New school year: Brave smiles hide fear & loathing

Dilip Thakore

The beginning of a new school year for an estimated 146 million children across the country is hardly a joyful occasion. The shabby run-down primary and secondary schools of the nation staffed by poorly trained and unmotivated teachers belie the modest expectations of India's child citizens. Dilip Thakore reports

Even as much-awaited, rain-bearing nimbus clouds begin to assemble over the Indian subcontinent, an estimated 146 million children across the country are readying themselves for the start of the new scholastic year. Unfortunately for the overwhelming majority of them the prospect of starting or going back to school, is a time for fear and loathing.

Understandable sentiment given the shabby, rundown conditions of the great majority of the nation's 830,000 primary and 75,000 secondary schools. According to the well-publicised PROBE (Public Report on Basic Education) 1998 which examined the status of primary education in four of the largest states of the Indian Union (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh as well as the smaller state of Himachal Pradesh), 83,000 primary schools lack proper buildings; 100,000 are single teacher institutions; 420,000 don't offer drinking water facilities, and 500,000 are bereft of toilets and sanitation.

“The schooling system is nowhere near ready to provide education of decent quality to every child. If the right to elementary education is to become a reality a massive effort is required to bring the schooling system in line with this goal. And as things stand there is little sign of such an effort being undertaken. Quite the contrary, the rhetoric of education as a fundamental right is going hand in hand with an unprecedented retreat of state commitment to universal primary education,” say the authors of PROBE.

Though the PROBE survey was heavily influenced by the abysmal state of primary school education in four of India's most backward and most maladministered states, the ground reality in the other 24 states of the Indian Union — including the unwarrantedly lauded southern states — is at best a few degrees better.

This is because though ritual obeisance was paid to the cause of universal elementary education with Parliament passing the 93rd Amendment to the Constitution (which mandates that the state shall provide free and compulsory education to all children between the ages of six-14) and the Union government has promulgated its SSA ( sarva shiksha abhiyan or education for all) programme earlier this year, the root problem which has debilitated school education in post-independence India — grossly inadequate government spending on education — has yet again been swept under the proverbial carpet. The Union budget for fiscal 2003-04 had little to say about education and it certainly didn't make any dramatic hike in allocations to realise the ambitious objectives of the SSA programme. And all indications are that the virtually bankrupt state governments will renege on their obligations to finance the 93rd Amendment and/or SSA.

Despite much lip service and rhetorical flourishes, the bad news for the nation's child citizens is that the annual outlay (centre plus states) for education remains static at 3.5 percent of GDP (gross domestic product) against the global average of 5 percent. Moreover an estimated 20-25 percent of the annual allocations of the centre and the states for education is siphoned off for heavily subsidising higher education, and over 90 percent of the remainder is absorbed by teachers' salaries. Hence the dilapidated infrastructure of India's government schools (90 percent of the nation's children attend government and state-aided schools). Little wonder 59 million children — a number greater than the entire populations of Britain or France — in the age group six-14 are out of school.

“ T here is a lot to be said on the subject of what is lacking in India's school system. It is well known that the physical infrastructure is inadequate in most schools which tend to be one-room buildings without proper classrooms, blackboards, books, drinking water and toilets. Details like blackboards and textbooks do matter. Add to this bleak scenario the pressures which poor families have to face to educate their children. Foremost among them is the loss of income to the family budget if a child is at school instead of working. The issue of conceptualising a just system of compensation for families which educate their children has not been adequately addressed. Making schooling compulsory is hardly the best option for tackling the situation. Compensation for lost income has to be given to families as incentives to retain their children in school. The midday meal introduced by some southern state governments is one such incentive. A combination of beneficial schemes with compulsory schooling will go a long way in decreasing the huge number of dropouts from the school system. Today even the poorest parents are ready to invest in the education of their children; government — and society — has to facilitate them,” says Dr. Kirit Parikh, emeritus professor and former director of the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), Mumbai, the highly-rated postgraduate research deemed university.

