VIVEK MOTAIRO

Introduction 

It is sometimes argued that politics should be kept out of educational policy. This is like asking that economic policy should be kept separate from politics. Is this possible ? 

To take a recent question : What price should be paid for natural gas ( a question of more than a lakh crore rupees every year) ? This is almost entirely a political decision. Whether the price should be fixed based on cost of productionor onworld market prices , whether in rupees or dollars, are matters of political choice. The answers to the same questions relating to natural gaspricing are different in  India, the USA and Venezuela due tothedifferentpolitical situation in each country. Can economic policy be kept separate from politics ?

Just as economic policy is linked to politics, so with educational policy. It is instructive to trace the development of the right to education in the context of the political history of our country. For thousands of years the right to education was the privilege of a few. British rule in India brought about some expansion of education, but it continued to be a privilege for the few. 

Recognizing the importance of education as a force for social and political change social reformers like Jyotiba Phule raised the demand of universal  free and compulsory education . With Savitribai he pioneered the opening of schools for women and the excluded castes. Progressive rulers like Sayajirao Gaekwad and Rajashri Shahu  made primary education compulsory and free in their areas of rule in the early 20th century.

The efforts of the progressives towards universal education had to face stiff opposition from conservative elements in Indian society . In 1911 when G.K. Gokhale introduced the Free and Compulsory Bill in the Imperial Legislative Assembly it was opposed by the members representing some of the Maharajas  and rulers of princely states who argued that such a bill was premature and hasty. The Maharaja of Darbhanga collected 11,000 signatures on a Memorandum expressing concern that farm operations would be affected if all children were sent to school. 

The alarm of  the conservatives that education policy changes may be “going too far and too fast”  were not restricted to our country. In England, for example, in the 1931 ‘Report of the Committee on National Expenditure’ , Sir George May and his colleagues caution that “since the standard of education, elementary and secondary, that is being given to the child of poor parents, is already in very many cases superior to that which the middle class parent is providing for his own child, we feel that it is time to pause in this policy of expansion”.

When the Indian constitution was being drafted, the right to education featured in the discourse of  citizen rights . Though the constitution was drafted under the chairmanship of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, yet it was rather different from the kind of constitution that he had originally proposed .

The issue of inequality and equality was a prime concern for Ambedkar.In his “States and Minorities” document, he outlined a constitution with fundamental rightsthat would disallow any majoritarian protection of inequality.  Government and state wouldactively work to overcome and dismantle the historical legacy of deeply entrenched inequalities of Indian society where large sections of the citizenssuffered all round social and economic inequality. It is here that Ambedkar articulated the principle of one man- one value (vote ). Equipped with new consciousness, the excluded and oppressed masses could use their votes to elect governments to restructureeconomy and society in a framework of equality.

Dr. Ambedkar understood that universal education could empower the masses with this new consciousness .Universal education as a fundamental right could be a powerful force for building equality. 

The Subcommittee of the Constituent assembly on Fundamental Rights had proposed that education be included as a justiciable fundamental right. This recommendation was considered by the Advisory Committee where it was opposed by conservatives and not accepted. Instead a compromise was worked out and Universal education included only in the Directive Principles as a non justiciable right. Article 45 directed the Indian State to “provide within a period of ten years from thecommencement of the Constitution, free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen years”

The placing of the right to universal education in the Directive Principles rather than  as a Fundamental Right represented a compromise between the conservatives and the progressives in Indian society at the time of Independence. Struggle and compromise between progressives and conservatives has continued in  post independence democratic India.

The first twenty five years of Independent India, which are also termed the Nehruvian era saw the building up  of a large public sector in extraction of natural resources like coal, oil and gas, basic industry and infrastructure. They saw the nationalization of banking and insurance. In the field of education the Kothari Commission report made a strong statement in favour building a  system of government schools for building equality. One of its important recommendations was for raising state expenditure on education to 6 % of the GDP. 

The  last twenty five years may be termed as the era of  LPG (liberalization , privatization, globalization) policy,  also known as the neoliberal paradigm . 

There are many myths and misconsceptions about Nehruvian policy and  the LPG regime which need to be dispelled while making a realistic assessment of the political prospects before the country today. 

It is often stated that LPG became inevitable  because the failure of Nehruvian economic policies led to  the 1990 balance of payments crisis . This is the first myth. The departure from Nehruvian policies began not in 1990 but a decade earlier.  During the eighties the Nehruvian policies of self reliance and import substitution were replaced by a policy of import liberalization. 

It was the import liberalisation from 1980 till 1990 and not Nehruvian policies  whichcreated the BOP crisis of 1990 which then provided the excuse for the shift to  neoliberal LPG economic policies.

