A push into the abyss

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.