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Public education is indispensable, says Nobel laureate Amartya Sen

NEW DELHI: No country in the world has been able to educate all its children without state intervention, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen argued on Wednesday. This was in response to suggestions from the corporate sector for adopting voucher systems and greater private participation in school education.

Intervening in a discussion on ‘Right to Education — Actions Now,’ Professor Sen sought to give the corporate sector a reality check on the state of primary schools across the country as leading lights from industry spoke about greater connectivity and computers as an effective tool for spreading education.

“Do remember that many of the schools we are dealing with are one-teacher schools, which do not even have toilets,” he pointed out. Appreciating the innovative options suggested by the corporate sector, he stressed the need to accept the reality. Accepting the argument that quality education was important, he, however, laid greater emphasis on coverage.

Speaking from experience, Professor Sen said, “We have found that even if children go to terrible schools, it has an impact.” Not only do they influence each other, programmes such as the mid-day meal scheme helped break caste barriers as all children ate together.

On the suggestion that India adopt the voucher system — where instead of setting up schools, the government gives parents cash coupons that allow them to pay for their child’s education in a school of their choice — he underlined the fact that very often the parents were illiterate and, therefore, ill-equipped to take that kind of decision.On a remark by Vijay Thadani of the Education Committee of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) that teaching had lost its standing among careers, Professor Sen said this was not quite so in the rural areas.

Admitting that things might have changed for the profession in the urban areas, he said in villages teachers, more often than not, formed part of the elite.

Earlier in his keynote address, he called for rapidly expanding public services and infrastructure not just to ensure that basic services were delivered, but also because it complimented the process of change initiated by Manmohan Singh as Finance Minister in the early 1990s.

Asserting that public education was indispensable, he said the deficiencies in basic education could not be met by the expansion of private schools, which “have not been able to play that role anywhere else in the history of the world.”

Organised by Aspen Institute India, Shiksha and CII’s Institute of Quality, the day-long seminar was aimed at gathering “the collective acumen and experiences of various corporate honchos and academicians to arrive at a gettable solution to ensure the spread of primary and school education in India.”

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