Education Priorities

Yesterday I was reading an article on how the new government should 'correct' the history syllabus of our schools and why secularists are scared of this move. As I am in the government service, so am not supposed to comment on government policies, yet as a citizen who has benefitted most out of government subsidised education I would like to express my personal views on the things that should be prioritised in the sector of education.

In the field of primary education, the issue is not of content but of quality of dissemination. In a country where a class 5 student is not able to divide 27 by 5 and find the remainder, (ASER report), I don't think it will matter whether she grows up thinking that Aryans invaded India or otherwise. When a bright student of a remote village lands up at IIT because of his sheer talent but feels cheated when the entire course is in English, he really doesn't care if Akbar was a bigger hero or his rival Rana Pratap. I come from a typical middle class family and all that my parents wanted out of my education was to ensure a job for me. Most middle class and lower middle class parents in India still send their kids to school in the hope that they will become employable in future and will be able to earn for themselves. Our education system must cater to that need without taking any moral high ground. 

I was always interested in history and my father never discouraged from spending time on it. My grandfather was a Gandhian freedom fighter, my father is a communist trade union leader and my brother and I have attended 'shakhas' run by RSS in our localities as kids. I have heard different versions of history from these different sources. Even now I keep re-reading history books to know more about India and love reading books which contradict each other. That is what makes history interesting- it changes depending on who is narrating it.

But that is not the case with Mathematics and Science. They do not change with the educator. And hence the scope of improvement in dissemination of maths and science becomes so much easier to implement.  Our existing economic setup is hugely biased towards students of Mathematics and Science. A science student has a much higher probability of employment than a commerce or humanities student and hence the rising madness for engineering colleges. So if you want to change history in school books, first change the economic setup where history students can get a good employment.

Our government schools are hiring the worst talent in the society. Anybody who is a an above average student either makes a career in the private sector or at least ends up as a clerk in the public sector. The leftovers are the ones who apply for government teacher jobs. So the worst student in the class ends up becoming a primary school teacher in a government school. Yet we find some exceptional teachers in the government setup and people like me are the handiwork of such brilliant government teachers. There is a lot of improvement that needs to be done in the way we teach our kids. Recent experiments in primary school have really deteriorated the quality standards. Recently I was appointed observer for evaluation of answer sheets of state board examinations of 10th and 12tn standard and some of the random copies that I checked were very disturbing. The quality of answers were so pathetic that it made me cry. Not to mention that my job was to ensure that the teachers who were empolyed as examiners did their job well, and that too wasn't easy. They were the least motivated lot that I had ever witnessed.

Teachers, especially primary teachers are the most neglected as well as the most politicised group. Neglected because they are given no inputs to teach more qualitatively and are mostly busy with the administrative work like distribution of school uniforms, free textbooks, mid day meals, and minor construction works in their schools. They are also the most politicised as they are the largest number of workforce in any state government and hence their postings and transfers etc are highly influenced by local politicians. I remember that in Bihar and Jharkhand there was always a flood of teacher recruitment so just before assembly elections, just to gain votes. This is not to say that our primary teachers are good for nothing. They excel in all the non-teaching jobs that they are assigned. Census of India and Election Commission of India claim to be the most efficient of the public organisations and both of them hire teachers as the field workers. Sadly, no thought is spared for the kids who are rendered teacher less during census and elections.

A lot has been tried in training the teachers but hasn't given us expected results. And when we are hiring a very poor student as a teacher, we should not expect miracles at his/her hands. Thankfully technology is at our aid now. Smart classes like educomp, virtual classrooms like Khan academy are making primary education more interesting and dissemination of knowledge more efficient. The MHRD needs to focus on scaling up the inputs in these directions. Our existing school systems can only produce clerks and that is why coaching institutes produce doctors, engineers and managers. The way science, mathematics, technology (including computers) and English (to enable global employability) is taught in government schools needs a total overhauling. Things like biometric attendance of teachers, GPS enabled apps to track presence of teachers in schools, optical fibre connectivity to all villages are things that should be on the minds of the people dealing with education policy.

History is,and has always been, an important subject of interest for mankind. It is taught in schools only to give a cursory view of how the country and the world came into being in its present form. Out of the same school syllabus that has been taught over years, we have produced intellectuals from the extreme right to the extreme left in our country. So for heaven's sake, let's not waste our energy and resources on rewriting history or in 'correcting' it. People who are interested in knowing the counterview shall know them later (provided books are not banned for providing counter views). Let us focus on quality of the various other subjects that are taught very poorly at our primary schools today, namely Mathematics, Science, English and Computers. 

Afterword- my constant emphasis on English is also because all technological higher education institutes of engineering, law, medicine, management as well as commerce and chartered accountancy are i. English only and we should not be unjust to students who aspire to do big in life but are forced to compromise because their school education in English was not of a good quality.