Gasping for Air

A vested interest of politics, business and bureaucracy has been strangling the education system

By Col. R. Hariharan
Courtesy: Gfiles

(November 06, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) Last year, as a non-technical member of a corporate campus selection panel, I asked a third year graduate engineering student the difference between the GSM and GPRS systems in mobile phones. Pat came the answer: “GPRS is not in our syllabus, sir.” A more experienced panel member assured me that the student represented all that was wrong with our educational system. The problem was “at the bottom of the pyramid – schooling” that turned creative and intelligent young people into mindless youth, he added. Six years ago, while heading the corporate social responsibility project of an IT firm, I had regular interaction with over 60 schools run by the Chennai Corporation and nearly 2,000 high achievers of these schools for about two years. The experience left me horrified at the appalling standards of schools and teachers. The negatives were too many: infrastructure was creaking, most of the kids were barely literate, teachers generally lacked commitment, and leadership was noticeable only in islands of excellence.

At the same time, it was heartwarming to see the strong desire among the students to achieve their goals despite the obstacles. They were living testimony to what Mark Twain said: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” I was ashamed that as a citizen I had allowed this to happen to our young people.

Unfortunately, this “wisdom of the Bodhi tree” came after nearly 30 years of involvement in Army training at all levels. Despite its system of regimentation, military training produces amazing results. I have seen first-hand how Munusamy or Bhoop Singh, a barely literate school dropout from the backwoods of Himachal Pradesh or Tamil Nadu, changes totally in just a year-and a-half of training. The lazy and clumsy lout is transformed into a self-confident, disciplined and socially useful member of a team.

Army training is always focused and objective-oriented. It teaches even complex systems in easily understandable modules. More than all this, it gives confidence to the soldier to face the odds and learn to overcome them, and work to achieve pre-set goals. Later in life, for a decade I was involved in corporate training in a big way. The corporate world has taken in many of the good points of military training to improve process management skills and achieve productivity of the highest order. It also focuses on keeping abreast of applied knowledge skills to get the best out of people. These two systems of transformational education provide ample pointers to improve our education system.

Our corporate social responsibility project aimed at identifying and helping over 1200 high achievers through their senior secondary schooling every year. Corporate volunteers helped the kids, mostly living in slums, to hone their skills and learning to perform even better. Our weekend IT classes were a welcome change for the students because we allowed them to design their own learning.

My sessions on spoken English skills taught me that student participation was at the heart of any learning. My classroom session became a dialogue process full of wit and repartee flying all over. There were also poignant moments when all of us saw the stark reality of their lives. An 11-year-old girl left us stunned when she wrote about her “most memorable experience.” It was about how she lost the sight of one eye due to repeated fires in the slum where she lived.

The kids were far more creative and worldly wise than upper-class kids. They were a keen lot, ready to work hard to learn more. Their goals were clear and their methods pragmatic. These were qualities I had found markedly absent even among MBA students in the business school where I taught part time. The whole experience was a revelation for me.

Unfortunately, my experience with the school principals and teachers was the opposite. Few principals showed interest in upgrading their management skills and using modern tools of management. Some principals did not even want to meet us. We found one principal drunk at 10 am, unable to talk coherently! Many principals were appointed on political consideration. Some teachers assured me payment of money under the table started from the time they applied for teacher training. Barring a handful of committed teachers, the rest appeared to have drifted into the job because it provided a cosy nook in the government set-up.

The principals were mostly a demoralized lot because the education administration was highly bureaucratic. This had probably made them part of the insensitive bureaucracy. It was evident in some schools where cartons of computers were lying unopened because the principals did not want the students to “damage” them. One principal told me that, on an average, she had to send 62 reports a month to the administration! Though she might have exaggerated, it was clear paper work choked school administration and red tape killed any initiative. Infrastructure was uniformly bad and maintenance was shoddy. Toilets were too few and unusable. However, a few street smart principals knew how to pamper politicians and local MPs to improve their schools.

There was a well-meaning IAS officer heading the education bureaucracy at the corporation headquarters. In consultation with him, we designed a process workshop for the heads of schools to discuss and debate their problems to evolve a set of best practices in consultation with experts to improve the running of the schools. There were no takers for the workshop as the administration did not make attendance mandatory. We simply abandoned the project. So much for private participation in public institutions. Education holds the key to break class and caste barriers. As a result it is entangled in a whole range of politically explosive issues. As government controls the largest number of schools and colleges, they have become symbols of assertion of political power. Government educational institutions offer seemingly laid back government jobs. So training and appointment of teachers in government schools is a cash cow for the corrupt. This has created vested interests of politics, business and bureaucracy keeping a stranglehold on our educational system as a whole and on government institutions in particular.

Education as the shared responsibility of the State and the Centre has suffered from lack of leadership commitment. It was treated as a proverbial holy cow, fending for itself from the leftovers in the annual budgets. Added to this is the public inertia in voicing the educational needs in loud and clear terms. I am a product of an average small town government school in the 1960s. Now, the middle class has abandoned government schools. Thus government schools have become the refuge of the lower strata of society, who have no voice in the government.

The falling standards of government schools and the emphasis on English language skills have opened up business opportunities in running private schools. Globalization of education added more money and glamour to the business. An education mafia of politicians and businessmen is promoting private education to increase its money power and social clout. The government institutions suffering sustained neglect have become hotbeds of politics. In fact, youth wings of political parties in educational institutions have turned them into political testing grounds to promote political and caste violence.

The state has a fundamental responsibility to provide quality education and health care to the citizens. While the private sector can chip in to add value, the government can never palm off its social responsibility on these two counts. We urgently need conceptual, systemic and structural improvements in the way we educate the young.

Union Education Minister Kapil Sibal should be congratulated for daring to reform our education system. The Minister has to free the education system from the bondage of our inertia. It would be a great achievement if he can build a consensus and get the process of change going within the term of the present government. Unless he is watchful, the zealous Minister may lose his job, thanks to the politically powerful education mafia. It thrives on the inefficiency of the present education system and will resist any change.

But we need to adopt a bottom up approach. Peter McLaughlin, headmaster of Doon School, in a recent interview aptly summed up the role of education as ensuring “children become lifelong learners”. He added that, today, “a narrow and stifling curriculum in most countries has led students to disengage themselves from the testing regime of the education system. Students are no longer intellectually robust. We need to create a critical mass of robust thinkers.”

If that happened, Indians would become responsible and productive members of society. And to achieve that we need to improve the grass-roots schooling at the primary level. We have to redeem education from teaching shops, there is no choice.

-Sri Lanka Guardian