Abstract
Education as a means of access and opportunity is understandably of crucial concern to parents and children everywhere, but particularly in countries where opportunities are limited and access is often determined by levels of privilege. Although universal access to quality public education has been on the state agenda since India gained Independence, the commitment and on-the-ground action have not matched the rhetoric. Under the influence of a global neoliberal agenda and the availability of foreign financial assistance in this sector in the last few decades, issues of quality and equity have been neglected. And now with the establishment of a right-wing, conservative government in 2014, the commitment to an equitable education system is dwindling even more rapidly. The manifestations of this ideological and political shift are varied and range from the blatant attack on the democratic functioning of universities to the adoption of new projects for skill training and assessment-oriented learning along with the sidelining of the social sciences at all levels of education. The results are most starkly visible in the disintegrating public school system, the proliferation of low-fee private schooling for the poor, and the push for public–private partnerships of different kinds that would enable the state to abdicate its responsibility as the provider of essential social services.
The Right to Education Act (for children aged 6 to 14 years) was passed only in 2009. Although the Act is aimed at achieving equity, efforts at implementing it are focused largely on providing access alone, and even that goal remains unmet to date. That millions of children (six million at the last count) remain out of the system even today is testimony to the state’s priorities vis-à-vis the poor, who can ill afford private schooling, and the mounting costs of both education and health. The commitment to providing quality education to the newer entrants into the system is far from evident, and the responsibility for this is increasingly being handed over, overtly and covertly, to the private sector, corporate or otherwise.
The latest budget makes grandiose claims and promises, but the allocations for what is proposed are meagre by any standard. Pronouncements on education with scant increases in fund allocation, accompanied by increased calls for evaluations and assessments, are hardly likely to solve the problems that are eroding the public school system and hold out little hope for any meaningful change. Seen in the context of other economic indicators of growth such as employment and spending in social sectors, the intent is highly questionable. Harking on assessments and outcomes without adequate investments in infrastructure, quality inputs, teacher-training and support, better learning opportunities and a host of factors that go into providing good quality education can only render the system more punitive and encourage what should be the last priority of a good education system: examination-oriented teaching, rote learning and information overload at the expense of critical thinking, reflection, debate and exploration.
This has serious implications for large sections of the population, and does little to bridge the social and economic gaps that education in India has traditionally maintained. Indeed, the inequities are expanding, and the two-tiered system that has long existed has become more complex and multi-tiered. The spectre of an educational system envisaged by the New Sociology of education in the UK, and corresponding sociologies in the United States in the 1970s, seems to be coming to life in the developing countries, where the reform of educational systems is focused on restructuring to create and supply a capitalist workforce. The fact that a large proportion of the population is forced to access education only as a means to employment speaks volumes about the state of the society and the economic order, and it raises serious questions such as: What is the nature of the system of education to which children have been granted a right? What of their right to a life of dignity that extends beyond the struggle for survival, the right to employment that could enable their educational experience to look beyond employment and the cut-throat competition for increasingly limited job opportunities?
Although these questions are pertinent in many parts of the world today, the implications for less developed countries, and especially extremely unequal and hierarchical societies like India, are far more serious, and are highly skewed against socially and economically marginalised groups. Debates around these issues, and challenges to them, are also more robust in many parts of the developed world. In India, the voices of dissent and protest against this neoliberal onslaught have been limited, and are now being openly targeted, not least through an assault on those institutions that have traditionally challenged the status quo.
The endpage discussion on the proposed curriculum changes directs our attention to other disturbing elements of the present governing dispensation and the political context within which educational changes are being proposed. Presenting an analysis of the Ministry of Human Resource Development’s proposals on curriculum revision, Rupamanjari Hegde highlights the likely consequences of this project, given the BJP’s record of an earlier tenure in government and especially since their election to power in 2014. The recent announcement by the union minister for Human Resource Development about the need to reduce the curricular load at the school level, followed by a demand by another minister for setting up a high-level committee of ‘experts’ to rewrite the history of India, raises doubts about the government’s seriousness about achieving substantial improvements in the sector and, in fact, is cause for alarm. According to the author, ‘Both these announcements are ominous signs of impending tectonic shifts leading to an overhaul of the school curriculum under the current political dispensation’. Her warning that the BJP government ‘is determined to reshape the national identity in accordance with its ideological framework’ needs to be taken seriously, given the party’s unopposed pan-Indian presence and the influence that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) exerts over it.
