Comment

Education: quantity versus quality

THEORETICIANS of western liberal democracy have long argued that citizens with formal education are better equipped in making choices while exercising their fundamental right to vote. Further, formally literate citizens can act as watchdogs for their individual rights in a democracy. So how does the specificity of India, where mass illiteracy and extremely low quality of formal education have coexisted with electoral democratic politics during the last seventy years, fare? A lowly 5.4 per cent of the population was literate in 1900. By independence though the situation had somewhat improved. School, college and university education had gradually spread in different regions and major cities of the country, mainly due to the limited efforts of the colonial government and through private initiatives of the Christian missionaries and other religious communities and philanthropists.

Post-independence, especially upto 1960, the spread of education was slow and the social base was narrow. It is only subsequently that we saw an expansion with the opening of a large number of schools, colleges, universities, and highly specialized institutions for technology, engineering and medicine. Nevertheless, mass illiteracy remained endemic. It was only under the Congress-led UPA government in 2004 that a law was enacted to make education a constitutionally guaranteed right of every citizen, though only upto class VIII.

Yet, even after seventy years of independence, efforts to make India a ‘literate’ society have met with limited success. India has not succeeded in eradicating mass illiteracy; it is also caught in a trap where numerical expansion of educational facilities has been at the cost of minimum levels of quality of education. Public policy makers have ignored the issues of quality education and focused only on quantitative expansion. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018 by Pratham is quite revealing. In 2018, although as many as 90 per cent of kids now go to school, (a) one out of four children who leave school at class VIII ‘do not have basic reading skills’; (b) 50 per cent of them can’t do ‘basic mathematics like simple division.’ While pointing out regional and spatial variations in performance, a disturbingly high proportion of children upto the class VIII standard are not equipped for the ‘R’s like reading, writing and arithmetic. Note that the survey covered 3.5 lakh households and 5.5 lakh children in the age group of 3 to 16 years in 28 states.

The HRD Minister in the Lok Sabha (2016-2017) admitted that 92, 275 elementary and secondary schools are one teacher schools and the highest number of single teacher schools are in the backward states of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. A socially progressive scheme was initiated by former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (1984-88) when Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNVs) were established ‘for talented rural education’ as a step forward under the National Policy on Education, 1986. Two special features of the JNV scheme were that ‘(a) 75 per cent of the seats in each school were set aside for rural children’ and ‘(b) seats were also reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in proportion to their population in the district.’ The government opened 635 JNVs in the country with an intake of 2.5 lakh students. The step was a drop in the ocean in the context of mass illiteracy in the country.

Paradoxically, if one part of the story is of mass illiteracy and poor quality of school education for children of rural areas and small towns, beginning with the 1970s, there has been a great expansion in the number of universities and postgraduate and degree colleges. It has been estimated that India currently has 40,000 colleges and 900 universities and specialized technical institutions like IITs, IIMs, medical colleges, et al. A large number of school teachers for primary, middle and higher secondary are the products of universities and colleges including teacher training colleges. If universities and colleges are providing reasonable quality education, its products who are employed as school teachers will be academically well equipped and school children will benefit. It is thus essential to focus on the quality aspect of education provided by universities and colleges in India.

Unfortunataly a large number of universities and colleges are imparting very low quality of education. Public policy makers have often taken important decisions about higher education either without consulting the academic community, or a major stakeholder, or been in an indecent hurry to take decisions that have adversely impacted the quality of university education. For instance, the Congress-led UPA I and II governments of 2004-2014 decided to start 45 central universities without any data about the availability of highly qualified teaching faculty for these new central universities. The central government did not work out the implications of starting new central universities before implementing this decision. Not surprisingly, none of these new central universities have made any mark as centres of higher learning.

The BJP-led NDA government in January 2019 announced that to accommodate the 10 per cent Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) quota in central universities and IITs et al., beginning July 2019 and July 2020, the student intake should be increased by 25 per cent. How can a university recruit new teaching faculty to cater to the increased number of students in just four months? If the quality of teaching faculty is negatively impacted because of sudden announcements by the governments to ‘accommodate and expand’ the student intake, it has a multiplier impact. Substandard universities produce substandard school teachers whose victims are students of poor families. However, this assault on university educational standards by public policy makers has not resulted in any widespread protest in the country. Is this in part because our powerful and influential ‘moneyed classes’ have created for themselves ‘private’ educational institutions where their children can access quality learning, though at a price?

Our affluent strata is able to buy education as a commodity in the market by paying a higher cost which they can afford. This has created ‘islands’ of educational excellence which meets the demands of clients who can pay for education. For all practical purposes, this strata of affluent middle and upper middle classes have ‘ceded from society’ and for them the poor and common people of India do not matter. It is our poor and lower middle class that are the victims of low quality education. It remains to be seen whether our opinion makes and policy formulators will be able to persuade the political class to turn its attention to this urgent problem. Far from benefiting from a demographic dividend, the pressure of increasing numbers of low skilled/educated young people in our labour force, surviving on low earnings, may well turn into a demographic nightmare.

C.P. Bhambhri