T N Ninan: Wrong target for benign neglect

The school education system needs a desperate overhaul. So shouldn't the human resource development minister in New Delhi be focusing on it too, in the middle of her other pressing concerns?

So what do you think are India’s biggest and most urgent education problems that the government should be tackling? Judging from the subjects that hit the headlines, you might be persuaded that it is either the quality of historical research or the poor governance of the leading institutes of management and technology. Some other candidates might be language policy in Kendriya Vidyalayas and insufficient expression of cultural nationalism in school textbooks. It is time, therefore, for a wake-up call.

The average Indian spends 4.4 years in school, according to UNDP’s Human Development Report. That compares poorly with some of our neighbours about whom we like to feel superior (except that they have taken to beating us in cricket, too). One need hardly add what everyone knows because it is repeated every year by Pratham after its school surveys: about half the students in Class 5 cannot cope with Class 2 level reading and arithmetic. Somewhat contrarily, though, secondary school enrolment is said to be as high as 69 per cent. Are many of the kids in secondary school coping, or learning anything? We don’t know because the last government abolished exams. Nevertheless, an answer to the question came after students from Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh took part in the Programme for International Student Assessment, or Pisa, in 2012. Indian students did worse than those of every country other than Kyrgyzstan (which incidentally has a much higher literacy rate than India). Indeed students in Class 8 in India compared poorly with Class 3 level education in South Korea.

This is a system in desperate need of overhaul. School education is a subject that directly concerns state governments, but shouldn’t the human resource development minister in New Delhi be focusing on it, too, in the middle of her other pressing concerns? The ministry’s annual report to Parliament says surprisingly little on the key issues. But it should concentrate the mind that while India’s literacy rate is 74 per cent, Myanmar’s is 93 per cent and Vietnam’s 94 per cent. It bears noting, too, that India’s definition of literacy (“the ability to read and write in any language”) is basic and out of date; among other things, it excludes numeracy. A more contemporary definition of literacy, of the kind adopted by Unesco back in the 1970s, would find India’s literacy score dropping.

As with so many problems that affect primarily the not-haves, an important part of the problem is simply lack of funding. India spends 3.8 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on state funding of education. Malaysia’s figure is more than one-and-a-half times as much (5.9 per cent) and Thailand’s is twice as high (7.6 per cent). There are those who argue that increasing state funding of the existing government schools is no solution, because the primary problem is that the teachers in those schools (paid much better than those in private schools) have high rates of absenteeism. Indeed there is a steady flow of students from public to private schools as parents seek to improve their children’s life chances. In some states, half the students and more are now in private schools, where the level of education is noticeably better (though not good enough).

So a good case can be made for funding parental choice rather than schools and teachers — whichever school a child’s parent chooses should get the money that the government doles out for a child’s education. You can rest assured that this will improve the performance at government schools though it may not change the pedagogy, which, too, needs urgent re-invention so that children can escape the rigours of rote learning and use their minds in more stimulating ways. But is anyone in the government interested in such issues, or are they more interested in attacking the level of autonomy enjoyed by the institutes of management?