Are the maladies of India’s education system terminal?

The Telegraph, November 27 , 2013

MASS IGNORANCE - Are the maladies of India’s education system terminal?

by Ashok Sanjay Guha

One of the worst-kept secrets of the human resource development ministry is the fact that education in India is in a mess. Explosive expansion over the last two decades has failed to mask appalling standards of quality: in this, indeed, we are now at the very bottom of the global ladder. In 2011, India first participated in world-wide tests of the reading and arithmetical ability of school children. In every test, in every grade tested, India competed desperately with Kyrgyzstan for the last two places. These tests confirmed the results obtained earlier by another organization: in school-learning outcomes, in 2003, India was among the five worst countries in the world. In the eight years between the tests, we had only deteriorated. The reactions of the government were entirely predictable. It did nothing about the facts revealed. Claiming that the tests were biased against us, it withdrew India from future world-wide testing. Unfortunately for the government, a very Indian NGO, Pratham, was also testing educational outcomes. Its revelations were every bit as shocking. To cite just one, less than 20 per cent of Vadodara fourth graders could do sums required for average first-grade competency.

We had flunked at the primary level. Our performance at the other end of the spectrum was reflected in the recent QS rankings of universities world-wide. No Indian university figured in the top 200. Some IITs appeared in the 200-350 range, but the only other Indian institutions in the top 800 were the Universities of Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Pune, which sneaked in near the bottom of the distribution. The rankings done by the Times Higher Education Supplement, the US News and World Report and the Shanghai-based Centre for World Class Universities were similar. Our ranks were abysmal — not because these rankings were dominated by the affluent West or Japan or the ‘tiger economies’. Kazakhstan alone had 9 universities in the top 800. We were outranked by dozens of universities from China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, South Africa and — yes — Pakistan. Nor did our predicament reflect the overwhelming pressure of numbers. Jawaharlal Nehru University ranked among the top 50 universities of the world in faculty-student ratio (the inverse of overcrowding), yet had little else to show for it. In academic accomplishment, as in sports, India, for all its 1.2 billion people, was a cipher.

But while in sports the reasons are in part genetic, there is no genetic explanation of our pathetic scholastic achievements. Children of Indian (and Chinese) immigrants are the highest performers in American schools. And while immigrants naturally constitute a biased sample, a genetically handicapped group cannot possibly register such spectacular success. The problem lies not in us but in our educational system. Innumerable deficiencies of the latter have been highlighted — from mass teacher absenteeism to lack of infrastructure and of teaching and study materials. Pratham’s studies, however, suggest that, while absenteeism certainly affects outcomes, infrastructural expenditure does not. The crucial factor is the match between the student’s absorptive capacity and the level at which he or she is taught. Pratham’s tests conclusively establish that when weaker students are taught separately (as in Pratham’s Balsakhi programme), their scores improve dramatically. Teaching needs to be tailored to the ability of the specific student. A heterogeneous class needs to be stratified according to ability levels with those at each level being taught separately.

This elementary educational principle has eluded the authors of the Right to Education Act and its judicial interpreters. If resource constraints preclude several teachers teaching at different levels in each class, the class must itself be homogenized. The only way of doing so is to deny promotion from lower classes to those who have not attained the minimum standard required. Instead, the act mandates automatic promotion up to Class VIII. In consequence, laggards learn nothing at all: they fall further and further behind the general level with each successive promotion and reach Class VIII with an educational backlog of many wasted years. En route, they enact shockers like the Vadodara drama that Pratham recorded. Teachers who are sensitive to the plight of laggards have to reduce their teaching standards; the better students are then no longer intellectually stimulated so that their intellectual potential is undermined.

Our passion for political correctness, for the symbols, not the substance, of equal opportunity perpetuates mass ignorance under the garb of the right to education. We establish our egalitarian credentials by giving educationally backward children access to an educational process that, we have ensured (again in the name of equality), is completely opaque to them.

Precisely the same problem bedevils our universities. The gradual expansion of reservations has increased diversity in each class, not only in student backgrounds but also in their academic preparedness — with no provision however for parallel teaching at different levels. The teacher therefore faces an invidious choice: he can teach at a level commensurate with proclaimed course content and confront the blank, uncomprehending stares of half the class or pitch his teaching several levels lower, inducing boredom in the other half and ensuring that they cannot compete with students of their own age educated in university systems less pseudo-egalitarian than ours. The politician’s solution: dilute standards of evaluation and admission everywhere, turning universities into factories for mass production of degrees not worth the paper they are written on. Meanwhile, as education expands, semi-literate degree-holders become teachers, transmitting their ignorance to posterity.

Israel, with its inflow of Jewish immigrants from quite incredibly diversified backgrounds, not only the affluent US and western Europe, but regions like Yemen, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and Mizoram, has heterogeneity problems as complex, though not as numerous, as ours. Unlike us, however, Israel has a solution. Students below minimum general standards are allowed an additional year for their degrees. This is a preliminary year of compulsory intensive preparation to catch up with the general average. At year-end, they take next year’s admission tests and join the general stream if they reach the minimum standards required — and 95 per cent of them do. Could we, for the sake of the future of our education, implement such a scheme? One doubts that the politicians in government and in education will permit it: it offers no electoral dividend.

The author is professor at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University