Our intention is to draw the attention of the people of India
during the ongoing electoral exercise to the state of public schools so that
relevant questions may be put to the candidates and political parties
contesting elections and an informed debate may get going amongst us citizens,
especially those working in and concerned about the public school system. We
focus on some of the gravely damaging policy measures adopted by the
government, in many cases both at the centre as well as at the level of the
states. In doing this, we hold the values of equality, liberty and justice as
the guiding principles around which the public school system of our democratic
republic should be built.
Though much of our experience and analysis is rooted in Delhi,
we are under no illusions, in spite of the recent projections and claims in the
media about the ‘transformation’ of Delhi government schools, that the larger
policy trajectory is any different from the centre. Nevertheless, we would also
like to underline at the outset, and as this statement will show, the last five
years have seen an unprecedented assault by the centre toimpose its politics
upon the schools run by states, in utter disregard of democratic norms of
federalism and the constitutional position of school education as a concurrent
subject.
Further weakening of the RTE Act
While commentators and activists have drawn attention to the
manner in which the pro-people elements of laws such as the FRA, RTI, PESAetc
have been diluted in the recent past, our observations tell us that the RTE Act
(2009) may also be added to this sorry list. While the RTE Act itself didn’t
promise much and is rightly criticized as having been used as a tool to divert
attention towards EWS admissions in private schools while doing nothing to move
towards a robust common school system, even the meager rights it promised to
children in the age group 6-14 are being snatched away. This is being done by
diluting its provisions of section 16 (popularly known as the NDP or No Detention
Policy) to bring back the pass-fail system in elementary grades; hindering
admissions and entitlements (section 31) by introducing hurdles in the form of
structures of e-governance and digitalization at various stages; and denying
admissions on the bases of sections 12 (children failing to produce relevant
documents of address proof to fulfill theneighbourhood criteria) and 25 (‘seats’
being declared full to maintain the lawfully mandated PTR). In spite of the RTE
Act bestowing the right to complete elementary education for a child who may
have exceeded 14 years of age, such children are being denied admission to a
relevant class on the ground that their right is no longer protected by the law
due to their age
We don’t buy the argument of NDP having lowered academic
standards. We believe that NDP, with extra academic support, can go a long way
in ensuring that students learn as per their age and are not pushed out of the
school. The argument becomes especially untenable when it comes from a regime
which not only de-values academic rigor in schools by diluting course content
and promoting market-oriented vocational courses but also proposes two unequal
levels of exams at the secondary level.
The only thing which links these seemingly disparate trends is
the certain and powerful lobbying by private profit interests almost
controlling and dictating government’s education policies. Thus the criticisms
of the RTE’s ‘input’ requirements by the lobby of private schools and forces
which identify themselves as entrepreneurs and which see even the weak norms of
infrastructure put by the law as unnecessary and irrelevant to schooling and as
fetters to entrepreneurship in the business of private schooling. This push to
replace the focus from legally mandated norms for schools by ‘outcomes’, is
ably aided by the NitiAyog’s declaration to fix public and policy attention around
schools to measurable outputs. This has brought us to the corporate model of
results, competition, grading, ranking, all at the cost of a focus on enriching
experiences, deepening processes and other democratic concerns around which any
self-respecting public school system must be built.
Another layer of exclusive schools (for example, Schools of
Excellence in the case of Delhi) has been established which not only deepens
inequalities in the provisioning of public education but whose special category
status is also used to place it beyond the ambit of the RTE Act.
It is as if various clauses of the RTE Act, like the ones
about PTR (pupil teacher ratio), neighborhood criteria, age-appropriate
admissions, learning levels etc, are being selectively and mischievously used
to scuttle the main objective of the law itself, which must have been to ensure
the fundamental right of schooling till at least the completion of the
elementary stage.
Inventing new tools of denial
A mother tells a teacher how she was worn down by doing several
futile and inexplicable rounds of Aadharcentres and the school for getting a
detail in her daughter’s enrollment corrected. As a result the parents found it
extremely difficult to get their daughter readmitted in Class IX since her name
had been stuck off as they had left for their native village due to some family
emergency. This was her second daughter among four girls and two boys and she
proudly recalled this particular child’s studiousness. She tells the teacher
that having found no way out to get her readmitted in her former(regular)
school, something the child herself so desired, they decided to marry her off.
