FE Editorial : Right to what?
The Financial Express: Jan 21 2013, 00:55 IST
With over 96% of children aged 6-14 in rural areas enrolled in school, it’s obvious the government’s Right to Education (RTE) Act is working. What’s happening to these children inside schools is quite another matter. India’s schooling system, it is well accepted, has many drawbacks in terms of the inability to teach children adequately. Just how inadequately is best brought out by NGO Pratham’s Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER) which points to the percentage of children in Class V being able to read even a Class II text at a miserable 46.8% in 2012. In the case of Maths, similarly, a little over half of the kids enrolled in Class V were able to solve a two-digit subtraction without borrowing. While that’s bad, consider what Pratham’s previous surveys have shown—these numbers have been falling with each passing year. In the case of English, the proportion of Class V kids who couldn’t even read Class II texts was 53.7% in 2010, this fell to 48.2% in 2011 and to 46.8% in 2012. For Maths, a similar fall can be seen.
Since the only real change that’s taken place over the past few years is the implementation is the RTE, it’s reasonable to ask whether that is, in fact, responsible for this slide. Though there is no proof that this is the case, this may well have something to do with the collapse. After all, since the RTE states that no kid can be held back for non-performance, this could be
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