The second myth is that LPG is inevitable, irresistible and that there is no alternative. Over the last 25 years of the LPG policies the national  trade union movement led by the left trade unions has conducted a vigorous campaign including several national strikes against the LPG policies. This protracted struggle has been reasonably successful  so far in slowing down and sometimes stopping the privatization of the public sector undertakings in important areas such as oil and petroleum, banking, insurance, coal etc. It has been successful in preventing changes in labour law to dilute labour rights. During this period the struggle of the trade unions  has received crucial support from the left parties.

One of the fundamental principles of the LPG policies is the withdrawal of government and the state from its responsibility to provide public social services like health, education, water, energy etc., and handing over profitable segments of public services to the private sector and corporate companies to provide these services through the market mechanism. In this approach, public services, including education, are not a right, but a commercial, marketable commodity for earning profit. 

The withdrawal of the state from education has been effected by a dual policy of promoting and facilitating private educational institutions on the one hand through a variety of policy measures and subsidies, coupled with a systematic neglect of academic quality in government schools. Due to declining quality of education in  free government schools there has been a steady exodus of children to private fee charging schools. Declining enrolment in free government schools is itself then used as a reason for handing over school premises to private trusts and companies under various policies and schemes including the so-called PPP private-public partnership.

During the last 25 yearsthere has been a rapid expansion of private schools and colleges. Much of this expansion has been in the form of private encroachment on public school premises, facilitated by government policy. Many elite private schools have been allotted premises in government schools. There are many examples in Mumbai, where in one part  of a government owned premisethere are airconditioned classrooms of an English language international school for children who pay six digit fees, next door to crowded municipal classrooms of substandard quality for the free SSC board Marathi language upper primary or secondary school. 

The replacement of the ‘right to education’ by ‘education as a purchasable commodity’ has faced resistance from the democratic and progressive movement. Right at the beginning of the LPG era , the landmark  ‘Unnikrishnan’ judgement of the Supreme court in 1993, provided a powerful basis for converting education into a justiciable right , by linking Article 45 of the constitution with Article 14 (Right to life).

The Unnikrishnan judgement  provided a powerful tool to the progressives for demanding that the constitution be amended to include the right to education as an explicit fundamental right. The 86th Amendment of 2002 was enacted during the NDA government period .  Article 21 A, making education a fundamental right was enacted, but excluding the crucial age 0-6 from its ambit.The 0-6 age group continued to be covered as a non justiciable right under the Directive Principles. This was a compromise between conservatives and progressives.

The period of the NDA government at the Centre from 1998-2004 saw many retrograde changes in education. The NCERT was misused to introduce communal ideology in the curriculum and textbooks, particularly in subjects like history. Astrology was conferred the status of a ‘science’ by the HRD minister Dr. M.M. Joshi, against the strong protest of the scientific establishment.

The 2004 Lok Sabha elections were an important milestone for educational policy. In May 2004 the Congress led United Progressive Alliance could not form a government at the centre without the support of the left parties. This support was given on certain conditions such as stopping the proposed disinvestment of the oil companies and bringing  explicit legislation to make justiciable certain basic rights in the Directive principles such as a right to employment, right to social security and right to education. These conditions found expression in the Common Minimum Programme of the UPA I government which included reversing the communalization of education which was taking place under the previous NDA government. 

The NCERT was reconstituted and entrusted with the task of revamping educational policy. The National Curriculum Framework 2005 (NCF 2005) was formulated through a comprehensive process of consultation with educators and teachers at a national level. NCF 2005 represents a major step forward in progressive educational policy. It reaffirmed the role of the educational curriculum in promoting the values of the Indian constitution such as secularism and equality. It laid the foundation for the Right to Education by asserting that for every child to learn and develop its full potential it was necessary to reject the behaviourist learning model and replace it with a constructivist approach based on learning by understanding.  In fact it went further to define ‘quality education’ as that education which equips and empowers every child to overcome inequality into which he/she is born.

The vision of NCF 2005 in regard to equality is not limited to ‘equality of access’. It mandates the much stronger requirement of ‘equality of outcome’:

The formal approach, of equality of treatment , in terms of equal access or equal representation forgirls, is inadequate. Today, there is a need to adopt a substantive approach, towards equality of outcome , where diversity, difference and disadvantage are taken into account.

A critical function of education for equality is to enable all learners to claim their rights as well as tocontribute to society and the polity. We need to recognise that rights and choices in themselves cannot be exercised until central human capabilities are fulfilled . Thus, in order to make it possible for marginalised learners, and especially girls, to claimtheir rights as well as play an active role in shaping

collective life, education must empower them to overcome the disadvantages of unequal socialization and enable them to develop their capabilities ofbecoming autonomous and equal citizens.