She was not yet 18. No checklist of school data will capture this planned
cruelty perpetrated by an insensitive technocratic system whose vice-like grips
our schools and children are increasingly being put into.
A 12 year old boy couldn’t attend school in Class VI because his
parents were not able to open a bank account in his name. He was told that his
thumb impression did not match with his Aadhaar record at the outsourced
service centre of the bank.
Families of students who had already passed grade 5 found it too
cumbersome and costly to fulfill the formalities (which included having an Aadhaar
with the local address, a bank account and address proof) required for
admission to the next grade. Some of these children ended up re-enrolling in
and repeating grade 5 in a primary school where the process of admission was
much more unconditional.
As practitioners, we have, often helplessly, witnessed children
being denied admission and due rights such as uniform and various scholarships for
not possessing Aadhaar and Bank Accounts. In spite of the law and the Supreme
Court’s ruling declaring Aadhaar non-mandatory for children below 14,
governments continue to bring out admission forms and online programs and
software which require Aadhaar numbers and bank accounts to be filled in
mandatorily. Indeed, what used to be a simple and convenient matter of visiting
the school for availing uniforms, or money in lieu of them, and other scholarships,
has now been turned into a veritable nightmare and no less than a cross-country
hurdle for hapless working class parents and kids which requires them to enroll
at Aadhaarcentresand open and then maintain bank accounts before accessing any
entitlement. The juggernaut of Aadhar has caught imagination of the parents.
The non availability of Aadhar (or Bank Account) has become a self-deterrent
which is making parents assume in many cases that unless they get the Aadhar of
the child made she will not get admission in school leading to waste of her crucial study years. All this is besides the harassment they
undergo owing to multiple, costly, time consuming and de-moralizing visits they
have to undertake in order to keep track of these ‘transfers’ and to get their
names, dates of birth, addresses etc corrected from time to time. That they are
often charged exorbitant bribes not only at Aadhaarcentres (even within banks!)
but at the banks’ GrahakSewaKendras (outsourced centreswhere they are
increasingly being forced to carry on all their petty transactions for a fee)
is a tragicomic irony considering the fact that one of the primary claims made
in support of this bio-metric identification document and the DBT into people’s
accounts was its promise of removing the weight of corruption from people’s
lives.On top of it, in many instances families are finding regular deductions
being made from these ‘welfare accounts’ when they are not able to maintain
minimum deposits. True to the neo-logistic streak under neo-liberalism, there
is nothing direct in the DBT policy for working class families being served by
our schools.
The enforcement of DBT for providing students due benefits for
entitlements like uniforms, stationery, books and for transferring scholarship
money into their bank accounts has become a means to not only restrict
children's access itself to schools but also led to depriving many children of
the benefits in whose name coercive and debilitating procedures have been
imposed upon children and their families. For example, we came across numerous
cases in Delhi where children had been denied admission in government schools
on the ground that they did not have a bank account or Aadhaar card or the
details on their Aadhaar differed (as they naturally would among a people
unfamiliar with the nuances of spellings in Hindi, let alone in English), even
if minutely, from their school record or other details. As a result, most of
these children, who come from working class backgrounds, were literally pushed
out of school and were languishing at home. Not surprisingly, many among them
were girls and it was not rare for their distraught parents, particularly
mothers, to utter spontaneous acerbic comments on the BetiBachao, BetiPadhao
slogan. Moreover, a result of the, as it turns out, an ironically named DBT has
also been the mass denial of uniforms to children not possessing Aadhaar and
bank accounts in our schools. It has become a common sight to see children
being forced to attend school without uniform. And where you do find them
wearing uniforms without exception, it is certain that their families have been
coerced to avail them from their pockets, either in advance of the scholarship
amount or even in its absence. We witness students of Classes IX – XII feeling
forced to buy second hand books, or books of private publishers, avoiding
getting noticed in class for not having a book for months or throughout the
year. What good has replacement of the exercise of providing books to students
with DBT for textbooks hasbrought?What State has achieved by linking government
school education and benefits to opening of bank accounts is a backward flow of
cash from working class homes to banks (as it had happened in the case of
demonetization); right from the process of opening bank accounts, maintaining
minimum balance in these accounts and most importantly thousands-lakhs of
children not receiving their dues. This new age digital corruption continues to
rob the masses under the garb of 'transparency'.
