A letter to Kapil Sibal

This is in the form of an open letter to Union human resource minister Kapil Sibal, because I see you going in the same way as India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Like Nehru, you have the vision. Like him, you have a dream. Unfortunately, like him, you too have been looking at higher education more closely than at primary education and at the rot that prevails there. And I feel that it is important to bring this to your attention because four to five years of college education cannot undo the damage done by 10 years of rotten education — notwithstanding any tinkering or overhauling of the educational apparatus.

How bad is school education? Let me give you the findings of a survey I had financed in 2003 in Mumbai, which is, after all, one of the progressive cities in this country.  We focused mainly on standards V and VI, but also looked at standard  VII. To normalise our respondents, we focused only on privately-managed English-speaking schools in north-east Mumbai, where there are more middle class and lower middle class people. The reasons behind this choice were simple. If India has to change, you must focus on the middle and lower-middle classes, as they comprise over 95 per cent of the population. And we did not want to compare the students of a municipal school with those where private education was available.

As many as 34 schools gave us permission to conduct a quiz in English and Mathematics, and 16,500 students participated. The questions were basic (some of them as simple as putting the numbers in the right sequence). When the results were tabulated, we discovered that 65 per cent of them failed in mathematics and 75 per cent in English. And mind you, this wasn’t a moffusil area. This was Mumbai, a leading Indian metropolis with global ambitions.

We then researched further and discovered that most tests conducted by other NGOs, some prior to 2003 and some post 2003, came to similar conclusions. In fact, some of them found failure rates in Bihar lower than those in Maharashtra, Gujarat or Madhya Pradesh. We think that Bihar’s students performed better because good teachers had remained with schools — they did not find alternative job opportunities to wean them away from teaching as had happened in almost every other state in India.  No wonder then, more students from Bihar are getting into IITs and clearing the IAS exams.  When schooling is good, all subsequent education turns out better.

If teachers have begun to desert schools what should the answer be? Obviously, to make teaching  as a profession more attractive than any other profession, because this is the well-spring from which much of national wealth will emerge some 15 years later.  Most teachers have left teaching as a full-time vocation because of several reasons. Some of them are: (a) lower wages; (b) a poor student teacher ratio which has gone worse from the recommended 20:1 to almost 100:1 thus preventing individual mentoring, and increasing examination correction work; (c) allowing violence (often politician instigated) against teachers and school administrators to go unchecked and unpenalised; (d) burdening teachers with non-teaching work like election duty and census surveys; (e) a loss of dignity that the teaching community has suffered grievously.

Unfortunately, the last reason is often the result of the first four.  With poor wages and increasing exposure to violence and political interference, good talent deserts the teaching profession.  In cities like Mumbai, successive governments have barred the entry of part-time professionals into main-stream teaching, thus preventing even missionary zeal to save teaching. With the talent pool opting for teaching worsening on an average, the best teachers with missionary zeal get marginalised, and the teaching community begins to be seen as lazy, inept and not fit to receive even the meagre  wages they get.

Is it any surprise then that most state board exams after the 10th class (often referred to as the SSC examination) give grace marks to students securing as few as 15 marks out of 100 (through a practice of granting ‘grace’ marks, which is now a disgrace).  It helps governments quell any revolt from parents whose children have failed, by keeping failure levels under 30 per cent of the student population.

It is therefore not surprising that most students who fare well at competitive examinations like CAT, IIT-JEE or medical entrance examinations come from upper middle class families, who can afford private education.  These are also families where both parents are educated, and teach their children at home.  Thus, children of most common folks who depend solely on the school system, will fare poorly at competitive exams except for the exceptionally gifted, who would have done well even without schooling.

So what is the way out?  How do you reform primary education? That’s in part 2.