Charter of Demands for School Education

 

Lok Shikshak Manch wishes to place the following facts and the associated demands regarding the present and evolving school education system before the political forces participating in the general elections for electing the 18th Lok Sabha. This charter is meant to voice the concerns and interests of the people in general, but especially those working in public schools and those whose children are enrolled in these schools, so as to take forward the idea of and campaign for a robust and equitable fully public funded common school system.

SCHOLARSHIPS AND RIGHTFUL AIDS

Observations and Concerns

1. The total withdrawal of social justice based scholarships at the elementary level is grave injustice to students from marginalised backgrounds. It is ironic that the government justified such a move on the grounds that these are not needed as the RTE Act has already ensured free education till grade 8. This is coupled with an increasing emphasis upon 'merit-based' scholarships, such as the PM Young Achievers' Scholarships. The latter kind are also limited in number and suffer from issues of complicated application process similar to the remaining scholarship schemes.

2. The condition of income certificate for applying for various scholarships is elitist, exclusionary and immersed in corruption, all of which impose additional costs upon parents.

3. Making the application process compulsorily online, that too at the level of the individual student (or her family), is expensive, wasteful, complicated and ultimately discouraging for the applicants.

4. The vast majority of students from the marginalised backgrounds is unable to fulfill the demand for caste certificates and many among those who do have such certificates, having migrated from elsewhere, do not possess these issued from the states they are studying in, in our case, Delhi. 

5. The compulsion of availing scholarships (and students’ all other rightful aids) only through (aadhar seeded) bank accounts denies the rights of many students whose parents are unable to open the accounts of their children for various reasons, ranging from exclusionary and unhelpful policies of banks to the additional costs involved in the process. This is compounded by the huge wastage of parents' and students' precious time and resources spent in long and uncertain queues in aadhar centres, banks or outsourced and unaccountable customer service centres of these banks, many of whom charge illegal and exorbitant fees for the minutest of services. All of this amounts to the tragic irony that families end up spending money and time for what should have been, and used to be till a point of time, available to them, as scholarships were meant to be, free of any prior expenditure on their part.

6. This massive denial, harassment, injustice and even exploitation is made worse by the almost absolute unaccountability about making any data public and the absence of grievance redressal and public audit around this issue. 

Demands

1. Budget allocation for scholarships and other rightful aids to students should be increased in proportion to the overall number and different categories of students.

2. Scholarship amounts and other rightful aids should be pegged with inflation. 

3. Scholarships should be decentralized. 

4. Students and parents should have the option of availing scholarships and other aids in the form of cash, which is the real DBT, instead of having a Bank account based pseudo DBT imposed upon them. 

5. All rightful aids, like uniforms, should be provided in kind rather than in cash. 

6. The social justice character of scholarships should be protected and enhanced by, among other things, easing the caste certificate linked conditions. 

7. Let there be a social audit of all scholarship schemes and rightful aids provided (and denied) to students across grades over the last 10 years. 

CURRICULUM AND PEDAGOGY

Observations and Concerns

1. Curriculum is becoming increasingly centralised and micro-controlled. 

2. Curriculum has been fractured, made ad-hoc and subservient to motivated, casual and urgent/immediate compliance diktats. 

3. Examples include continuous competitions and events directed from all kinds of Ministries, imposition of unending, meaningless, ready-made pledges, enforced and resource-wasteful attendance in academically numbing programs like Pariksha pe Charcha etc.

4. Elements from time-table, modules, worksheets, classroom activities, assessment to class-organisation in terms of students’ groups and seating arrangements, almost all aspects of teaching are being centralised and decisions taken away from the hands of teachers.

5. Decreasing scope for schools and teachers to organise and undertake things on their own, as per their academic concerns and needs, is diminishing their identity and autonomy. Features of school and teaching as essential as games, debates, environmental science etc are losing out in a barrage of bureaucratic diktats. All this has made teachers feel like strangers in their classrooms and alienated from the promise of their profession. Teachers’ and schools’ control over their work is vanishing. Large number of teachers and school heads are going through a loss of agency, morale and facing consequent burnout. Ironically, but not surprisingly, under these circumstances schools and teachers are not in a position to make meaningful and constructive use of what material resources are being provided by bodies like the SCERT and NCERT. The shadow of centralisation, dilution and disruption has come to hang over our schools. 

6. Politically motivated deletions and additions from curriculum are an attack on the objective of inculcating scientific temperament among students. Examples include deletion of Evolution Theory, Industrial Revolution, Understanding Partition etc.

7. The character of vocational courses and their imposition in public schools is designed against the interests of students from working classes and historically marginalised caste backgrounds, and girls. These courses are not only anti-education and anti-labour, but, in fact, exactly contrary to how a truly work-based education should be organised. Instead of equipping students by respecting the principles of equality, freedom and dignity in and of work, the purpose is to push the already disadvantaged away from higher education and turn them into cheap and willing labour for the profiteering stranglehold of the industrial and commercial masters. 