Compromising content or privileging a faux product over process
A class IX student came up to her teacher in the staff room and,
having been encouraged to ask questions, asked why those whom we love, depart
early from our life. No checklist of ranking assessment for schools will be
able to capture this relationship and possibility between a student and a
teacher or the ethos which engenders this space in a school.
We have witnessed an exact inversion of focus upon access and
academic worth in our schools. Instead of making the former easier and the
latter uncompromising, we see regular processes of admissions and chances of
continuing in academic streams getting tougher, while all kinds of compromises
are being made with the content, whether it be reduction of chapters and
syllabi (an exercise with its own politically motivated objectives), foisting
de-intellectualised vocational courses, offering on-line courses or proposing
two levels of exams at the secondary level. Of course, much of this deliberate
academic dilution and withdrawal of equal rights from under-privileged children
is sought to be camouflaged by the ostensible objectives of improving enrolment
ratios, ensuring retention and a formal completion of varied stages in formal education.
It is another matter that most of these stratagems are not only pushing working
class children out of the regular system but shortchanging them by compromising
the content and very objectives of their education.
Since last two years students of middle wing in Delhi government
schools (and primary wing in MCD schools) have been segregated on the basis of
a functional literacy tool and made to focus upon basic reading and arithmetic
skills at the cost of subjects like literature, science and social science.
This reduction of education to functional literacy is not a far off threat but
a practiced reality in our schools.
As a cruel but inevitable blow back of the limitation of the RTE
Act, a mass level expelling of children has been taking place at and after
grade 9 where students have failed are being pushed out of regular schools and
‘counseled’ to take admission in NIOS or PatracharVidyalaya. This basically
means dropping these students from school’s roll call in order to improve
schools’ results and leaving these students on their own. Often, the high fee
and opaqueness of these systems results in making these students ‘disappear’ from the education fora
altogether.
All this has converged well with the purpose of
de-intellectualizing school curricula. As a result, not only are students being
forced into vocational steams after secondary grades but even being allotted
such courses from earlier grades itself. There is not even an attempt to
present it as being motivated by any Gandhian theorization of work and learning.
Its politics is in fact betrayed by its being confined to public schools and,
ipso facto, working class children. There is a real danger that this policy
trend threatens to reinforce and reproduce the caste-class and gender
hierarchies/inequalities in the larger society children of our schools come
from. Education will then no longer serve as even a notionally just and fair means
to transforming society. A further evidence of this is the slow but sure complementary
disappearance of Science as a stream from the senior secondary grades of many
public schools. It is as if everything was so blatantly unfair that there
was no need for a hidden curriculum or the corresponding necessity to unearth
and analyse it.
We are witnessing an increasing trend of instituting English as
a medium of teaching from primary grades itself in our public schools. While
this educationally indefensible and harmful policy orientation is being
justified on the basis of making public schools attractive to the aspirations
of the working classes, it is instead leading to an increasing alienation of
the experience of schooling and learning from the process of understanding and
the situated realities, including linguistic, of large number of children. The
consequences of such a policy practice are not restricted to a compromised
pedagogy alone but include a growing segregation across and within our schools.
Not only are newer layers of exclusive schools being opened in the name of
English medium teaching, there is a steady increase in the number of already
functioning ‘normal’ schools which offer separate and exclusive sections
dedicated to the English medium. Moreover, a disparate and ill-conceived system
ensures that there are cases of children being perforce shifted, for no fault
of theirs, from one medium to another at different stages of their schooling.
