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| Batting for private schooling |
| Laveesh Bhandari / Nov 25, 2009, 00:58 IST |
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Informal or unregistered primary schools take many hues and shapes. Some are quite large, some are held in one-room tenements, and yet others hold classes in the open. Some have well-trained teachers, others make do with whoever can read and write a bit. A very few have decent infrastructure, but most are quite poorly resourced. Indeed, the only thing common among them is that they are not recognised by the government. But despite the lack of official recognition, such schools are growing in number and importance. All this is well known. It is also well known that such schools are not only an India phenomenon, they exist across the developing world — Nigeria, Ghana and, yes, even China.
James Tooley has put together a fascinating account of the unrecognised primary schools across different countries, including India. He convincingly makes the point that not only do these schools provide education that is more in line with the requirements of the poor, but also that they deliver better educational outcomes than government-run schools. And he has some extensive data gathered painstakingly from primary surveys in Africa and Asia to back his arguments.
The government has a system of requirements that any school has to meet before it is granted recognition. This requires significant investments, certain specified area of land or real estate, presence of trained teachers, and so forth. For many in poor areas, these requirements are not possible to meet, and so we have scores of schools that are not recognised by the government. They are run by entrepreneurs or head teachers, they charge for the services, and they compete with both (generally more expensive) private recognised schools as well as the costless government-run schools.
It is sometimes said that children from families which are better educated and somewhat better off, go to private schools, and so these children also have higher levels of learning. Mr Tooley, shows that in survey after survey in India (Delhi and Hyderabad), and other countries, children who go to informal primary schools perform much better, even after we take into consideration their economic profile. In other words, whether the child is from a somewhat economically better or worse off household, whether her parents are educated or not, going to a private informal school leads to significantly better learning outcomes.
Why is this so? Mr Tooley answers that question as well. The need to sustain the school and ensure that students keep coming in, provides the right incentive for the school manager to ensure that the teachers teach. So, in surprise visits, children are found to be studying and teachers teaching in informal schools, but they are more likely to be whiling away their time in government schools. This despite the fact that teachers in private informal schools are paid lower than those in government-run schools.
Having proved his point, the author goes further. He makes the case that even our founding fathers were opposed to the conventional schooling system. He draws from the works of Dharampal and quotes from Mahatma Gandhi that the formal schooling system that we are building is not in line with the ground realities of developing countries. Consequently, the government-run schools cannot provide quality teaching in a sustained manner, and the rules and regulations related to infrastructure et cetera only succeed in making the delivery of good quality education costly and difficult to access. Moreover, he shows that before the colonial masters had set the framework for primary schooling in India, there existed a schooling system that was not regulated in the manner we know today, and where informal primary institutions did in large parts lead to inclusive education.
All in all, Mr Tooley makes a very powerful case for private schooling in India, and calls for an overhaul of the way we see publicly funded and delivered primary schooling in India. A school voucher system where parents are given a voucher and can pay for schooling via that voucher in the public or private school of their choice is the natural way forward. In other words, he calls for allowing private schools to operate in parallel with government-run schools, and also allowing parents to choose which school they want to send their child to.
Though this is a rather one-sided view, Mr Tooley leaves no stone unturned in his quest for putting forth his views. The Beautiful Tree is an entertaining and well written book, and is worth a read for all those interested in the cause of education in India.
The author is the head of Indicus Analytics
THE BEAUTIFUL TREE
A personal journey into how the world’s poorest people are educating themselves
James Tooley
Penguin; Rs 499
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