Schools! Are they?

THE GOVERNMENT is patting itself on the back for the progress of universal education programme. But with the present approach to primary education, India?s under-privileged children, particularly in the villages, have no hope of getting proper education. The effort of successive governments to have a primary school in every village is counter-productive. Meagre resources are being spread too thin and the rural poor are not getting anything beyond token literacy ? just the ability to sign their names.

THE GOVERNMENT is patting itself on the back for the progress of universal education programme. But with the present approach to primary education, India’s under-privileged children, particularly in the villages, have no hope of getting proper education. The effort of successive governments to have a primary school in every village is counter-productive. Meagre resources are being spread too thin and the rural poor are not getting anything beyond token literacy — just the ability to sign their names.

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Rather than many single-teacher schools, the need is to have a decent primary school in every panchayat, a standard higher secondary school in every ‘nyay panchayat’ or cluster of several panchayats, and a degree college in every tehsil. That is the only way forward for India’s 192 million children.

Additionally, about 17000 ‘Ekal Vidyalayas’ (single teacher schools) and thousands of madarsas and seminaries run by NGOs are trying to fill the gap of moral, religious and cultural education. But this is no more than pre-primary initiation to schooling for the children of tribals and Muslims.

Single teacher set-ups can initiate education and give sermons, but primary education demands much more than that.

In spite of schemes like ‘Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan’ and District Primary Education Programme, most of the rural schools of India are more like ‘Ekal Vidyalayas’.

Parents feel compelled to send their children to public schools for quality education. In government schools, there are no playgrounds, no sports teachers, and there is no fun for children. About 90 million children of India are neither school-going nor counted among child labourers. They simply spend their time with twigs and dust.

The scholarship money to primary school children goes to parents and free books have no meaning if copies are not given to them. Mid-day meals can motivate the children of families from below poverty line to attend school — not to learn.

A single teacher in a school can control his/her pupils through punishment, but has no time to teach. A school without teachers is like a hospital without doctors, no matter how much paraphernalia we have. On the contrary, if teachers and pupils are there, they can sit under a banyan tree and make a school..

Child labour is a well-known obstacle in achieving the goal of universal education. But it sadly becomes a necessary evil for the rural poor who bring their children to the fields. The problem of children working in brick-kilns, shops, hotels and houses may be smaller compared to the children forced by their parents to work with them in agricultural fields. How can we ban this child labour without ensuring two square meals for their family?

Children of working women in the countryside are most neglected. They take their children to the fields and put them on the ground or allow them to play in the dust. They cannot be expected to grow up to become book-loving inquisitive children. Even school-going children in villages are made to abstain from schools for durations up to 20 days in four seasons during sowing and harvesting of wheat and paddy. The total absence in many cases is more than 40 per cent of the school attendance. Most of these students ultimately drop out. The state of girl child is worse.

In the cities, elite and affluent groups from all sections of the society, whether caste Hindus, OBCs or SC/STs, collectively form the ruling class and send their children to public schools.

The ruling class, which also dominates the government, has allotted a meagre budget of less than six per cent for education, out of which the budget for primary education is negligible.

If the sons and daughters of the ruling class had to sit with the deprived children on the ground, their parents would do something to alleviate the standards of primary education. All the talk of uniform primary education is sloganeering without commitment.

Appointment of teachers in schools is not the priority for successive governments. They are interested in constructing school buildings, providing books, scholarships, mid-day meal and black boards.

They forget that a school is not an assortment of bricks and mortar, but a living entity. If, in a primary school of five classes, there is only one teacher who abstains up to one third of the academic year, the school is half dead. In the name of teachers we have one or two annually appointed untrained Class XII-pass ‘shiksha mitras,’ who are yet to learn the methods of teaching.

Occasionally there are one or two regular teachers who are often assigned numerous non-teaching duties.

In previous generations, primary education was initiated and also supplemented by grandparents in a joint family who used to teach oral arithmetic and how to write on a slate.

Now, the poor quality primary education is hurting more because rural children have lost the advantage of joint family system, even in the urban areas, the young parents have neither time nor patience to play and teach their children.

We cannot revive the old system due to challenges of modern life, but parents can take some of that responsibility to compensate for the poor quality of primary education.(The author is a retired geologist and runs the Bharatiya Gramin Vidyalaya School in Kunaura village of UP. He can be reached at sbmisra@yahoo.com)