Bihar 'toppers' case isn't unique: Education system is broken and no one wants to fix it

What will it take for our politicians to wake up to the crisis destroying the school education system? Not even recent revelations of the shockingly poor learning outcomes of Class XII toppers in Bihar have jolted the political class out of nonchalance. The latest disclosures from Bihar have sparked outrage among citizens and despair among students, who were feted one day and trashed the next, in full media glare. Butt of public ridicule, the students are however, victims of the system, not its architects. The Indian education system — which is spawning a whole generation of near-literates — is pushing young people outside the structures of India’s fast-paced knowledge economy even before they have a chance to compete in the real world. By now our policymakers and governing classes should have pulled out all the stops to reinstate to the classroom its sanctity as a site of learning; instead of using it as a space to merely mark attendance. But the quality of primary education is the last thing agitating politicians. Never mind that the very demographic advantage they cite for India – its youth – are looking at a bleak future. [caption id=“attachment_2810814” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational Image. Reuters[/caption] This is what a report in The Indian Express said in the case from Bihar just mentioned above: “While arts topper Ruby Rai pronounced political science as “prodigal science” and said the subject dealt with “cooking”, science topper Saurav Shrestha could not define proton and electron.” Faced with public outcry, the Bihar School Examination Board decided to go for a retest and interview of 13 top Class XII students. Saurav Shrestha and Rahul Raj, both Science students of Vaishali’s Vishnu Roy College, had their results cancelled. Ruby Rai, from the same college, did not appear for the retest because of ‘depression’, and has been given another week’s time to appear for a retest, failing which her result will also be cancelled. This crisis in schooling is not however, peculiar to Bihar. State after state has reported large-scale failures in classes X and XII. Under Right to Education Act, regardless of their lack of performance, students can’t be failed, till class VIII. That policy is currently under review. This month, only 20 out of 120 students of Government Senior Secondary School at Pathiar, Kangra in Himachal Pradesh, passed the Class X examination. Seventeen other students ended up with compartments, while most others fared poorly in English, Math, and Science. That’s not all. Not a single student could pass Class X in as many as 16 government schools, while none passed Class XII in three schools, according to a report in The Indian Express. Ironically, Himachal Pradesh once used to be among India’s top ranking states in primary schooling. Two years ago, the Annual Survey of Educational Research (ASER) revealed all was not well. The ASER showed that 17 percent of Class VIII in rural schools could not recognise digits, 15% could not identify numbers between 10 and 99, while 0.5 percent could not read capital letters in English and 1.2 percent could not read even small letters. That economic achievements do little by way of improving educational standards is corroborated by the abysmal learning outcome statistics of Gujarat. An annual evaluation drive, Gunotsav, has found students of classes VI to VIII unable to read and write simple words and sentences in Gujarati, besides failing to solve simple mathematical problems. The evaluation drive found that six lakh students of Class VI could not write in Gujarati. In this situation, successive governments that claim to be committed to improving the lives of the underprivileged, should have, long ago, launched a national conversation on primary education. But we have little other than emotive campaigns in this country, on issues that can grab votes and eyeballs. For the moment, it is the volatile Uttar Pradesh – going to polls next year – which is at the centre of political attention, where dietary habits are making headlines. There is simply no time to talk about the state of classrooms – the site where students are meant to acquire basic knowledge. It’s one thing to raise a clamour about textbook rewriting and historical personalities. But these meaningless controversies have no bearing on pedagogy or knowledge production in a context where the system itself is broken and no one wants to repair it.