WORKING CONDITIONS IN SCHOOLS – TECHNOLOGY, DIGITALISATION, DATA AND RESOURCES

Observations and Concerns

1. Almost all aspects of school are being digitalised, irrespective of any substantive needs or issues of rights and justice. These include the day-to-day administration, teaching, application processes for admissions and scholarships, reports of curricular/co-curricular events, continuous and often repetitive data-entry etc.

Much of this digital, data supplying work is unfathomable, non-productive and makes huge demands not only on the health and personal time and resources of teachers, but also leads to great loss in the time available to teach. The claim of time-saving and efficiency which was touted in favour of the introduction of digital mode of work, has turned out to be a false promise. Teachers have found their work increasing, if not doubling, without any concomitant help in terms of additional hands for those tasks.

2. This digitally imposed emergency in the working conditions of teachers often compels teachers to take recourse to a studio-like manipulation of images, videos and data, a fakery which is in-built in this mode of administration.

3. Teachers have been put under the indignity of facing CCTV surveillance of their class (which now includes providing live feed to parents' phones), compulsory marking of attendance through biometrics and selfies (on insecure apps) and the humiliation of self-certifying their (and family members') ODF practice.

4. This state of affairs is compounded by the virtual denial by the administration to share information or data, including that demanded under the RTI Act, with the people. We find ‘data, data everywhere, but not for the public to sip!’

5. Researchers and journalists are not allowed access to physically visit institutions or collect facts on ground. Only selective pieces of (mis)information are placed before the public for purposes which suit propagandist interests. 

6. With recruitment always lagging behind, most schools continue to run with a shortage of teaching/non-teaching staff. There is a dire need of not just filling vacant teaching posts but also increasing hiring of teaching staff in accordance with increasing academic and non-academic workload on teachers but also for decreasing Pupil Teacher Ratio in a manner that children from marginalised backgrounds can receive the academic help they require and deserve. 

RIGHT TO EDUCATION 

Observations and Concerns

1. The increasing and obsessive emphasis on ‘outcomes’ has led inevitably to policy measures taken in the name of FLN. These, whether rooted in the globally pushed SDGs or more proximate forces like Pratham and other market-oriented, anti-educational private, corporate bodies, NGOs etc, have caused immense harm to the cause of education and the rights of children, especially those enrolled in public schools, a majority of whom come from deprived backgrounds.

The removal of child-friendly and educationally just clause of No Detention under the RTE Act was, under the policy of outcomes-based FLN, bound to be followed with the removal of the clause of age-appropriate admissions. This has come to pass. 

2. These shifts signify that it is children who, regardless of their socially unjust conditions, have to be ‘school ready’ instead of schools being ready for them. 

On the one hand, children are being admitted in pre-primary grades in schools without required arrangements in terms of space, rooms, toilets, teaching and non-teaching staff etc being made available for them. On the other hand, it is being conveyed to schools that allocation of teachers’ posts will be based not on the legally mandated statistics of PTR, but by the duplicitous concept of average attendance of students! 

3. But even prior to any of this, there is the constant suppression of children’s rights when they are denied admission and end up losing precious years for the crime of not having Aadhaar with Delhi address or for not having bank accounts. Thus, children from vulnerable and migrant family backgrounds are facing an increasing push-out and being left to the ‘open schooling’ system (a system which, in fact, forecloses chances of their further and regular education).

             

CONSOLIDATED DEMANDS (OTHER THAN wrt SCHOLARSHIPS)

1. ‘I can’t teach. I demand the right to teach and the freedom to do so meaningfully and with dignity.’

2. Let all public funded schools flourish on an equal footing in terms of resources and attention. Abolish all inegalitarian layers across and within public schools.

3. Stop digital tyranny in schools and ensure that privacy, dignity and health of students and teachers are not compromised for carrying out of instructions/orders. 

4. Fix an upper limit on the time spent by teachers on school-related, especially digitally communicated and demanded tasks after school hours. Provide digital allowance and overtime for any such tasks. 

5. Provide sufficient time for teachers to reflect, plan for their classes and engage with students.

6. Stop bombarding orders to be implemented on an urgent/immediate basis.

7. Stop using schools to push the agendas, including regressive, divisive and hateful ones, of various ministries.

8. Ensure the ease of doing education, especially for the children from historically marginalised sections, through unconditional admissions in lower grades, and continuous and free access till higher grades. 

9. Extend the right to education till 18 years/12th grade.

10. Guarantee rigour in curriculum and teachers’ pedagogic agency.

11. Reinstitute the no-detention policy and withdraw FLN and all other curricular compromises.

12. Stop direct or surreptitious privatisation of schools through handing over of recruitment of non-teaching personnel to private agencies or elements of the curriculum and training to unaccountable NGOs. 

13. Ensure that there is no shortage of teaching and non-teaching personnel in any school and take account of the growing needs and legitimate leaves by recruiting on a permanent/regular basis 5-10% over and above the extant norms.

14. Stop mindless, wasteful, concrete-obsessed and environmentally disastrous construction of and in schools and ensure that all school campuses are environment friendly, green, accessible and provided with soft grounds, and ample spaces which are open, sunlit and airy.  

15. Withdraw the imposition of anti-working class and anti-education vocational courses in public schools.