The deficiencies of the national school system which has resulted in a glaring failure to universalise elementary education even after 55 years of detailed central planning, are well-documented and the subject of anguished debate in small but powerless informed circles (including EducationWorld ). It is pertinent also to note that the authors of PROBE allude to the possibility — indeed probability — that this failure is rooted in the preference of the nation's powerful middle class for a “‘filtering process' which picks the best and brightest and helps them realise their potential” while the rest of the population is sentenced to serve as a pool of cheap illiterate labour (see box below).

But while Prof. Parikh high-lights the economic and infrastructure deficiencies of the nation's (public) school system, Dr. S.S. Rajagopalan, a maths and education alumnus of Madras and M.S. University, Baroda and former chairman of the mathematics curriculum committee of the Tamil Nadu state government, identifies the poor quality of teacher training institutions as the weakest link in the school education system.

“Teacher training programmes tend to completely bypass the issue of human and children's rights, which is why corporal punishment is rife in India's schools. Teachers are not trained to manage large classrooms or made aware that a lot of learning can happen outside the classroom. As a result teachers are ignorant about activity-based learning. Also it is said that education is equal to literacy plus character. But teachers and the system ignore the character development aspects of education totally. Since character shaping attitudes are formed before the age of 12 years, high quality primary education is of utmost importance, but it is given very low priority,” laments Rajagopalan.

Despite such valuable cerebral inputs offered by academics across the country and the painfully obvious drawbacks of the elementary school system, officials in Delhi and the state capitals don't seem to be aware of the depth or magnitude of the crisis in school education. Comments Dr. Neelam Sood, a fellow of the department of school and non-formal education unit of the Delhi-based National Institute of Education Planning & Administration (NIEPA): “The issue of school dropouts is very complex. It is erroneous to link it directly to infrastructure deficiencies or any other specific factor. NCERT (National Council of Education Research & Training) has conducted many surveys and its findings indicate that a number of factors are involved. True the percentage of dropouts is high but it is not possible to ascribe any one cause which can be uniformly singled out at the national level. It is definitely local-specific.”

With expert opinion about the causes of the unprecedented wastage of human resources inherent in the neglect of the school system still divided half a century after this high-potential nation began its ill-fated journey down Freedom Road and given the obstinate refusal of government and the establishment to acknowledge the obvious causes of mass illiteracy, the EducationWorld think-tank deemed it prudent to highlight the views of those most directly affected: students across the country. In random surveys in various parts of the country, EducationWorld correspondents interviewed students of all ages to highlight the deficiencies of the public and private school systems. Admittedly students are unqualified to provide solutions to reform the system, but they are best qualified to discuss its pervasive weaknesses.

Though students are critical of various aspects of the teaching-learning process in the nation's schools, a common thread which runs through the random interviews is that all of them love school and value education as a privilege — rather than a right — which is the passport to improved standards of living. The widespread middle class belief that children at the base of the social pyramid are averse to and don't value education, needs to be given an overdue and final burial. Indeed it is this appreciation of the value of education, however sub-standard, which prompted the children interviewed to prudently temper their criticism of their schools and the system. They love school but...

A case in point is Pragati Singh (12), a class VI student of the Hindi medium government aided Marwadi Commercial School, Mumbai. Pragati began school in a village near Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh where she completed class IV when her family moved to Mumbai two years ago because of “a family quarrel in the village”. Her father is a sweeper/ caretaker of a residential building in the upscale Churchgate area of Mumbai and the family resides in quarters there. Not surprisingly while Pragati is enrolled in the aided Hindi medium Marwadi Commercial School (tuition fee: Rs.6 per month), her brother Niranter is enrolled in the unaided English medium wing of the same school (tuition fee: Rs.285 per month). The school has an aggregate enrollment of 2,000 with an average class strength of 50.

“I like my school here better than in the village. Everything is nice. I like being with my friends, studying and playing and the teachers are much better and don't hit us like they did in the village school. We have drinking water, toilets and a (small) playground,” says Pragati who entertains the ambition of qualifying as a doctor. Little Pragati stoically accepts the inequality of her computer-literate brother studying in the English medium school as she is aware of her family's financial constraints.

