Educational Excellence through Equality

Former Ambassador and Former Indian Foreign Secretary, Muchkund Dubey, recently spoke about problems in the Indian school education system at a round table conference on challenges facing the NDA government. He underlined major issues like low attendance, high dropout rates, 5 lakh vacant teaching posts and the lack of focus on pedagogy. Criticizing the idea of handing over education to the private sector, he said that the market can neither ensure universalisation nor affordability. Therefore, to pursue excellence in education, the government needs to focus on equality.

Transcript:

I would like to highlight a few problems with the field of school education which are relevant to the policy that the present government may adopt. One thing that one finds is that the government itself; very little has come out so far as their policy in the field of school education is concerned. The ministry and the minister seem to be extremely busy with the three and four year degree course. As I said in my opening remarks, there are many articles, many presentations and other, you know, forms of media from which some trends emerge and overwhelming trend is that the problems in the field of education will be solved if you open it much more than before for the private sector. Main provisions of the RTI are concerned. They have been implemented and the focus now should shift on improving the quality of learning and improving the measurement of capacity to learn so should shift to pedagogy, syllabus, classroom, administration and so on and so forth and then it is claimed that this can come best from the private sector. Less than 10% of the schools in India are fully compliant with the infrastructural norms laid down in the RTI. Even the number of schools that needed to be built, have not been built, though the dead line is long over. No mapping has been done as to where schools are required, how many of them are required even though it is laid down in the RTI and all these dead lines were April 2013 that all the out of school children should be brought into school, by the same dead line. Millions of children are still out of school and no attempt has been made to assess the magnitude of the problem. Another falsehood that is being perpetrated is that the problem of access is more or less solved. That is also false because access is measured only in terms of enrollment percentage and though it is true that enrollment has gone upto 95% and 97% even but even more than enrollment , whether children are going to school, whether they have access to school very much depends upon the figures of attendence and some surveys that have been done on attendence still indicate that this is somewhere in the range of 65%-75% and there has not been much improvement since the RTI came into operation. Then we don't take into account the drop-out rates and the drop-out rates according to government statistics till, are about above 60% at class 10th, close to 40% at class 8th and close to 20-21% at class 5. Coming to quality, the most critical factor which now has been recognised is that of the of teachers deployed and the quality of teachers. Now here also no mapping has been done as to the total number of teachers that need to be recruited or even the vacancies that just run into lakhs and they have no been filled. According to one figure 5 lakh vacancies exist and 6.5 lakh teachers need to be trained. There are public institutions which used to train teachers particularly in university departments and do work on pedagogy etc., they are in decline. Much is talked about quality, but quality is viewed mainly in terms of some of the tests that have been developed by institutions both nationaly and internationaly, that is, your ability to read, write and do arithmatic. It is also ignored that quality is not only the function of the number and qualification of and the motivation of teachers but several other factors and one of them is that quality particularly depends upon quantity, that is the physical infrastructure, the kind of environment you have in the classroom, whether you have adequate space for the students, teaching aids. Vast number of the high schools have no functioning laboratories even though they teach science and the second thing is that quality is critically dependent upon equality and the western societies learnt it almost centuries ago and I am quoting a western scholar who has said that you would not like to pursue excellence and equality together because it is not even possible. You would rather pursue excellence through equality. It had been emperically established that the schools which bring together children from different economic groups provide better quality of education than the schools which are for the elites only or for the poor only. Quality also very much depends upon what do you understand by education. Again if education is literacy and numeracy, then there is one way of judging quality but if you Delor Commission Report which is the most authoritative report on education published in recent years which talks about education in the coming century. It talks about purpose of education , not only to comprehend, contest, criticise but also to develop habits of working together, to see your interest in the interest of others, to build a common citizen concept, to inculcate the values which is universally shared by the nation, which indicates the values of india enshrined in the Indian Constitution. If you take education in this sense then it is very difficult to envisage that you can have a real quality education without equality and without State playing a central role in that. Private market can of course lead to an expansion in the number of schools but market cannot do two-three very essential things. One is that, it cannot ensure universalisation because market is a random process; it's not a planned process and what is a fundamental right is available to all the citizens from the moment the right is conferred and therefore society cannot tolerate interregnum for the realisation of the right from the time they are guaranteed to the citizen and that cannot be done by the market. Secondly, market cannot ensure affordability and in a country where a vast number of people are poor and cannot afford, market cannot ensure that vast number of children would really get quality education and therefore in most of the societies which have developed, quality education has been universalised, mainly by the state. Finally I would say that we should definitely protest against the government doing anything which further perpetuates not only the multi-layered system of education, some for the riche -some for the poor, some for this class-some for that class, but really reduces it and one of them was that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's announcement in the first year of the UPA-1 government that he will open a one-model school for each district of India, which is 6000 model schools and this will be done through PPP and you should know that not even one of these schools have been opened. Government is still negotiating as to how it can be done through PPP and this is what the country needs is that all these schools should be model schools.