Education, according to Adam Smith, is a social process. In
his opinion, education is central to a flourishing society. For, educated
people are “less liable … to the delusions of enthusiasm and superstition” and
“less apt to be misled.” It is perhaps
in the light of this belief that he favoured education for all. Indeed he argued in his The Wealth of Nations for the government to provide public
education for everyone for it simply benefits the economy by offering more
educated workers.
Today, education has
become the lynchpin of economic and social development. It is viewed as the
most effective means to eradicate poverty. It even counters the widening
inequality in the society by promoting employment, improved-earnings and health
across the social classes. All this cumulatively leads to social cohesion. Of
course, there is a great ‘if’ behind all these averments: if only education is
accessible to everyone.
With the passing of
RTE Act, our government thought that it had addressed this issue squarely, for
it offered a framework for making education available to children freely, at
least for eight years, across the nation. No doubt, the spending on schools
rose by about 80% in 2011-15. The literacy rate has also risen from 52% in 1991
to 74% in 2011. Midday meal programme is said to have helped children go to
school regularly.
That said, it must
also be noted that the education in the government run schools remained a big
disgrace. A survey conducted by National Institute of Educational Planning and
Administration (NIEPA) makes certain disturbing revelations: 42,000 schools
that are run by the government in the country have no buildings; 26% of the
schools are run in rented buildings; 10% of the schools, i.e., more than
100,000 schools, are run in single-room structures. Among them, 90% are located
in rural India. About 81,000 schools do not have even blackboards.
Besides the lack of
physical infrastructure what is more disturbing is: quality of education that
these schools offer. Sometime back, Economist observed that
“half of its [our] nine-year-olds cannot do a sum as simple as eight plus nine.
Half of ten-year-old Indians cannot read a paragraph meant for
seven-year-olds.” Much of this is, obviously, owing to poor competency, or the
ethical standards of the teachers manning these schools. Secondly, the
automatic promotion of pupils from one class to the other has made the job of
teachers that easier: they need not ensure that their pupil understood the
lessons that they were supposed to teach. Ironically, within the government
schools, there is a wide gap in the quality of education offered by Kendriya Vidyalayas
and schools run by municipalities and by Panchayats in villages. Which means,
nothing much has changed on our educational front!
Amidst this
disturbing scenario of our education system, the recently launched economic
reforms had only heightened the need for ‘efficient’ work-force. For,
efficiency alone can lead to growth in a highly competitive markets. Which
means that it is only when individuals maximize their own selfish utility that
the resulting competitive equilibrium can become Pareto-optimality. In this
emerging milieu a certain class of parents picked up ‘outward orientation’
strategy as a means to get their wards fit for survival in the ‘knowledge
economy’. For them education is no longer simply going to school. They realized
that to prosper in a rapidly changing economic scenario, their wards need more
than basic literacy—they need skills to think, to be problem-solvers and to be
innovative and creative as they advance in life.
As a result, the
high school students are today facing considerable pressure in acquiring
necessary competency to write competitive examinations to gain admission to
elite colleges/institutes of higher learning such as IITs, IIMs, NITs/desirable
university courses, etc. Even after acquiring the requisite skills to succeed
in competitive examinations, students need to further work on building up
necessary skills to eventually graduate from the colleges and be ready to face
the challenges of real world. It is needless to add here that it is only those
with consistent good performance in the education that secure well-remunerated
employment. As against this, those who perform poorly will end up with very limited
economic prospects for the rest of the life.
The net result of
these pressing demands is: anxious students and worried parents. To come out of
this predicament, parents, who could afford, have turned towards supplementary
tutoring, which is widely known as shadow education. In the recent past, shadow
education has become more dense and widespread worldwide. For, it helps slow
learners to catch up with their peers, while the high achievers are enabled to
reach new heights. It indeed promotes personal academic development. Its
contribution to human capital is, of course, substantial.
As a result, today,
for thousands of children, schooling is not ending with the evening’s long
bell. They are indeed straight going from there to some kind of private tutoring.
Sometimes, they may undergo such tutoring within the same compound. It is also
not uncommon for the government school teachers, who are incidentally, known to
be indifferent to their students in the schools, offering private tutoring,
that too, quite effectively, in the same school compound or at their residences
or in private establishments. And students undergoing such private tutoring
don’t have the luxury of weekends even.
In spite of such
tight processes, all that these institutions could accomplish is: make the
students cram the facts. And make them practice answering model question papers
rightly and faster, perhaps. And the net result is: students do succeed in
getting admission in their choicest institutes but at the cost of their
‘creativity’.
And surprisingly, such
private tutoring appears to have penetrated even post-graduate courses. To my
utter surprise, I came across a study carried out by Dr Anshu Sarna about shadow learning prevailing in
Business schools around our capital city. Interpreting
the survey data using statistical tools such as descriptive statistics,
hypothesis testing, ANOVA and cluster analysis, she inferred that a student’s
performance in maths in school studies had influenced the student’s decision to
go for shadow learning. Intriguingly, the findings of this study throw open a
plethora of questions, of which the important one being: What would be the behaviour
of such tutored B-school students as tomorrow’s managers? Will they continue to
look for coaching from others for taking decisions? Or, will they become
independent in their handling the managerial roles? Only future research will
reveal!
Reverting to our
main focus, it must be said that private tutoring has indeed become an
enterprise by itself even in our country. A study carried out by the Pratichi
Trust in 2001/02 and 2009 established by Amartya Sen revealed that the proportion
of children relying on private tuition has gone up from 24% to 58% in West
Bengal, but what is more alarming is: the general conviction among the parents
(78%) that private tuition is “unavoidable” if it can be afforded. Shadow
education appears to be more prevalent in urban centers than in rural side.
And, unsurprisingly, it is the educated parents who are more opting for such
private tutoring for their wards.
Shadow education,
though an all-pervading phenomenon across the globe, is causing great distress
to Indian parents by demanding considerable financial investment. This demand
for additional investment is, unfortunately, often found to result in boys
walking away with private tutoring at the cost of girl students.
No doubt, shadow
education has the potential to deliver desirable results but it also has a flip
side: shadow education has the potential to divide student population into
haves and have-nots and thereby undermines the very potential of education as a
tool to lessen the inequality in the society.
This phenomenon,
obviously, warns us that our public education system needs immediate
correction, else it may distort the societal dynamics.
No comments:
Post a Comment