While we recognise the justice-based demands and need for teaching English as a
language and subject in all public schools from early grades, something
entailed by the spirit of the three-language formula too, we are disturbed by
the trend of practically abandoning the principle of mother-tongue education in
favour of the unthoughtful, harmful and populist implementation of English
medium schooling. A similar dishonesty prevails and has only been strengthened
in the context of the third language which is offered as a subject in the
post-primary grades in our schools. Instead of respecting both children’s
interests and linguistic identities as well as deepening the spirit of national
understanding/dialogue through the learning of diverse languages of India,
children in our public schools continue to be presented with a fait accompli of
studying a centrally prescribed third language as a subject from grade six.
Emerging tools of governance
Ironically, this whole trend towards dumbing down our schools
and students is accompanied with an exercise which keeps the teachers engaged
with superficial and superfluous tasks under the duress conditions of ranking
which involve submitting to performance parameters having no bearing upon the
lived reality and ideals of an academic institution. Consequently, it is not
the education department officials (who themselves could not be said to have
been adequately or professionally prepared) nor university academics or the
SCERT which is engaged in providing feedback to or assessing our schools, but
this task is increasingly being outsourced to private bodies which not only
have no academic pretensions but whose free market ideological commitment
orients them not to strengthen public schooling but in fact to the spread of the
market of private schooling.
Primary schools in Delhi itself have enforced Aadhaar based
biometric attendance on students! Others have made it mandatory for teachers to
record each student’s attendance on tabs/computers and upload it on a daily
basis. While this invidious tracking of children and CCTV cameras is being
pushed in the name of accountability and transparency, it has ironically been
made next to impossible for research scholars, journalists etc to visit and report
truthfully and deeply on schools.
An allied aspect of this insensitive push towards digitalization
is that children and teachers are all being forced to subject their bodies and
minds to the surveilling and data capturing gaze of the state.It is
apparent that the demands to capture the attendance of each student online and
transfer it to a central data base can have no respect for the dignity of
children or trust towards school and teachers. This distrust and
disrespect extends to forms of managerial governance which mimic the worst
forms of a market model and include the indignity of coercive biometric
attendance and the installation of CCTV cameras in classrooms, corridors and
premises. It even celebrates the idea of relaying direct feed of
classroom/school visuals to the smart phones of students’ families. The haughty
claims of this proposal are unencumbered not only by any concerns for the
sanctity of children’s individual identities and academic spaces but also
oblivious to these families’ socio-economic realities.
This
securitization, surveillance and data generation and capture has been sought to
be sold to the people in the name of transparency, while schools have virtually
been turned out of bounds for even the community with which schools are
supposed to be in a democratic relationship. More than ever before, children in our schools today need to be made aware of their
privacy rights and the corporate and state threats facing their privacy.
Instead, the whole paraphernalia of managerial performativity and the
presentation of the glaring charms of technology as a panacea is immuring the
young to the dystopian possibilities within the forces controlling and driving
our tastes, habits, lives and the polity itself.That this is something being
claimed as an educational revolution/reform is a testimony to the sorry state
of discourse we find ourselves in around schooling and public education.
Consequently, teachers are being assessed through ACRs on the
basis of the results of their classes, oblivious of the fact that such
parameters are only going to lead to unethical practices and narrow concerns.The
threat of show cause notices to teachers for home exam results has been leading
to another dangerous trend; pushing teachers to become tutors teaching exam
oriented tricks to students instead of dealing with an in-depth understanding
and demands of the discipline. It is our students who are going to suffer this
crazy obsession with results, particularly those coming from first generation
school goers and challenging social or personal circumstances. It is clear that
under this result-rank discourse there is an attempt to blame and punish the
student and the teacher alone, at the same time obfuscating the responsibility
of the State and the role of the wider social system in the functioning of our
schools.
Leadership managerialism is being imposed on our schools through
the new forms of training for posts of principals. This is transforming schools
from academic institutions into managerial places. The fetishes of ranking and
managerialism of schools are feeding into each other. The use of these tools of
accountability implies that there is nothing wrong with the government’s
policies and all accountability rests coercively at the bottom. What gives away
the paucity of wisdom driving the education policy is the fact that the
responsibility of conducting the exercise of Ranking schools in itself the
deeply problematic idea due to its market provenance, has been thrust upon
Child Rights bodies and perforce conducted under the aegis of the QCI, a
registered society set up under the department of Industrial Policy and
Promotion, Ministry of Commerce and Industry. It was thus only to be expected
that these ranking exercises would not go deep into the schools’ life but
remain restricted to a ticking of checklists.
