Education today

Education today: moving towards commercialization and saffronization

Since the early periods of human society, education has been a tool to set norms and values according to societal demands. At first it was learning to hunt, then to rule the land, and now to be able to participate in a democracy Education is not just a process aiming to achieve a single concrete goal, but a transformative process for constructing equitable and sustainable social development. Education

should promote nation building, upholding constitutional values of secularism and non-discrimination between different religions, languages and ethnicities that form part of Indian democracy.

Education is therefore a process that is fundamentally societal in the broadest sense of the term. As experts have said, “within the highly complex world of human activity in the given social environment, the child enters into an infinite number of relationships, each of which constantly develops, interweaves with other relationships and is compounded by the child's own physical and moral growth."

However, archaeological, documentary and other historical evidence tells us that education in earlier centuries was very elitist and biased in favour of upper echelons of society especially so-called higher castes. Teachers belonged only to some sections or castes, and students from some sections were privileged enough to receive any form of education. Contemporary education is, or should be, in principle accessible to all sections of society so that society as a whole, rather than just a small elite section, can benefit. Rather than advancing this goal, and striving to overcome the many barriers to widening the social base of education as will be discussed in this booklet, the New Education Policy recommendations of the TSR Subramanian Education  Committee as released by the present government seeks to put the clock back, hailing Vedic Education and the Guru-Shishya Parampara as an example of “knowledge sharing between the teacher and the student.”

         The British colonial period saw modern public education controlled by the Inspectorate. The Macaulay Commission framed a new educational policy for British India with the objective to “do our

best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.” The freedom struggle and its stalwarts like Gandhi, Tagore, Aurobindo, Ambedkar however threw away the colonial yoke and called for a National Education system.

After Independence, Dr.Radhakrishnan’s University Education

Commission (1948-49), National Science Policy (1952), Sri Mudaliar’s

Secondary Education Commission (1952-53), Dr. Kothari’s Education

Commission (1964-66) which was made into National Policy on Education (1968), the National Commission on Teachers I & II (1983- 85) and The National Policy on Education 1986 (revised in 1992) were the major government policies in education. Now the Government is preparing a new National Policy on Education-2016, thirty years after the last policy. Despite the many efforts made, the effort for education in India to be inclusive for women, dalits, adivasis and minorities has remained

a distant dream. The earlier Reports and policy documents stressed the role of education as a process of human liberation and all-round social development, dissemination of scientific temper, secularism and

democracy and advancement of the knowledge, skills and capabilities of all sections of population. Education was seen as primarily the responsibility of the state, with private institutions playing their role.

However, a shift could be seen in the later documents. Under the growing influence of the neo-liberal ideology permeating governance systems in India, the government began to gradually withdraw from its

responsibility and private institutions, particularly those with an entrepreneurial disposition, being assigned major responsibilities. Considerable changes have taken place in the structure and functioning of the education system during the past two decades. However, an examination of the actual performance of these schemes shows that there is much to be desired.

Literacy

According to government data, literacy rose from 52.2% in 1991 to 64.8% in 2001 and further to 74% in 2011. The Peoples Science Movement in India, and its specially-created arm the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti, played a seminal role in placing literacy as a paramount agenda of the nation. A huge public mobilization campaign was organized all over the country through a Total Literacy Campaign which resulted in seeding the government’s National Literacy Mission in the 1990s. The number of illiterates declined in absolute terms by 31 million and the number of literates increased by 218 million. Literacy rate of India in 2011 was 74.04%. The Male literacy rate is 82.14% and Female literacy rate is 65.46% according to the Census. Increase of Literacy rates for women reduced the male-female gap from 21.59% in 2001 to 16.68% in 2011. Yet these figures show that a substantially large number of children are still first generation learners. Gender and regional disparities in literacy continue to remain high.

School Education

Most people have had an average of only 5.12 years of school education in India. This is well below comparable figures in other emerging economies such as China (8.17 years) and Brazil (7.54 years)

and significantly below the average of all developing countries (7.09 years). Enrolment of children in primary classes has picked up, particularly since the implementation of the Right to Education (RTE)

Act, but the drop out rate is still high. Gross and Net Enrolment Ratios continue to fall sharply after Class 8, showing that a number of children drop out after primary education or when they complete 14 years, and presumably thereafter enter the labour market to financially assist their families. The drop out rates is sharper among SCs and STs. There has been an improvement in the enrolment of girls into primary education, but drop out rates after primary education is still high. This shows that the stress on UEE (Universalization of ElementaryEducation) has not resulted in establishing education as a continuous

process such that all children reach a socially acceptable level ofknowledge and practical skills so as to play useful productive roles in society.Despite the stress on a ‘mission’ approach, various centrallysponsored schemes and substantial intervention by NGOs and privateagencies, achievements have been less than expected.Even though the 1986 Education Policy statement stressed access

to education, the bedrock of programmes for realization of Educationfor All, access is not 100 percent. Further, States that have been backward, still remain backward in terms of access.

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