(see Box 1 )

The contest between equality and inequality has been at the core of the politics of  education policy. Under the LPG policies, fresh arguments were brought for defending exclusion and inequality in the name of quality and excellence. In a free market for education better quality education would command a higher price.  Buyers would opt for better quality. Competition between sellers of education would lead to an improvement in quality. Instead of government running and trying to improve schools, parents should be given vouchers to pay for fees in private schools of their choice. 

In fact it is observed that the privatization of education has led to proliferation of educational institutions giving professional degrees to the children of the rich who, by paying capitation fees, can buy admission into higher education regardless of their  poor academic performance. Defenders of inequality like Shri Arun Shourie, who wrote many articles arguing that the policy of reservation quotas is leading to declining standards, have remained silent on the issue of this collapse of standards due to ‘reservation for the rich’. 

In fact quality education for equality , is impossible within a privatized framework. It is the law of the market that  consumers with lower purchasing power will get second rate quality. Quality education for equality is only possible by systematically strengthening  and improving the public school system in a ceaseless process of continuous improvement. The RTE Act linked with the NCF 2005 now has made quality education for equality a legal right of Indian citizens between the ages of 6 and 14. Though it has many shortcomings, the quality mandate of the RTE Act provides a powerful tool in the hands of the progressive forces.

The 2014 Lok Sabha elections have brought into power a conservative right wing government at the Centre. There are BJP led governments  ruling in many states. We can expect systematic moves by this government to promote the neo-liberal agenda in education. We can expect renewed attempts to revise NCF 2005, communalise the curriculum, syllabus and textbooks, and undermine the values of the constitution like secularism and equality. 

To face the onslaught of neoliberalism, the workers unions in the country came together to defend the public sector and labour rights. The last twenty five years of united  workers struggle have shown that it is possible to resist the neoliberal policies and even win some important battles despite having hostile governments ruling at the centre.

Just as workers have come together to defend their rights and the rights of common citizens, a similar role can be played in the field of education by teachers, educators and students.  Teachers are already organized. They can come together to defend the gains of NCF 2005 in the areas of quality for equality and the values of the constitution. The strengthening of the government schools and the government aided private schools attended by the children of the common masses will be a prime focus of this effort.  Teachers in many districts are already coming together to build quality education in their classrooms and are achieving substantial results. Progressive student unions also have to play this role. RTE 2009 provides scope for organizing the parents and community on these issues. 

Because inequality and equality remain a burning issue before the country, this is an educational policy issue that the progressives can contest and win even in the adverse political situation at the Centre. In fact the issue of equality and inequality is the biggest weakness of the reactionary forces . It is in this area  where a broader political battle can be fought and won to turn the political tide in the country .

Box 1 

Another major concern is that quality school education has still not reached to a large section of our population. There is no doubt about some .islands. of excellence, but the large majority of marginalised groups such as girls, socio-economically disadvantaged children, etc., do not get meaningful learning experiences in school, which will give them a sense of dignity and confidence. Curriculum design must reflect the commitment to Universal Elementary Education (UEE), not only in representing cultural diversity, but also by ensuring that children from different social and economic backgrounds with variations in physical, psychological and intellectual characteristics are able to learn and achieve success in school. In this context, disadvantages in education arising from inequalities of gender, caste, language, culture or religion need to be addressed directly, not only through policies and schemes but also through the design and selection of learning tasks and pedagogic practices, right from the period of early childhood. Education must empower them to overcome the disadvantages of unequal socialisation and enable them to develop their capabilities of becoming autonomous and equal citizens. The National Curriculum Framework-2005 is focused on providing quality education to all children.

NCF-2005 has two very significant things to say about the twin major concerns expressed above. First, universalisation of education and quality in education are not to be regarded as two .opposing. needs. They are complementary and reinforce each other. Quality cannot flourish for long in a society that is not based on equality and justice for all. Likewise, universalisation can be an empty slogan unless quality is assured for all. Second, NCF-2005 interprets the quality dimension holistically, departing from its narrow connotation of excellence in particular subject areas.

We have already agreed that .quality. is inclusive of universalisation. The document clearly explains that quality is a systemic characteristic rather than only a feature of instruction or attainment. The attempt to improve the quality of education will succeed only if it goes hand in hand with steps to promote equality and social justice. Equality in education can be brought by enabling all learners to claim their rights as well as to contribute to society and the polity. Quality education should promote these social values necessary for a democratic society such as ours.