Column

Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal wants to move fast on education reforms. He is one of the UPA’s most capable ministers but he will find that forward movement will take a lot of time and consensus-building. The preponderance of vested interests in the education sector — from fly-by-night coaching classes to a corrupt regulatory set-up — will stymie all his initiatives.

Look at what has happened so far. Sibal said he wanted to reduce stress levels for children and make the Std 10 board exams optional. When the states protested — they don’t want to lose control over education — Sibal had to change his tune. But as if to prove he was still capable of getting things done, he went ahead and introduced the grading system of evaluation for CBSE schools.

But what has he really created? We will have both grades and board exams at Std 10 — the worst of both worlds. Theoretically, the change means students can opt out of exams if they want to. But will they? Why should the parent of a Std 10 student close the options for her teenager? Her ward may want to study in another state or board after the 10th. CBSE schools may thus end up doubling the work of staff who will now have to cater to both requirements, grades and exams.

If Sibal wants to go down in history as the man who reformed the education system, he needs to approach the problem differently: first, he must understand where we are now; next, he must tell us where he wants to take us; and finally he must draw up a roadmap to take us from here to there.

Instead, by straightaway deciding that stress is the main problem children face in the current schooling system, he has put the cart before the horse. Abandoning the exam system is not the solution to stress; a grading system is not going to make students or parents any less paranoid. Every parent will continue to pressure her child to get straight A’s in everything after the marks system is abandoned. We would only have traded one kind of stress for another.

The other point about stress is this: no system should be designed to avoid all of it. The goal should be to end needless stress — like multiple exam systems, endless form-filling, opaque admission processes and so on. Let’s remember, Obama wants American kids to learn math from us. So we are doing some things right.

If you want to reduce stress, you have to figure out why the current education system is so bad in the first place. The answer is obvious: there are too few good schools and good teachers. The problem is compounded by quotas and reservations, which further reduce the supply of seats to the deserving.

Exams are thus a way of eliminating 90 per cent of the eligible children from good schools. The system is geared to ensuring that only the best 10 per cent get in. When a parent knows that the chances of her ward getting into a good institution are 1 in 10, she will automatically send him/her to every possible coaching class and emphasise rote over real learning. This is true whether the child is applying for a seat in kindergarten or Std 11 or an IIT.

If, on the other hand, your chances are one in two — which is what an ideal educational system should attempt — stress levels will come down. It has nothing to do with grades. Grades are a way of categorising varying levels of performance. They don’t necessarily measure anything more than what a marks system does. Neither system will reduce stress.
As long as the supply of good institutions is poor, vested interests will get into the act — either to help you beat the system or to profit from it. This explains the proliferation of coaching classes and fake colleges.

If we can agree that stress comes from a shortage of good schools and colleges, it follows that the remedy must be to increase supply. Now this calls for an entirely different approach to the problem. This is where we need to be clear where we want to go.

If we want more and better education for everybody, it means allowing good institutions to expand under a liberal regulatory regime, giving them autonomy and freedom to set fees and curricula, creating a fee subsidy (or voucher) system for the economically weaker sections, and providing special coaching for those whose scholastic standards have been historically weak (for example, Dalits and OBCs, who have not had a supportive social structure conducive to learning and studies).

This means we should allow foreign schools and institutions to set up shop here — the best schools are in the US and Europe — even while allowing domestic institutions to raise money and expand.

At another level, universalisation of primary and secondary schooling needs a national effort. The best ideas in education do not come from government, and maybe it’s time to put someone like a Narayana Murthy to head this national effort.