In the end, it is not the years in your life that count. It is the life in your years.
The above quote, part of an e-mail that I received recently, has a bearing, albeit indirectly, on our Education Ministry, in the sense that it is not the number of departments under it but what they do that counts.
Though the Ministry of Human Resource Development, of which the Education Department is an appendage now, may gloat over India’s educational achievements and the Census Department may gloat over the rise in literacy, their claims are hollow.
Literacy
Right up to 1991, the Census of India treated only those in the 5+ age groups as “literates”. Suddenly, that is after four decennial Censuses since Independence, it woke up to the reality that children up to the age of 7 cannot be literate, and changed the age since the 1991 Census to 7+. And what is the Census definition of literacy? Reading and writing a simple sentence or statement.
Apart from the question of the reliability of the data so collected (as, more often than not, the Census enumerators themselves are only semi-literate, and what they collect in just one day is at best a hotchpotch), the Census does not take into account those who relapse into illiteracy after its one-day wonder once in ten years.
Granting that India is as literate as made out by the Census, the Census definition of literacy is a poor surrogate to what is used in the developed countries. I remember having read somewhere that in the U.S. the official or academic definition of literacy is at least completion of twelve years of formal education.
Education
If India’s definition of literacy itself is dubious and even spurious, what about the reliability of the claims on education?
On February 25-26 (when I did not interact with MS!), I was in Delhi participating in a national seminar on Primary Education and Teacher Training. I was not at all surprised when a participant, a very active activist in the spread of literacy and education said that though Kerala (the so-called “model State” of India), has a kind of laboratory situation for primary education, with school buildings, infrastructure, teachers, students, and everything else in place, when a student in Standard IV was asked to write Aana (elephant), he could not go beyond Aa!
If this is the quality of education imparted in the educationally most advanced State, how worse it could be in other States is only to be imagined.
It is generally believed that there has been an overall decline in the standards of education in terms of the quality of curriculum, teaching and learning, though there is certainly no benchmark against which any comparison can be made.
Though the National Policy of Education of the “Rajiv era” or if you wish, “Rajiv’s India” was expected to usher India into the 21st century as an “enlightened” society, that plan has gone awry.
Language Politics
The situation has been confounded by the linguistic jingoism in various States as a result of self-seeking politicians using language as yet another political instrument to exploit the gullible voters. The students have been its victims, have fallen between the stools without being proficient either in their mother tongue or in English, the now “global” language, and are almost hamstrung, as the absence of proficiency in English has hampered their social and spatial mobility.
Hindutva Politics
The situation has been further, and even irreparably, confounded by the ongoing Hindutva politics, with the NCERT tampering with the syllabi at various levels, and the UGC going a step further, all to please one or two Joshis, who wish to live in an imagined Vedic age, and since they cannot do so, they seem to get vicarious pleasure by using students as guinea-pigs and by their “text-book tyranny”.
The sloth in the education system is pervasive and not confined to the primary level. The energy that concerned academic and other discerning citizens have been wasting to drive sense into the Vedic maniacs could have ideally been spent better in the absence of such maniacs.
Self-earned credit
Despite all the hurdles which parents and students face, if some students still come out in flying colours, albeit mostly to contribute to the intellectual and productive wealth of developed countries, in particular the U.S. (I am referring to the brain-drain, despite the Education Department’s systematic attempts to “drain-brain”!), it is only the parents and the students who deserve credit and not the Education Department.
To conclude, India has a long way to go to enter the fast evolving “knowledge society”. That can happen only if it does not have Joshis and their ilk, with their imagined Vedic mindsets, in the helm of affairs, and leave education as a free-wheeling, autonomous institution, with strong secular, rational, scientific, multi-cultural strands. In such an education there should be little of the undesirable history teaching; for, India is now learning the hard way, to paraphrase what Shakespeare said, the telling of history is sometimes full of sound and fury, signifying nothing; at those times it may not be the history itself that is problematic, but the telling of it.