Step into the Churning World of Indian Education

To paraphrase what the owl said - the more I see and hear and experience in what is happening in schools today, the more I realize that I should keep quiet. This is not a reverential silence, but a despairing silence. I realize it is useless to blame the founding fathers of our country for so messing up primary and secondary education but this is exactly where we are now - a totally messed up situation. To be educated is our birthright, but are we getting the kind of education that will make life better, is the question.

No doubt, we are handicapped. Our children, all of whom have their own mother tongues, are either sent to English medium schools, or they are in vernacular schools, craving for an English medium education. Gone are the days when a privileged lot went to either the British style public schools, or the Church schools, or the schools run by the Catholics, the Indianized term being-Convent schools. Gone are the days when educated people chose to become teachers and believed that teaching was a vocation. Gone also are the days when school administration was in the hands of those who believed they were helping to build a nation, when schools were run with the purpose of teaching and educating children who would be equipped to take the country forward.

Today we have a situation when there are hundreds of English medium schools with nothing English about them except bizarre names, and that have come up to cash in on the need for parents to have their children speak in English - he will become a gentleman - is a refrain I have heard over and over again in the course of my life as an educator. We have so many Boards with each one vying with the other to push up the statistics. If we run a check on the teachers who work in these hundreds of schools, it would be interesting to find out how many of them are educators - and teach with a mission, and how many have gate-crashed into this profession because there was no opening for them anywhere else, and they need a livelihood.

We teach children in a language so alien to their own that for them to identify with anything that they learn is traumatic to say the least. Worse, this English that they are craving to learn to become gentlemen, is neither English nor even pidgin, it is some totally bastardized and alien language that is utterly incomprehensible. If it weren’t tragic, one might laugh at the pronunciation and sentence construction one hears from the mouth of a linguistically traumatized child. And to think that the solution is right there staring at us - our parents and grandparents who learnt English correctly as a foreign language and studied in their mother tongues, can today, speak better and more correctly than any of our English medium educated products.

Having committed linguistic genocide, we move our kids into a situation where only marks are important. 97% is less...so we proceed to murder their sense of self worth and self esteem. And what is all this for? That is the question. Since most teachers today are where they are only to earn a livelihood, there is little chance if at any at all of their being interested in and trying out all the new and innovative teaching methods that are being experimented with in the western countries. They are not even interested in the children, so much so that they have allowed a parallel tuition industry to thrive, and maybe even are a part of it in order to supplement their salary.

Everyone wants a good life! And why not? Only it would have been better to have the good life having done an honest job in an honest situation. To top off this whole circus are the new breed of edupreneurs - the corporate honchos, the business men and the retired Government bureaucrats - all with too much money and no sense at all about either a child’s needs, or what the role of a school is, or for that matter how a school should be, but who glibly pontificate on education. For these investors or promoters children represent money, teachers are B.Ed walis or wallahs who deserve only a pittance - what? -they are only teachers after all, - and the school is a business which can make do with as little investment as possible but which gives maximum returns and a sanctified position in society.

The only sound this variety of people wants to hear is the sound of the cash register ring. Not the happy sounds of children or the distress of the educators or the cries of a nation that is struggling to grow... the jokers in this circus - the educators and academics who have been groomed in the old schools, by selfless headmasters & headmistresses, and who live by a strict value-based code of teaching, suddenly find themselves losing their footing in this new quicksand, and quagmire...

As I see it, and as I feel, in all this, as always, and as usual, the child and his/her particular growing needs is nowhere on the horizon.

Whither then, education??

And yet, it need not be like this - as in every man-made problem, there is a sane way out...