unto him, Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant. And he said unto them that stood by For I say unto you, That unto every one which hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away from him.

(From The Gospel According to St. Luke 19:11-12)

The above passage is, of course, a parable and has nothing to do with socio-economic realities, nor is it a manifesto for the virtues of capitalistic trade and commerce. Jesus is talking about virtue and the spreading of virtue each one who has some enlightenment and knowledge owes it to society to spread it around and not keep it for ones own personal gain. This is something that those who are charged with the development of our education system need to be asked to ponder.

For decades now, the States have erected, with funds given by the Central government, either a shoddy and often grotesque caricature of an education system or one that nurtures the elite and is meant only for the privileged. In State after State, government schools are either non-existent present only in registers at the offices of the district inspectors so that salaries can be released to teachers who do not exist or are sheds with children and very few or no teachers. Blackboards, textbooks, tables and benches and such essentials as chalk, maps and simple teaching aids do not exist. Children sit on the ground, frequently in the open, and are taught goodness knows what.

For the examinations, students learn some set pieces by heart until they can parrot them even in their sleep, and spill out mindlessly whatever they have memorised. Such things as comprehension, thought and expression are not just unheard of but are terms that would probably be dealt with as humorous aberrations of some kind.

These children are then sent to colleges where they get much the same treatment. Except that the meek obedience of schoolchildren is substituted with the aggressive hooliganism of college students led by professional gang leaders masquerading as students.

In these same States are schools that are treated differently. There are the Kendriya Vidyalayas and the Navodaya Vidyalayas, which have now been co-opted by the affluent or influential, or by those who are both, for their children. They may only be turning out students who are able to memorise better, and even if comprehension is still a strange and wondrous term, the students do relatively well in their examinations and get by in college using more or less the same techniques of memorising what they are told will come in the exams.

What does all this achieve, except the expenditure of large amounts of public money and a good bit of political patronage? It may be that there are people genuinely concerned about giving our children a really good basic education, and they ponder over how this can be done. But have they been able to do it? If everyone from the top down is honest about it, they will agree that they have not. Where has the system failed? The answer to this question, too, is known if everyone is honest in answering it.

So knowledge has not been spread in the manner that all States swore to spread it. If it has spread, it has been through the network of private schools and private colleges that are the preserve of a privileged few. What happens to the other children? Stories of some youngsters who have struggled all the way to the top or near the top, overcoming poverty and caste and other prejudices are presented in the media from time to time. While one does feel good when one reads about these determined young men and women, have we stopped to ask how many others have been able to do the same thing?

Have not the children of the poor, of those who belong to the backward classes, been deprived of the little they could have got had the system worked even slightly better than it does today? And from him who hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

In a book that I read some years ago, a Dalit leader says to a young Western-educated person trying to establish a school for Dalit children: Yes, you are setting up schools. But we do not want that kind of education. We want your kind of education. How easily we assume that a run-down college with a few underqualified, inept teachers will do for them, while the St. Xaviers and St. Stephens and Loyolas will, of course, be for our children.

Someone has to start thinking and acting out of the box on this vital matter. The problem, essentially, is not what is to be done though in that sphere some of the mythical idealistic notions need to be made more practical and down-to-earth but how it is to be done. Even the most gifted of teachers can be hopelessly bad administrators, and educational administration is not a field that has been looked at with any degree of seriousness. Not by planners, not by policymakers and not by teachers.

There is little to be gained by patting ourselves on the back and saying we have the largest middle class in the world after China and that our gross domestic product is growing at a rate fast enough to make the rest of the world sit up and talk about it. Little to be gained because behind those malls and high-rises are crores of the disinherited and disenfranchised in a terribly real sense. Statistics swallow them up and convert them into percentages and decimal points. But they continue to be there, deprived and condemned to lives of privation and need because our systems choose not to regard them.

In Delhi one has seen illegal premises being sealed and the so-called victims enacting something Dostoyevskian on the streets, and one has seen illegal slums being bulldozed, the inhabitants packed into trucks with their pathetic bundles and boxes and taken away somewhere 30 kilometres from where they work. The former gets to be written about and shown on most news channels; the latter is not even mentioned.

Perhaps there was, apart from the moral significance, something prophetic in what Jesus said in the passage quoted in the beginning.