Also pertinent to these issues is the article by N.V. Varghese, ‘Criticality, empathy, and welfare in educational discourses’. He traces the role of the welfare state in expanding education, especially in the post-war period, and subsequently in reducing social and economic inequality. He laments the decline of these policies in recent decades, and especially the current emphasis on preparing young people for the ‘fourth industrial revolution, on the one hand, and seeking alternatives to state funding of education, on the other hand’. This trend gives tremendous influence to market forces in shaping the course of education and the economy, especially in countries like India where levels of poverty remain appallingly high, and where social and economic inequalities abound. Varghese makes a case for an education that nurtures empathy and criticality, and that is sorely needed for policy-makers, for governments and for our future citizens to foster justice and equity in increasingly discriminatory societies.
Of the three books reviewed in this volume, India Education Report: Progress of Basic Education, edited by R. Govinda and Mona Sedwal, is in most part a straightforward, comprehensive review of the progress made in basic education in India, with an excellent introduction and chapters by scholars, experts and bureaucrats dealing with themes that focus on Education for All (EFA) goals, and presents detailed reviews of four states. It provides useful information, raises important questions and sets up a context for understanding the challenges that face the Indian school education system and the many levels at which these are located.
The Strong State and Curriculum Reform: Assessing the Politics and Possibilities of Educational Change in Asia, edited by Leonel Lim and Michael W. Apple, offers a critical lens for analysing the influence of what it refers to as ‘strong’ states on education systems in the context of East Asia. Through case studies and analyses, the volume attempts to find spaces for intervention, within educational structures and systems, by examining ‘a series of unfolding tensions and contradictions, as states attempt to extend their control over the production and regulation of “official” knowledge as well as the work of schools and teachers’. In light of the present scenario in India, it holds important lessons and needs to be taken seriously.
The volume edited by Devesh Kaput and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Navigating the Labyrinth: Perspectives on India’s Higher Education, deals with issues of higher education. ‘A significant body of literature, encompassing a variety of disciplinary stances, points to the social and economic exclusions and complexities that characterise higher education in India’, writes the reviewer. The editors see the massification of higher education in a post-globalised India as posing a ‘trilemma’ while deciding between scale, cost and quality. The volume is a collection of essays that discuss the challenges to higher education in the face of quality, access, financing and internationalisation. The reviewer notes that [F]or general readers, students, and researchers interested in understanding the new terminologies, concepts, and institutions, the book is a relevant reference point. For those concerned about the crisis in higher education, the book offers resolutions from one of the dominant political–economic perspectives. Those who disagree, or who envision the mission of higher education in other ways, may want to ask, do the resolutions suggested here necessarily lead away from the crisis towards the quality promised through autonomy?
The book opens up an important contemporary debate that educationists must understand and engage with.
The two other articles in this issue are more directly connected with teaching and the classroom, and focus on science and mathematics respectively.
Deepika Bansal’s article on feminism, science and science education makes a case for a more nuanced understanding and use of feminist critiques of science and science education. Science education, informed by the more complex critiques made by feminists, in her opinion, ‘has the potential to not just transform scientific culture, but scientific knowledge and our wider society as well. And such an act would make students realise that science indeed is a human affair—vulnerable to human foibles and fantasies, and corrigible by human praxis’.
Gayithri Jayathirtha’s article is an analysis of geometry school textbooks, based on the van Hiele model that proposes a five-level hierarchical system of geometric reasoning among children. This article is somewhat different in tone from the articles we usually publish in Contemporary Education Dialogue, but it has been included here as part of our effort to encourage well-researched articles in the domain of classroom practice that can have a direct impact in the classroom and on processes of teaching and learning.
Another departure in this issue is the inclusion of a report, prepared under the direction of the Supreme Court, by a team of academics and practitioners on the practice of ragging, an issue that comes to the fore at the start of every academic year and that often has tragic consequences. Despite a government ban and regardless of interventions by the Supreme Court, ragging is still prevalent and is frequently ‘viewed as a “harmless” rite of passage’, with tacit support from parents, teachers and institutions. The aim of the report is ‘to deepen our understanding of this phenomenon, particularly the prevalence and nature of ragging practices’. It confirms the disturbing fact that this practice also plays out social hierarchies and is often targeted most brutally at socially marginalised students.