India: Crisis In Rural Education
By Yoginder Sikand
21 October, 2012
Countercurrents.org
India is home to the largest number of illiterate people in the world. Although it is claimed that literacy rates in the country are rapidly increasing, vast numbers of Indians who are officially counted as ‘literate’ are hardly so in the true sense of the term. The Indian educational system, especially sectors that cater to the rural poor, continues to be plagued with a host of enormous problems. So I have discovered in the last few weeks working as a volunteer English teacher in a private school in a remote village in Arunachal Pradesh, which is considered to be one of the most ‘backward’ parts of India.
Most of the inhabitants of this area are small or marginal farmers. Others supplement their meagre income by laboring in other people’s fields, fishing, collecting and selling jungle produce and firewood, making cane mats and baskets, and weaving cloth. There are a few private schools in this poverty-stricken area, and the rest are government-run. The villagers’ enthusiasm for educating their children is deeply touching. Almost every child is enrolled in school. They all want to learn English, to do well in their studies, to go on to college (if their parents can afford it), and then hope to get a well-paying job. It is difficult for most village folk to get a secure, well-paying government job, and so many of them aspire for some sort of private-sector employment. Education for such students is a means to rescue themselves from stark poverty at home, from backbreaking work in the forests and fields. Most students I’ve interacted with want to work outside their villages, even outside their state, because they feel that their prospects here are limited. Higher education, for them, is a means to migrate to the ‘big city’ in order to fulfill their dreams—the dreams that the serials, movies and advertisements that they watch on television have sold them. Yet, few actually make it ‘big’.
Most parents cannot afford the fees of the relatively more expensive and supposedly somewhat better private-run schools, and so the vast majority of students in the area are forced to study in poor quality government schools. In some schools, as elsewhere in India, teacher absenteeism is as much a problem as is students’ skipping classes. Some government schools are miserably over-crowded with students and are also grossly under-staffed. The main government school in the area has some three hundred students in Class X alone. In this school, there are well over a hundred students in a single classroom, making it virtually impossible for teachers to give proper attention to individual students. Not surprisingly, almost all students from families who can afford it have to take private tuition classes after school hours, which is a major additional investment for their parents.
Not all villages in the area have schools, however. Children in some villages without a school have to cycle or walk a considerable distance, through narrow muddy paths and wading across streams, in order to reach the nearest village that has a school. There are just four secondary schools and one higher secondary school in the entire area, and these cater to almost three dozen villages, where several hundred families live. Only a few students in the area manage to make it to college if they manage to study till the higher secondary level. There is only one college in the district, and the closest college is across the border, in Assam, a bus journey of several hours. Relatively few parents have enough money to pay for their children’s college fees and for the cost of boarding and lodging in a hostel or in private accommodation. Not surprisingly, then, the drop-out rate among students, especially after the secondary school level, is extremely high. A large number of children are forced, for want of any alternative, to go back to working in their fields after spending ten or more years studying in school or else head to various cities outside Arunachal Pradesh, where they take up petty, relatively low-paid jobs, such as in call-centres and factories. Besides achieving basic literacy, numeracy and a smattering of English, the several years of schooling that they have gone through proves to be of little use in the work that they will do for the rest of their lives.
The schools in the area are mostly affiliated to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), and are ostensibly all English-medium schools. But, for almost all the children English is a thoroughly alien tongue, even though they are eager to learn it because of the prestige supposedly associated with it and because they see it as indispensable in order to get a well-paying job. There are several ethnic groups in this area, and each of them speaks its own distinct language. Almost none of these languages is taught in the schools, however. Education, therefore, is imparted in a language that most children find extremely difficult to properly follow.
Since the books the students study are, with the exception of Hindi (the second language), all in English, most students, even those at the higher levels, cannot understand much of what they are forced to study. Not surprisingly, few students, including those in senior classes, can write and speak grammatically correct English. But they are not entirely to blame, for most teachers, too, including many who teach English, are hardly fluent in the language. Most students of Class IX and X whom I teach cannot write or speak a single paragraph, and, in many cases, not even a sentence, of grammatically-correct English, and their vocabulary is extremely limited.
It isn’t that the students are dull. In fact, given the conditions in which they live, many of them are surprisingly intelligent. They have a wealth of practical knowledge. They know how to survive in even very harsh situations. They know an amazing variety of things: how to till the land and harvest crops, how to trek into the jungles and search for berries and fruits, how to weave cloth and make baskets, for instance. They know much about their communities’ histories, traditions and culture. Many of them can speak several local languages, besides Hindi, not learning these formally, in school, but picking them up through interacting with people from different linguistic communities. But such valuable knowledge is counted for little at all or nothing in the formal education system.
