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| Why Not Equal Education For All? | | | Dr. Banarsi Lal and Dr. Pawan Sharma | 2/24/2018 9:31:54 PM |
| Education for all has still not been achieved in India. This is in a continuum from over a century and a half ago, when modern education was first introduced through Wood's Dispatch of 1835 and the Dispatch of 1854. Alexander Duff was one of the most vitriolic of all missionaries who arguably created the model for modern education in India. Our nation still does not have 100 per cent literacy and school-going children are learning below their class levels. Indian schools, administrators, policy makers and teachers are pulling one way and the children's families and communities are pulling in another way. Teachers and curricula are also divided. Now-a-days the economics of education is very important, for instance the amount spent per head is responsible for the quality education. This turns upper and middle class families away from government schools and they think for better equipped private schools for their children. But, if the country has the will to have a system of public schooling, the resources for public schools should be created. There is need to reform education system with persistence and determination. The shortfall in educational funding is ultimately traceable to the home-school divide. It also seems that there is poor management that is responsible for the poor functioning of schools especially in government sector. Even when the teachers are trained, the school building natty, teaching resources available and curricula imaginative, a school principal complains that he cannot make the school work. There is lack of ability on the part of well educated managers to manage less educated or differently educated people in India. This management shortcoming may be traceable to the home-school divide. The home is a particular site of politics. Parents and the older generation control younger generations for utilitarian reasons, to reproduce themselves socially and culturally and also because that is the preferred politics rather than age equality or the dominance of the youth. Career choices and choices of what to study are mostly made by parents of the children. Marriages choices are likewise mostly are made by parents. Sons and daughters-in-law may be controlled well into their middle ages. Apart from age politics, the family is rife with gender politics. Every Indian family is patriarchal. Senior men bond together to control younger men and all women. Age and gender power norms combine together to socialize girls and boys respectively to assume feminine and masculine roles so seamlessly that no authoritarian control is needed and men and women control themselves according to strict patriarchal norms throughout their lives.
There is class, caste and sectarian politics. Each family maintains its distance from others on these three lines, as well as on other grounds such as language and region. In each case, there is separation, hierarchy, stereotyping, sometimes more gently, sometimes aggressively. The school, by contrast, is a modernizing and secularizing agency whose mandate is to produce equality and to practice it. Through classroom procedures and regular rituals, children are taught in school that India is a secular country and all the Indians are fellow citizens. The Indian Constitution assures equality to all, meaning men and women, rich and poor, all religions and all castes. But is equality what schools actually practice? There are number of shortcomings of schools' perfect adherence to democratic, secular functioning. The first and the major one is that schools themselves are divided up by class lines, by gender and sect. There are no integrated schooling systems in India. There are schools for the rich children and schools for the poor children and various gradations in between them. It is not a free and simple choice to choose the schools. The schools for the children are chosen according to ones income. Rich children go to the rich private schools. Rich schools generally are rich in resources and management. Poor children go to poor schools. Poor schools generally are poor in resources and teach poorly. Children may work very hard and learn something in these schools, but the majority of them remain poorly educated. Some drop out because of the sheer poverty.
The whole educational system in India functions on the premise that there are two kinds of Indians, those who would naturally want to and be able to, pay for better schools for their children, and those who would resort to free or subsidized government schools that are bad or average or unknown. The curriculum of schools is based on the premise that India is a secular, democratic country and children should learn themselves about their country and countrymen. The curricula in Indian schools are progressive and it does not teach students to practice caste or ethnic hierarchy, to harbor regional or linguistic stigmatization, to nurture the values of patriarchy and to adopt class exploitation as natural. Then why different kinds of schools fail in promoting education for all? When questioned about the low level of learning of the children, it is always presented as the fault of the families, whether because of absenteeism, irregularity and un-punctuality, inability to keep books in order and most of all, the inability to study at home. All schools in India are based on the premise that some portion of the teaching done in the school must then be carried out at home, perhaps by parents, perhaps by hired tutors. Obviously, poorer and less educated parents can do neither.
The home-school divide is so ingrained in people's minds that they cannot grapple with the problem of uneducated, poor and working class families confronting a modern educational system. They can only condemn those families and stiffen their distance from them. Many parents who aspire to have their children study are willing to pay for private schooling with the faith that these schools will teach English and give a competitive edge to their children. The schools, in turn, again expect, indeed, demand, that the home does a large part of the teaching work. They give homework that needs adult help and they fail children who cannot cope with it. Almost 100 per cent of first generation, or even second generation school goers go to a tutor to study after school hours. The teaching of English, Science and Social Studies, as well as sometimes Hindi and Math's, is so non-progressive, non-interactive, and unimaginatively undertaken that children do not learn well. They leave school ostensibly having studied these subjects for the duration of their school life but with a skill level in them so poor that they cannot use their education to provide the social mobility they had dreamt of. Private Indian-language schools are schools founded by the community, often funded by the government, with low fees, old buildings, an Indian language as the medium of instruction and a consciousness of being more 'indigenous' than private schools that are English medium. These are closer to the homes of their students in little ways. They also use the mother tongues of the children. The top schools are those referred to as "convent schools," run by Christian missionaries or those that call themselves "public schools" after the British style. These are expensive and therefore, select only educated and upper middle class families as their clientele. Much of the work of the school is still expected, as with the other schools above, to be done by the family, but in this case the family actually does it. Children of these schools are successful in competitions and go on to do well in all walks of life.
In order to change Indian education to make it in fact education for all, we need to change the mindset of those who are the intelligentsia and the leaders of the country, most of whom are produced in these elite schools. The mindset at present is, "We believe in the Constitution. We swear by the ideals of secularism and democracy. We are not superstitious or ignorant, ritualistic or backward-looking. We do not have objectionable social practices. We believe in equality. We believe in rationality, and science, and progress."And what the mindset needs to become is something like: "Due to an accident of history, the educational system in India is divided up between rich and the poor. Different communities in India have different practices, some of which deserve change. That is partly the agenda of schooling. Some schools, like ours, and their products, like us, cannot blame others and demand of them a self-transformation to fit into our expectations. |
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