But though urban schools tend to be better equipped in terms of infrastructure than the hundreds of thousands of schools in the nation's neglected villages, even in the privileged metros official indifference and incompetence cripples them and provokes massive dropouts. According to a survey conducted by the education department of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) in end April, thousands of children in 35 municipal primary schools in the national capital are making do without drinking water because taps have run dry. “In 23 schools there is an irregular supply of piped water but a large number of children go thirsty because water storage tanks are out of order. Moreover there is no water supply to the toilet blocks of 111 primary schools in the city and the septic tanks of 62 schools have not been cleaned,” says Subhash Arya the (BJP) leader of the opposition in the Delhi state legislative assembly. MCD runs 1,300 primary schools with a gross enrollment of 800,000 children in Delhi.

Quite obviously India's children have very modest expectations of the school system and are satisfied with minimal infrastructure and facilities. And perhaps the greatest failure of post-independence society is that by chasing wrong priorities it has failed to meet even the most basic expectations of the nation's children resulting in the neglect of human resources on an unprecedented scale. The consequence is mass illiteracy and poverty which has crippled the national development effort.

“The failure of the central and state governments to build a strong elementary education infrastructure is not as great as their inability to create an awareness of the value of education within the mass of the population. As a consequence the school system has always been supply rather than demand driven. Governments supply school buildings, infrastructure, teachers — whatever their quality. But there is very little interest within the population in attending school because of a massive failure of government to communicate to the people that education is important for life and livelihood. This communication failure has been compounded by the poor quality of education delivered by poorly trained and unmotivated teachers. As a result attainment levels are highly unsatisfactory and several surveys have indicated that even after 400 days of attending primary school, children are barely able to read and write. In the overwhelming majority of the nation's schools, very little learning takes place. This is the major cause of the high dropout percentages which characterise Indian education,” says Dr. A.S. Seetharamu professor of education at the Institute of Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, a research and think-tank institute promoted by the Delhi-based Indian Council for Social & Scientific Research (ICSSR) in 1972.

A repeatedly expressed opinion of educationists is that the quality of teacher training imparted in India is at best perfunctory. The consequence is that teachers are untrained to manage large classes (the national teacher-pupil ratio is 1:63), and the quality of education they deliver — especially in government-managed schools — is rock-bottom. Moreover it is commonly accepted that candidates who don't get admission into the best engineering and medical colleges and/ or into the better business management institutes take to the teaching profession. Little wonder that the poorly trained and unmotivated teachers community has acquired an unenviable reputation for shirking and meting out arbitrary punishment.

Minimal training and lack of motivation which characterises teachers in government schools in particular, is compounded by pay and remuneration structures which are peculiar to India's school system. After the profligate award of the Fifth Pay Commission for government employees in 1998, the pay packets of teachers in heavily subsidised government-run schools have swollen considerably. On the other hand given the overall supply-demand ratio for teachers (heavily weighted in favour of supply) in better managed and equipped private sector schools which are obliged to balance income and expenditure, pay packets tend to be embarrassingly modest. This curious anomaly serves to discourage the brightest and best from entering the teaching profession. On the one hand they are unlikely to volunteer for shoddy governments schools micro-managed by bureaucrats and local politicians, and on the other pay packages in independent schools tend to be too thin.

The bottomline of the criminal under-funding, neglect and ill-considered government interventions in the school education system is a frustrated and demotivated force of school teachers whose aggregate number is estimated at two million. Little wonder that in the class X public examinations conducted by most state boards, less than half the students pass. And the standards of academic attainment demanded by state-level boards are considerably lower than those of the Delhi-based Council of Indian Secondary Certificate Examinations (CISCE) and Central Board of Secondary Examinations (CBSE) to which the best upscale private schools are affiliated.

“Teachers in my school are very unreasonable and fault-finding and resort to caning even for small mistakes. We are given lots of homework which if we fail to complete invites expulsion from class, caning and being made to kneel before the class. Going to school is certainly not a fun experience,” says a class VIII student of Chennai's Modern School who spoke on condition of anonymity. This harsh regime imposed upon students by a private sector co-educational school, well-furbished with sound infrastructure, large airy classrooms, a well-stocked library, computer labs and playgrounds is attributed to the institutional compulsion of covering the syllabus and doing well in the board exams.