Because they think in their own languages, in which they are fluent, and not in English, and because their English is weak, many students find it difficult to understand their textbooks, which are almost all in English. And because they understand but little of what they are compelled to study, typically students simply memorise huge chunks of their textbooks for their examinations, and quickly forget them as soon as their examinations are over. It is as if what they have memorized is an enormous burden they are forced to carry on their shoulders, which they throw off as soon as they can, to their immense relief. Many teachers provide their students with pre-set answers, which they instruct them to commit to memory before the examinations. And so, generally, students are not encouraged to be able to think for themselves. Education, for all practical purposes, is thus often simply temporary memorization of information, in many cases without understanding anything whatsoever. Assignments often take the form of copying essays, poems and sections of chapters from textbooks, and even in this case many students make grammatical and spelling mistakes. Students I’ve asked about this tell me that if they write anything other than what is written in their textbooks, they are bound to make mistakes, and that would mean that they would get less marks than they would if they faithfully copied whatever is mentioned in their textbooks.
Even if students perform miserably in their examinations, knowing next to nothing of what they are supposed to have studied, they are, under the new CBSE rules, supposed to be passed and promoted to the next class, and this continues until they reach the 10th grade—or so say the teachers I have met. Many teachers are unhappy with this rule, and argue that it is disastrous for the children’s education. Not surprisingly, students often don’t take their studies at all seriously since they know they will be automatically passed. And, if this indeed is what the new CBSE rules lay down, it explains, in part, why while the statistics for educational progress in schools might seem impressive, the actual quality of education continues to be pathetic. Because of this absurd supposed rule, only some among the relatively few students who go on to junior college are able to do well in their studies—at this level, no longer are they automatically passed as they earlier were.
Examinations in schools I’ve visited here are held every two months or so (unlike twice a year when I was in school). Because of this, students face tremendous pressure and debilitating examination-phobia. Examinations at such close intervals leave them with little breathing space to do anything other than continuously memorise their lessons, which they mostly do without comprehending. It also reduces the time available for extra-curricular activities. In any case, hardly schools in the area have any extra-curricular activities. It is as if education consists simply in reading and memorizing painfully boring textbooks, and as if learning outside the classroom is not ‘real’ education. Hardly any schools in the area have a library, and even the biggest school, which has more than 1200 students, provides no newspapers or children’s magazines for students to read. Many children here have amazing skills—drawing, making cane baskets and implements, weaving clothes and so on—but few schools, if any, encourage these activities or consider them important forms of learning.
The contents of the textbooks constitute another major challenge for many rural children, making schooling additionally difficult and tiresome. They have so many subjects to study, and, for some subjects, numerous textbooks, that schooling seems a terrible torture, rather than fun, for many children. Little wonder, then, that for many children schooling is (as it was in my time, almost forty years ago), a painful, rather than enjoyable, activity. They are compelled to study much material totally unrelated to their lives and which they would never use themselves—excruciatingly difficult mathematical equations, calculus and algebra, for instance, or abstruse chemical tables, facts about volcanoes in Indonesia, the architectural details of the remnants of the Indus Valley Civilization, and the social behavior of orangutans. They study the history of Europe and of the Cholas, the Chalukyas and the Delhi Sultans, and read about the geographical marvels of Antarctica, for instance, but they are taught almost nothing about local history and geography or about the more than one hundred tribes that live in their state. They may study about the rivers of Latin America and the tropical forests of Africa but next to nothing about the amazing forests and rivers of the region where they live.
Naturally, then, many students find much of what they are forced to study irrelevant. Their books are simply to be memorized in order to pass and enter the next grade, and are then to be hurriedly forgotten—a tremendous waste of precious childhood years! When I compare them with children I see around who do not go to school, I am sometimes tempted to think that the latter are, in some ways, truly blessed and fortunate. They spend their days playing with toys they craft out of bamboo sticks and banana leaves, swimming in streams, chasing dragonflies, ambling through the forests in search of fruits, and weaving cane baskets. They may never get a well-paying job, but at least they are spending what are said to be their best years celebrating life, instead of being confined grim-faced in a classroom, forced to memorise books to pass examinations, only to memorise new books once again, and then to quickly forget whatever they have parroted.
I have travelled in villages in other parts of India, where the conditions I’ve described here are hardly different. While official statistics record impressive gains in rural education, the actual situation is a different story altogether.
Comments are moderated
