RIGHT TO EDUCATION
Is the right to education merely the right to schooling? That is the question raised by the Annual Status of Education Report 2010, and it comes out of some disturbing statistics. The survey, which covered seven lakh children in 14,000 villages, found that while 96.5 per cent of children in the six to 14 age group in rural India are enrolled in school, the quality of their education left much to be desired. When only half the number of students surveyed in Class V can read a Class II text, when nearly 30 per cent of Class V students can do neither subtraction nor division, it is time to seriously ponder the slow decline in the quality of education in our rural areas and assess why we are going wrong at the very basic level.
It’s not that there aren’t any positive developments. Thanks to the standards imposed by the Right to Education Act and the far-reaching effects of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, there are more children in school: the percentage of five-year-olds enrolled in schools has increased from 54.6 in 2009 to 62.8 in 2010. The girls in the 11-14 age group still out of school has come down, too. Now, the imperative should be on providing them with the kind of education that is their right. Infrastructure is essential. Students need classrooms and blackboards. They need drinking water and warm meals. They also require qualified, enthusiastic teachers — for the quality of education a student receives depends on the quality of her teachers. And that’s where Punjab, where its children have shown a marked improvement in basic arithmetic, has scored. The survey points out how the state is focusing on teachers as much as it is on students. It has schemes intent on upgrading pedagogy. And that can be a lesson for everyone. Let us start with better pay for schoolteachers, followed by incentivising them to deliver the best and then make them accountable for the results. Only then can children get the kind of education they deserve.
RTE Issues in India
What happened?
The public debates themselves should give us a clue. Most of the disagreement is over the applicability of the law to private schools. The schools that charge more than the government’s average spend per child (around Rs.12000 a year) are disagreeing.
How much control should a government have over the functioning of a private institution? Can it set the fees? Can it decide who should be admitted? Can it decide what the criteria for selecting students should be? Can it decide whether teaching motivated by a philosophy of learning can take place differently in unconventional schools? What about disabled children, in particular those with learning disabilities? And so on.
There is no uniform answer to all of these, but it is possible to develop principles by which the answers should be decided. And the failure of the law is in this respect. Many of its provisions are incomplete answers to these questions. And the opposition - in the press, on the ground, in the courts - is an attempt to force the government to explain the principles publicly, and to defend them if possible. Indeed, if the government had done this in the first place, we would have a much better Act.
Two useful principles
We have seen a vast number of arguments put forward contesting the Act, but in our judgment these can be reduced to two that matter, and if these can be resolved the rest will settle themselves.
First, the law need’s to recognise there is great diversity in the type of institutions in existence. There are government-run schools; government-aided schools that rely substantially on the public exchequer; there are private schools that have entered into agreements with governments to get specific benefits (such as cheap land) in exchange for some commitment to educate the poor as well; and schools with very little inputs from the government. There is also another important truth to be recognised - most private schools cost much less than what the government spends per child in its system, but there are private schools that cost considerably more too.
What is the implication of such diversity? Simple - one set of rules for all schools will not do. We need to recognize the differences between schools, and suggest different rules for each type of school to function under the RTE Act. Some things are common to all schools - quality of education, for example, and uniformity on those fronts may be easier to achieve through standardization, as is done with testing. But elsewhere a uniform approach will not work.
Second, we need to decide whether private schools should be established and run for profit. So far, we have lived in Wonderland on this question - knowing fully well that the majority of private institutions do seek profit as one of their goals, but pretending in law and process that this is not the case. We even have stockmarket-listed companies that are deeply invested in education, but yet we regulate them with the pretense that learning is supposed to devoid of profit. The RTE law has brought some of this dodginess to a point of conflict, forcing a resolution.
In our judgment it would be better to separate the private schools into different categories, based on the extent to which they have received government aid. The recent Supreme Court hearings already appeared to be moving in this direction. Once such separate lists are in hand, we should apply different rules to each set of schools. Those who have received more support from the government should be required to meet higher obligations for educating the poor, and those who have received less support should be less obliged. This is only fair.
The present RTE law though is bland; it makes no distinctions between schools over the extent of support received by them. This is partly because such variation does not exist in Delhi schools, by and large, whereas it is common in other states. It is said by many that this is a Delhi law being blindly extended to the other states.
What are the challenges with RTE?
The main challenges is to implement the 25 per cent reservation for poor students, keeping all children in school until class V while reaching acceptable standard learning levels, monitoring private schools’ recognition, establishing School Management Committees that function well, and all done with similar mechanism in all States and Territories.
Obstacles: Attitudes and Resources
Among the many obstacles preventing India from sending all children to school is the availability of facilities. India’s leading advocate for child rights, CRY (Child Rights and You), estimates that 47 percent of dwellings don’t have a primary school nearby. A study by CRY revealed that an important reason for girls dropping out of middle school in many rural areas was the lack of separate toilets for girls.
In some regions, poverty and cultural taboos remain the biggest barriers to children not going to school or dropping out. Most adolescent girl children, especially in the deep rural interiors of the country, aren’t sent to school because their parents believe it will spoil their chances of marriage. Education in these regions is seen as something that makes women stubborn and turns their attention away from the home and hearth.
Some people say…
A slum boy cannot be admitted be allowed to be a student of Bombay Scottish a high profile school. We should not discriminate the kids is fine but definitely high class society paying Lacs of Rupees as Tuition fees for elite school will not tolerate slumdogs as schoolmates for their kids.