Likewise a student of Chennai's Corley Higher Secondary School (an aided school run by the Church of South India) who described himself as Anand and declined to furnish any other personal particulars, is highly critical of the quality of teachers in this 60-year- old co-educational school which he admits is well-equipped in terms of infrastructure, library, computer labs, and sports facilities. “The primary section teachers are very poor instructors and know little about classroom management. Unless students sign up for extra tuitions from these teachers after school hours, their chances of passing exams are very slim. In secondary school we are taught by postgraduate teachers but again they are very mediocre. They deliver careless, monotonous lectures which most of us don't understand and seldom make a class lively or interesting. There are no revision tests, little homework and no motivation from teachers. Discipline is lax and most students waste their time in class talking and playing and even breaking things,” he says.

In the garden city of Bangalore which is incrementally being described as the education capital of India, the abysmal quality of education dispensed by government schools has prompted the promotion of no-frills neighbourhood schools offering the additional benefit of computer literacy. It is an indicator of the anxiety of even the poorest strata of society to secure quality education for their children that these schools which offer the barest minimum facilities are attracting large numbers of students. The Baby Mirror English School in the city, offers K-X education to an estimated 400 students and levies a tuition fee of Rs.125 per month plus Rs.50 for students accessing its sole personal computer. Access to the wonder machine is the factor which prompted parents of Christopher X to enroll him in the curiously nomenclatured Baby Mirror English School which despite its title is a Kannada medium co-ed institution.

Unfortunately despite the substantially higher tuition fee, the attitudes of teachers in the school hardly differ from their government counterparts. “We are given too much homework and if we fail to complete it we are caned or sent out of class. And some of our teachers simply write questions and answers on the blackboard, ask us to copy them ten times and leave the class. The only thing I look forward to is being allowed to play computer games once a month,” says Christopher.

In urban India, at the very bottom of the hierarchical schools system is the municipal or local government school attended by children of the poorest citizens because education is provided entirely free. The Mayabazar Corporation School is sited smack in the middle of a slum characterised by overflowing drains, narrow roads and garbage-strewn surroundings, in Austin Town, Bangalore. This Kannada medium school promoted and maintained by the municipal corporation with an enrollment of 679 operates from a dilapidated building supplemented by a recently-constructed two-storied structure. Classrooms are unswept and most of the benches are broken and splintered; the school offers neither drinking water nor toilets. As per corporation rules, every child is entitled to a free midday meal, two sets of the school uniform and one set of textbooks free of charge. But a fixed amount of Rs.20 is payable for the uniforms and Rs.10 for textbooks — no receipt is issued for either payment.

According to B. Dilip all this is tolerable because the school does provide a free midday meal to all students. “However our teachers are very unsympathetic. They give us a lot of homework and beat and scold us for the smallest mistakes. This makes going to school a humiliating and unpleasant experience. We run a lot of personal errands for our teachers but they still treat us badly. School would be a pleasant experience if only our teachers were more kind and understanding,” says Dilip.

Quite clearly a combination of faulty policies and lack of awareness of the importance of universal elementary education as the foundation of the national development effort has almost destroyed the public school system unwillingly patronised by 90 percent of the nation's 146 million school-going children. Though the winds of liberalisation and deregulation which have transformed Indian industry are beginning to waft over the heavily state-dominated education sector, it is quite obvious that at the national level, private sector initiatives are unlikely to impact school education in the short or medium term. Therefore there is no alternative to a massive upgradation of the public or government-run school system.

“A metamorphosis in planning and management of India's school system is urgently required and managers of the system need to be reoriented. The objectives of school education — to produce loyal, obedient and unquestioning citizens — need to be revised to produce school-leavers with questioning minds, scientific temper and sensitivity to social and environmental problems. Moreover teacher training and induction programmes need to be drastically upgraded and top-down management of the school system has to be replaced by management from below which means that local communities including parent-teachers associations and alumni need to be more actively involved with school managements. If this transformation of the system is not actualised urgently, another generation of India's youth will be gifted with wasted lives,” warns Dr. A.S. Seetharamu, professor of education at ISEC.

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