It?s completely in keeping with their very nature that the most consequential legislations ride into existence only on the back of the stormiest of debates. Those who see the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act (the Act) as a momentous event in Indian history should not be disheartened by all the questions being thrown at it.
How will the Centre and the states share its financial burden? If all children are automatically promoted to the next standard from ages 6-14, what will ensure that they have received meaningful instruction in the interim? For private schools mandated to take in 25% students from economically weaker sections, how will the integration between paying and non-paying students be worked out? Will the integration plans be fair to parents who scrimp and sacrifice to get their children into a ?good? school? In categorising all such parties as ?privileged?, let?s not forget that they are shelling out many 100% what their parents had spent to get them the same education 20-30 years ago.
Yet, with the Act, India has signed the pledges that more than 130 countries already commit to their children. The Act provides a bedrock for the equity principle that is not only already enshrined in the Constitution but also intimately intertwined with the idea of India in the 21st century. The lesson to be learnt from looking at the best school performers?by different yardsticks?around the world is that no solution comes without a catch. Commitment to ambition, therefore, appears to be an achievement on its own. Every movement to reform brings benefits, with no benefit having absolute value.
Let?s begin with South Korea, which has achieved the world?s highest high school graduation rate of 96%. Here is the catch though, that the productivity of the average South Korean is only 40% that of an American worker. Critics say that it is the system?s focus on ?getting ahead? via exams that lets down its apostles in the long run. A common saying in the country is, ?Sleep 5 hours and fail. Sleep 4 hours and pass.? Around 80% schools reportedly employ corporeal punishment. Parents here spend four times on private education than in any other major economy. The Indian Act bans tuitions and physical punishment. Such catches aside, by its very strictness, the South Korean system has delivered huge income gains since it was revamped in the seventies.
Next, let?s consider Finland which repeatedly appears at the top of OECD rankings. Its system boasts a) parental income as a much lesser influence on earnings than say in the UK or the US and b) much narrower gaps between the highest scoring and the least scoring students. Most analysts put this down to the fact that Finns make extraordinary investments in educating educators?only around 10% applicants are accepted for teacher training. The successful few are trained to teach for around five years. Teacher salaries are high. This is the case in South Korea too, where an average teacher with 15 years experience takes home an impressive 221% of the country?s GDP per capita (as compared to 96% in the US).
Given the Indian Act?s marked overlap in goals (equity) with the Finnish system, the key conundrum is how to make teacher recruitment and training more rigorous. Fixing of minimum salary benchmarks (granted that funding remains a question) appears a step in the right direction. But accountability is the big challenge. As with many other provisions of the Act, such accountability is vested with local authorities (which are also mandated to give a certificate of recognition to all schools). These are not yet in place in most cases.
Finally, consider the US. Its universities retain global pre-eminence but schools continue to make news for the wrong reasons. High school performance lags South Korea and Finland by a long mile. Thanks in large part to legislation and other government interventions (many of them being driven by equity principles like racial parity) at the school level, college enrollment of Americans in the 18-24 age group rose from 2% at the beginning of the 20th century to 60% at its end. Still, public consensus remains a dream. ?No Child Left Behind? was George Bush?s signature domestic policy and it promised 100% reading and math proficiency by 2014. Barack Obama?s professed goal is to make all American students ?college ready? by 2020. Notwithstanding many overhauls and government dollars, neither goal is likely to be achieved. Yet, experiments proliferate. Many of them are promising. Teacher compensation, charter schools, curriculum modifications et al?everything is being rewritten in on country corner or another.
The simple lesson from all this globetrotting is that the best way to educate a nation remains an open question. As long as in the implementation of the new Act, we don?t discourage competition?between schools, between students?we can trust that it will yield productive experiments.
renuka.bisht@expressindia.com