Teachers are increasingly under performance/result and
multi-tasking stress. Whether it be the endless orders to collect and upload
students’ and their families’ personal details or act as proxy employees for
government’s all kinds of non-academic campaigns, ranging from Measles-Rubella
vaccination to voter enrollment, teachers are finding that not only has section
27 (restriction of non-teaching duties) of the RTE Act proved to be an empty
promise, the diversion of their time and labour into coercive, academically
unproductive and purely bureaucratic-technocratic tasks is growing apace.
The usefulness of filling in troves of school data for the MHRD
under the UDISE format is not at all clear to us. The purpose of this laborious
exercise becomes all the more suspect when we find that some of the fields
marked in the format are either unfairly close ended or suggest the submission
of factually compromised information whose only benefit seems to be to throw
positive light upon the government’s score card. The irony is that, in spite of
such an ubiquitous collection of data, RTI applications asking for collated
data are either denied or passed on to hundreds of schools, thereby not only
costing huge wastage of public money and resources but also harassing the applicant
and frustrating the pursuit to bring facts before the public.
We are caught gasping in a vortex which is turning the
intellectually challenging and socially responsible profession of teaching into
a digital clericalism.
Campaigns and Slogans: Turning schools into sites of
propaganda
In the last few years, we have seen reports from various states
of children being used as agents of the government’s ODF scheme, in the process
being dehumanized into participating in shaming people going outto
defecate/urinate in the open by blowing whistles at them. Given the fact that
the ODF campaign has not only involved the issuing of threats of disconnecting
electricity supply or cancelling rations by the administration but also led to
the murder in Rajasthan of a man protesting the filming of women of his
neighborhood by the administration, this is a sure recipe for numbing
children’s sensitivities and socializing them into vigilantism. On the other
hand, teachers have been asked to submit signed statements/declarations that
they and their family members use toilets at home and do not practice open
defecation.
That most teachers’ unions have let go this obnoxious and
humiliating order without lodging any protest tells us about the demoralization
and the level of apoliticisation among the general mass of practitioners. The
question whether and to what extent this state of affairs can be attributed to
the politics of the last five years may not be answered in an easy manner, but
we are surely facing a moral crisis in our public school system and as a nation
when teachers find themselves voiceless and without self-respect. It adds to
the long list of our cruel ironies this must come to pass at the very hands of
those forces which otherwise extol the virtues and merits of the traditional
figure of the guru.
The SwachhtaAbhiyan saw the enforcement of coercive
directives upon ill-prepared and under-resourced schools. Much of this coercion
was ultimately transferred by authorities eager to please their bosses, onto
the shoulders of teachers and the students. The fact that teachers were called
upon not only to take an oath of Swachhta themselves but enforce one upon their
students, even at the primary grades, degraded the meaning and sanctity of the
idea of taking a conscious and conscientious oath, apart from turning schools
and their assemblies into meek spaces for ruling-party and the ‘supreme’
leader’s propaganda. Children were marched into rallies for the campaign and
schools forced into organizing endless and repetitive shallow events around the
theme. Funds for the campaign were provided but in a sporadic manner and
without increasing any posts or fulfilling the extant ones lying vacant. This
reduced the whole exercise to a propagandist, cosmetic and coercive spectacle,
thereby belittling public schools and exposing children to a false narrative.
It has been no less than a crime against our schools and children.
While these centralizing instruments have been imposed through
an administrative exercise of control, we have found an unprecedented invasion
of the partisan and ruling party/leader, politics in our schools, under the
pretext of direct and compulsory telecasts of various addresses/programs of the
Prime Minister (and to a lesser extent, the Chief Minister). As a deeply
worrying aspect of forcing schools to follow the marching orders of a
centralized drumbeat, school platforms were shamelessly hijacked for the self
promotion of the PM and the sanctity of PTM and SMC meetings in schools was
abused for electoral propaganda by the CM in Delhi. Schools have been compelled
not only to observe days specially designated by the central government but also
to follow a centrally imposed plan in doing so and made to upload photos/videos
to prove their obedience. It is as if schools and teachers have been reduced to
captive public spaces in the service of vested political ambitions and petty
ideologies.
