The big challenge to Indian education is the burgeoning of private schools. (Express Archive)If you are reading this piece, it is likely your child goes to an English-medium private school. Did the possibility of a government school occur to you? Did you consider it before deciding on the private school?
When I pose this question to my friends, this is the usual refrain: “But they are of such poor quality, insufficient classrooms, inadequate teachers. The school teaches in the local language, not English. Why would anybody in their right mind send their child to such a school? Government schools are not for people like us; wahan gareeb ke bachche jaate hain (Poor people’s children study there).”
This narrative, fuelled by mainstream media and a large number of neo-liberal voices in civil society, has become so dominant that any experience or evidence to the contrary has little chance of a hearing.
At Azim Premji Foundation, every day, our teams go to government schools that are off the radar, in the deserts of Rajasthan, the mountains of Uttarakhand, the tribal belt of central India, and in many other parts of the country. This continuous on-the-ground engagement with thousands of teachers and others, year after year, has given us a deep insight into the methods and motivations of the government school system. These experiences are often at variance with the popular pejorative narrative and need telling.
Over the past three decades, India has pushed hard to have a school in every village. Walk into any community, no matter how remote, and it’s likely you will see a government school. With close to 11 lakh elementary schools, we have one of the largest government school systems in the world. School enrolment is close to universal, irrespective of gender, caste, or religion. If you consider that just 30 years ago, less than half of our girls were in school, this is nothing short of remarkable. In a country as vast as ours and with its complex geographies, this is an enormous achievement.
More often than not, teachers and students come to school, and there is a genuine effort at education. Schools typically have sufficient classrooms, potable water, toilets for boys and girls — though upkeep is a challenge given inadequate maintenance budgets. For many students, the school mid-day meal is the most important meal of the day. That the government manages to pull this off, day after day in 11 lakh distributed locations, is an administrative feat worthy of study.
However, despite genuine efforts at teaching, and years of schooling, students struggle to learn. This learning difficulty is primarily down to ineffective methods of teaching.
Many new teachers begin in right earnest and often go out of their way to make things work. In the districts we work in, close to 25 per cent government teachers and head teachers voluntarily give their personal time — after school hours, over weekends and holidays — to engage in their development. How many of us would be willing to sacrifice our holidays, month after month, so we can do our jobs better? However, after a few months or years of trying, most teachers end up resorting to the least effective of pedagogic methods, which is built largely on lectures, rote, drills and the stick. This is not a comment on teachers themselves, but a reflection of the pathetic state of teacher education in India.
The big challenge to Indian education is the burgeoning of private schools. It is fuelled, among other things, by a false belief that these schools are better — study after study has conclusively shown that learning in private schools is not better than in government schools. Differences are primarily because private school students come from more privileged homes with significant beyond-school learning opportunities and resources.
These for-profit schools are at every fee level, from hundred rupees per month right up to a lakh of rupees per month. A direct import of this is that private schools tend to serve socially and economically homogenous groups, furthering social stratification. By doing this, we are designing inequity right into the heart of our society. Taken as a whole, the private school system vitiates the purpose of education in a democracy.
From what we have seen, many of the private schools employ unqualified teachers on almost contract-labour wages, and operate out of tightly packed and unsafe premises. Fear is considered an acceptable pedagogic tool, and there is little attempt to customise school practices for the child.
Many believe this shift is part of a larger social shift from public to private provisioning of services, fuelled by a growing distrust of public institutions. But education is not a service that can be traded, but a social process in developing a certain kind of citizenship and nation.
Our country needs a school system that actively works for its ideals, one that exposes students to democratic values and rational ideas. And I cannot visualise any other construct, except a government school, playing this role in full measure and at the scale that our country demands. To truly understand the government school system, one has to take a decadal view. And that tells us that, rather than being a system in decline, it is a system that is slowly maturing. With the right support, it can improve.
This article appeared in print with the headline ‘The school for everyone’.
