The Hindu : Opinion / News Analysis : Schooled in inequality

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Schooled in inequality

Mary E. John

School education is functioning as a transparent alibi for a refusal to contemplate equality.

THERE IS a message of hope for school education hidden in the hectares of newsprint and hours of footage devoted to the agitation against reservation in elite institutions of professional education. Never have the haves voiced their concern for the schooling of the have-nots with such telegenic passion. I-tech tycoons, captains of industry, candle-carrying citizens, commissioners of knowledge, and, above all, the striking medicos have all resoundingly demanded "quality schooling for all." The manner in which this demand is made sometimes seems to suggest that poor schooling is part of a diabolical lower caste conspiracy to demand reservation in colleges. But, of course, the "weaker sections" are not against quality schooling either. So beneath the bitter controversy about colleges there lies complete unanimity about schools.

Or so it would seem, except for a little noticed news item on May 22 announcing the withdrawal of a Human Resource Development Ministry scheme to introduce a 25 per cent quota for the weaker sections in all (aided and un-aided) schools. While it is not surprising that merit-minded medicos fail to protest this abdication of an earlier promise, the reason behind this is even more illuminating. The courts had stayed an earlier move by the Central Board of Secondary Education (also under the HRD Ministry) to exempt the single girl child from all school fees from classes VI to XII. This scheme is among the most eloquent examples of misplaced official ingenuity. It was presumably designed to meet several objectives of national policy in one fell swoop. It was available only to single children (going beyond the already abandoned two child norm); was available only to girls (protection of girl child, adverse sex ratio); classes VI-XII imply incentive to keep the girl in school (raising secondary enrolment for girls, raising the age of marriage). If the government was so keen to help the endangered girl child, why not provide free education to families with two or more girl children? If the intention was to address the adverse sex ratio, such a policy would miss its target entirely because it is affluent families who have been practising sex selection and not because they cannot afford to educate their daughters. So when an elite girls' school approached the courts with the plea that such a move would bankrupt it, little wonder that it obtained a stay. In other words, a singularly ill-conceived scheme has become an excuse for abandoning a much more important move that could have contributed towards lessening inequalities in schooling.

In a trend that gathered momentum in the 1970s, the upper middle classes and the middle classes began to vote with their feet with respect to government schooling. Middle and upper middle class adults today are statistically unlikely to have gone to a regular government school, just as it is very likely that their fathers and certainly their grandfathers went to precisely such schools. (Their mothers and grandmothers would, of course, have very different stories to tell.) Since the 1990s, the process of what scholars call "school differentiation" has reached such a state that most large villages are likely to have many schools catering to different caste-class segments. The situation in urban areas from small towns to the metropolis offers a much wider spectrum — the exclusive speciality school of the super rich, the cut-throat competitiveness of the "results" school, the middle class convent school, the Navodaya and other special government schools, the lower middle-class English medium teaching shop, and, finally, the school of last resort, the municipal school. Some studies even suggest that `family planning' in education involves brothers and sisters being sent to different kinds of schools. In other words, easy talk of quality school education for all is at best naïve and at worst a cynical lie.

Key component

Despite this differentiation and its many serious problems, government schooling is still the single most important component of any plan for egalitarian development. All said and done, the school and the school-teacher remain the most ubiquitous and accessible institutions of the state. One could even say that to be cynical about schooling is to be cynical about the future itself. However paradoxical it may sound, the best prophylaxis against such cynicism is a realistic assessment of the magnitude of the challenge. Given the breadth and depth of school differentiation today, it may be wiser to devise different kinds of interventions for different schools. Broadly speaking, efforts have to be made to ensure that the urban government school retains the most affluent segment of its clientele, while the upper middle class "public" school acquires a lower middle class or even lower class clientele. As for the rural school, we may still need to concentrate on the basics: to ensure that the school has a viable physical existence, that the teachers turn up, and that pupils are persuaded to persevere.

Above all, the school badly needs to feel some of the heat and tension that is currently visible around professional colleges. It needs, in short, to feel the pressure of contestation around possible futures for children from different social and economic pasts. It is only through this kind of hardening that the school can be turned into something it has not been in independent India — a site of accountability.

Seen against this background, expressions of great concern for egalitarian schooling in the context of the anti-reservation protests, can easily seem hollow, and sometimes even become the first refuge of scoundrels. This is not because school education is unimportant, but because it is functioning as a transparent alibi for a refusal to contemplate equality in education. For both the aborted scheme to provide access to private schools for the weaker sections as well as the proposals to introduce reservation in elite professional colleges are about the same thing: the struggle to enable — or to prevent — "them" from sharing what "we" have.

(Mary E. John is Senior Fellow and Director, Centre for Women's Development Studies, New Delhi.)

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