We have seen the BetiBachao, BetiPadhaoslogan being thrown
around in the media, used for public campaigns; as practitioners we have no
idea of its substantive contributions, whether for the girl students in our
schools or those girls who have been left or pushed out of public schools. That
more than half of the expenditure on this so-called scheme has gone to
publicity indicates that this slogan also belongs to the category of a jumla.
Open spaces in many schools are disappearing for building
new blocks or have been defaced by laying them over with tiles and concrete,
thereby damaging children’s right to play in their very schools. This assault
on childhood is taking place in the name of an adult model of development and
is happening in an ironic parallel with the Khelo India campaign. It should be
common sense by now that merely providing grants for libraries and sports
equipments without having filled posts of librarians, games teachers etc or while
taking away the very spaces meant for these engagements, in favour of a
single-minded focus on demeaning minimum levels of learning, is not benefitting
our students or enabling an ethos in schools for these pursuits. Whatever
little there was of environmentally appropriate and light and child-friendly
open spaces in our schools, it is being devoured under the onslaught of a
destructive architecture of ‘development’ which intends to put to ‘fruitful’
and exhibitionist use all available spaces.
Recounting the woes
Testing and personalized publicity functions in schools have
taken away precious teaching time, cost valuable public resources and exposed
public schools and children of vulnerable age to blatant propaganda. That this
has happened in total disregard of the sanctity of the school schedule and
calendar shows the hollowness of the alleged concerns for lowering learning
levels and accountability of schools.
What is sorely needed is to establish the autonomy and
credentials of bodies like the NCERT and NCPCR at the national level and SCERTs
and SCPCRs at the state level. Currently, given the whole discourse about a
learning crisis in our schools which is guided by vested interests, these
institutions, meant to uphold academic standards and children’s rights (often under
attack by the state itself), have either turned away from addressing pressing
concerns or even been complicit in rights violations by supporting and
defending some of the governments’ unfair and illegal orders and policies. As a
result, schooling and teaching are being hollowed out of all meaning an
autonomous, self respecting and academically committed person cherishes in
her/his work.
A false narrative of merely universal enrollment at the
elementary level is being projected. The socio-economic realities which have
always disabled children’s access to and retention in schools have been
exacerbated by the introduction of technological forms of gatekeeping to keep
and push working class-caste children out of academic empowerment, if not schools
themselves. The compulsive use of ICT for forms of administration andteaching,
is having a tyrannical impact on the culture and functioning of our schools.
Under the rhetoric of digitalization, smart schools, smart classes and smart
learning, what we are experiencing is the dullness and control of e-governance.
This great disruption in the life of our schools is producing new barriers to
access, intellectual rigour and equity. We have yet to find it serving the
interests or rights of our students in any substantial manner. What it
definitely does serve are the needs of government control and the market interests
of manufacturers of ICT instruments and products, while at the same time
inflicting great and irreparable ecological and health costs.
There is a state of enduring socio-economic emergency, including
long-impacting nutrition deprivation, coupled with conditions of gross resource
neglect in schools. This means that at one level the touted learning crisis is
an obvious outcome of the inequity and at another level an example of
mischievously barking up the wrong tree of learning outcomes. But we also
reject the focus on learning outcomes not only as ill-conceived but as unworthy
of a wholesome and serious school system. The school examples of Wazirabadin
Delhi and Bihar in which children were segregated into different sections along
communal and casteist lines, along with the refusal of the mid-day-meal NGO,
Akshaypaatr (funded by the denominational organization, ISKCON) in Karnataka to
use onion-garlic in preparing children’s meals and denial of eggs as an option
in mid-day-meals in various states, show the toxic effects of infusing
religious ideology into our polity and through it into our schools and the
already fragile, precarious lives of our students.
