Fight the apartheid

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Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal's education reforms, particularly for schools, have electrified students, teachers and parents. The 10th standard Board exam will now be optional for CBSE schools, grades will be introduced instead of marks, and there will be continuous evaluation in schools. These reforms were urgently necessary and Sibal is certainly one of the UPA's best performing ministers

Yet reactions so far have been mixed. A group of parents told me recently that Sibal's advisers on school reforms are "idealistic jhollawallahs" who are far removed from Indian realities. Is the emphasis on "de-stressing" the Indian student, "de-traumatising" the education system, making a child free from the "pressures of competition", an overly romantic rather idealistic vision where children of elite schools are to be pampered into believing that underachievement, indiscipline and sloth are actually signs of a child's own "individual creative genius'?

Recently a member of the Central Advisory Board of Education, asserted that cut throat competition was just a small middle class phenomenon and the majority of Indian children don't need to be equipped to deal with competition. Is this true? A visit to a slum colony or a bus driver recruitment centre would show the frenzied competition for upward mobility that exists at all levels of Indian society today.

Many parents fear that Sibal's reforms are failing to put in place systems by which children can actually rise to the challenge of rigorous assessment and competition and instead simply lulling children-particularly the hundreds of spoilt brats that attend many urban CBSE schools_into purposelessness and laziness. The 10th standard board exam, and its certificate, may be irrelevant for the rich but is extremely important for the poor who need to leave school and seek a job after the 10th. A child has the right to be tested in a standardized test that all schools take and to leave school with dignity on the basis of a competitive examination that has tested him against all his peers, irrespective of social origin.

In fact, after the decision on the 10th standard board first became known, the majority of students and parents who spoke out, all said they wanted to take the exam because not taking it would blunt their competitive instincts and encourage them to take it easy. In a country with a surfeit of talent and limited job options, sadly we are conditioned to think that an exam and its marks are the only determinant of success. Of course this needed to change. But scrapping an exam is not going to solve the deeper crisis.

The most tragic fact of our education system, is the apartheid that it embodies. There is almost near total segregation of rich and poor. The rich go to 'good' private schools and the poor have to make do with terrible government schools. It is a system that is as unjust and as much a daily violation of democracy, as apartheid. Government schools are so synonymous with bad quality, such is the distrust of the quality of government schools that even wage labourer parents will slave and sweat just in order to enroll their children in private schools, which may be of even lower quality! This naturally opens the field for various fly-by-night operators to reap profits by exploiting the poor's yearning for 'private' education.

Sibal's greatest challenge is to fight the apartheid or at least minimize it. To de-segregate our education system, yet not sacrifice quality. Making an exam optional is only an easy option. How to make quality education available for all? Here are some out of the box solutions.

At the very centre of quality education for all, is a rare species: the excellent committed teacher. Sibal should create a well-paid elite service of school teachers, a service as sought after as any other top job. An IAS for teachers. School teaching is simply not glamorous enough, not well paid enough to attract India's best talent. There is no independent standard setting body that regulates the quality of teachers. Without brilliant and talented teachers, all education reform will come a cropper and making exams optional will remain only cosmetic measures. Where will these exceptional teachers come from?

Here's one source. India has a vast cadre of retired government servants and professors. Many retired IFS and IAS officers. Many are brilliant but far too idle and wasting time in useless seminars. Why not create an All India Teacher Service that is open to every retired top civil servant or former professor or ex-serviceman, to join if he wants? Once he joins, he is given teacher training and then 'posted' to a district school, which he is entrusted to manage and take to the very pinnacle of excellence. Why not let India's entire retired workforce, aged between 55-65 plunge into a second career: teaching India's young.

Second, take forward the Rajiv Gandhi idea of Navodaya schools or schools of excellence in tehsil headquarters and district towns. Lets have thousands more Navodaya schools or schools where education is made interesting, curriculum is imaginative and above all, teachers are top class.

Third, schools must become accountable, both to their students and to the education system. It must become the duty of the school to make sure the scholastically-inclined are guided towards academic excellence, and the creatively-inclined are guided towards equally rewarding non-academic careers. Every student must have the right to be tested and guided responsibly by the school. Above all, a school must not fight shy of developing talent. Its not a virtue to be a non-performer at studies, to encourage the excellent is not a crime.

Lets not make education an arena of ideological talk where we swap idealistic platitudes like "competition is terrible" or "there is no such thing as a bright student or a dull student". Instead, lets rope in private players, civil servants, former servicemen, maybe even NRIs to create a 21st century crack team of teachers, a Greyhound unit of pedagogical commandos who will roam India's backwaters and fight the evil of mediocrity. Mr Sibal, you've already shown that anything is possible.