Education for all ……..Anita Rampal
Almost six decades after the Indian Constitution promised that all children until the age of 14 be provided free and compulsory education, and six years after the Constitution was amended (but not enacted) to include the fundamental right to education, a historic opportunity to enact a long pending law is before Parliament. The issue at stake is the need to ensure that all children not just get access to education, but are also assured of its quality so that they do not drop out, as half of them do at present.
The Eleventh Plan agenda paper accepts that quality education has eluded most children.Our longer term goal should be to provide good quality education at least up to secondary level, comparable to that of Kendriya Vidyalayas, under the CBSE pattern, it says. The Right to Education Act can serve as a crucial instrument to ensure quality, which is intrinsically tied to systemic reforms for equity.
Finland, Canada, Cuba and Korea are four countries noted by Unescos Global Monitoring Report 2005 for having achieved high quality performance. All four countries invest effort in the professional development of teachers and make no concessions on teacher quality even when there are shortages. Finland is lauded for how it has, in the past 15 years, totally changed its system to ensure equality of opportunity and also outcomes. Canada too lays stress on equity, respect for cultural diversity, and ensures high outcomes for its large immigrant population. In Korea and Cuba, learning outcomes are viewed in broader terms, not examination scores of narrow cognitive tests.
Studies show that heterogeneity in school quality contributes to high inequality in educational outcomes. Schools in the UK, the US, France or Germany do not have equitable school quality, and students from lower socio-economic backgrounds congregate in low quality schools that result in low motivation and poor performance. Socially inclusive schools have been seen to exhibit racial, social and religious tolerance, which helps develop greater civic awareness.
In India, the Ramamurthy Committee had opposed the expansion of the wellresourced Navodaya Vidyalayas for the high-achievers and the gifted, and had called for equality in the conditions for success. It recommended that the quality of all government schools be enhanced to transform them into genuine neighbourhood schools, while also making private schools freely accessible. The Kothari Commission too had said Children of the masses are compelled to receive substandard education… while the economically privileged parents are able to buy good education for their children.
The Right to Education Act must ensure this vision of systemic quality mandate that education in every school is comparable to that in a Kendriya Vidyalaya. Moreover, in the true spirit of publicprivate partnership, the draft Bill proposes that private schools keep 25 per cent of their seats to provide inclusive access for disadvantaged children, for whom the government will bear a fixed per learner cost, in order to attain the vision of quality and equity in education. Parents of privileged children too will need to recognise that a culture of integration will indeed establish a culture of success for all children.
The National Curriculum Framework 2005 questions the perceived quality divide between government and private schools, though the latter select students from privileged homes and claim better examination results. In fact, the quality of schools needs to be questioned, on account of the unhealthy pressure and the competitive atmosphere in which these results are sought, which deprives students of crucial processes of cooperative learning and often makes them self-centred individuals. Moreover, private schools and also Kendriya Vidyalayas neglect the childs mother tongue and inhibit it to construct knowledge in meaningful ways.
Why should India not respect all its children? The Right to Education Act will not only help bring all into schools, more than half of whom continue to be pushed out of the system, but will actually ensure that the substantial funds allocated in the Eleventh Plan will go towards raising quality of education.
The writer is dean, department of education, Delhi University.