While around a lakh schools all over the country continue to
function miraculously with single teacher, lakhs other at the primary level in
a planned manner have neither an office staff, nor a Nursery Aaya or a sanitation
employee. Meanwhile, ad-hocism prevails and grows in the appointment of
teachers and other staff in schools. When seen in the light of multiplying,
tedious and increasingly useless tasks required of teachers, it is easy to see
why our schools are facing an emergency to even carry out their daily routines
in a decent manner. The more exclusive schools like the KVS are catering under
administrative orders to conform and comply. The monochromatic lens of language
and cultureimposed on our schools means that they will not be places for a
thousand flowers to bloom but factory floors churning out uniformly measured,
dead and single hued products.
The discourse of falling learning levels is used to say much in
disparagement about teachers’ competencies and for pushing a narrow idea of the
objectives of public schooling. This ‘concern’ for standards is then diverted
into implementing narrow assessment tools for students and instituting
concomitant reward and punishment mechanisms for teachers. This false focus
also helps in conveniently ignoring the sorry state of teacher education,
especially but not restricted to the mushrooming of private institutions across
the country. Much anecdotal evidence continues to reach our ears of private
management institutions whose sole motive is profit-making and which show an
utter disregard for maintaining even a minimum of infrastructural and academic
resources, including faculty. Sadly, the picture of public teacher education
institutions does not inspire confidence either. We find that while new
institutions are not being established, those already in existence are being
left to die a slow but planned academic death.
A charity model promoted by philanthro-capitalism has been
hitched to the CSR model and PPP not just in the administration of schools but
even in teaching. The policy of outsourcing has reached the academic character
and responsibilities of our schools via a demeaning and academically shallow
intervention of texts, testing and teaching by NGOs, likePratham, TFI etc. The
central government itself has gone ahead to introduce the Vidyanjali scheme
which has promoted and established the idea that any ‘decently educated’ and
‘well-intentioned’ person could be not just allowed but welcomed to contribute
by teaching in public schools. (It is another matter that, thankfully, this has
turned out to be another failure of this regime.)Such a compromise with the
role and credentials of teaching as a profession also falls foul of the
provisions of the RTE Act itself but is made to be circumvented by defining
these personnel in classrooms not as teachers but as 'volunteers', assistants
etc. This near-capture of policy-making space and powers in the state by
market-oriented, academically suspect and politically unaccountable private
entities has led directly to the interjection of toxic and obnoxious programs
such as the Chunauti and Buniyaad in Delhi government and MCD schools which
have not only segregated students on the basis of narrow assessment tools into
variously labelled ability-based groups but also mandated teaching them at
different levels, using worksheet-styled, ‘simple’ texts by sidelining the
NCERT textbooks and the NCF itself.
Our experience with and close observations of the trajectory of
policy measures enforced upon public schools over the last few years lead us to
see them in line with the larger trend of attacks on public institutions in
general. We have increasingly witnessed that the governance tools,
administrative styles and policy perspectives being imposed on our schools are
derived and inspired from the world of corporate management. On the one hand, this
is an absolute betrayal of an understanding of the nature and objectives of
education in general and public education in particular. On the other, it
presents a direct assault on the rights of children from working classes to
access a schooling which would not only enable them to aspire and participate
in the world of work on an equal footing but also develop thattransformatory
consciousnessin them which is needed to organize and agitate for liberty,
equality and justice. Instead, we have more than sufficient reasons to be
alarmed at the course of the policy direction which threatens to abuse these
very possibilities and responsibilities that our public schools owe to the
people of India.
The debilitating effects of children’s socio-economic
impoverishment upon their educational prospects are clearly evident in the
forced and sudden displacement faced by their families due to their insecure
employment and habitation. We have seen this cruel state of affairs lead to abrupt
exits of students from schools and the descent of otherwise cheerful young
lives into desperation and helplessness. The lack of health allied to such
precarious conditions is also seen in students’ prolonged absenteeism, drop out
and in some cases, even tragic deaths. It is obvious to us that a meaningful
right to education cannot be ensured without providing for other robust
social-welfare interventions by the state in favour of the working-classes.
