BY SWAPAN DASGUPTA

Foresaking Neo-literacy

Time for some quality in school education.

There should be a law against politicians making profound policy statements on education. Last month, I.K. Gujral casually proposed that school leaving certificates be withheld unless accompanied by evidence that the student has made five persons, including two girls, literate. The announcement got him the headlines but also drew considerable flak. Gujral was berated for being callous and ignorant of the existing burdens on schoolchildren.

The hostility is not unwarranted. Ever since social indicators evolved by UN agencies intruded on its political consciousness, the Indian state has been inclined to view education as a statistical mush. Fed on an overdose of development jargon, the political class has attached greater importance to per capita spending and literacy rates than to what is being taught. To add to this is the strange fascination for unworkable short-cuts that go under the guise of non-formal education. Gujral's exalted suggestion stemmed from precisely such a mindset.
The effects of this pedagogy of the oppressed are already being felt. During August's special session of Parliament, Murli Manohar Joshi noted that before Independence the country produced a galaxy of scientists such as C.V. Raman, Satyendra Nath Bose, Meghnad Saha, Birbal Sahni, P.C. Ray and Neelratan Dhar whose works matched the highest international standards. Why, he asked, has that tradition come to an end? "The level of research has also come down and our research papers are not up to international standards. This should be a matter of great concern."

An outrageously revisionist conclusion is that imperial subjugation wasn't as debilitating for India as is made out to be. The British, for all
their other shortcomings, gave India a modern education system that nurtured talent, fostered creativity and even upheld indigenous traditions, even if its reach wasn't universal. India inherited a legacy that could have been built upon. Instead, it was squandered in a series of disastrous experiments.

At the root of the post-1947 disaster is a phenomenon that passes by the name of progressive education. Reduced to essentials, it operates on the assumption that the traditional emphasis on the three R's is dogmatic, elitist and Eurocentric. This may be the case, but the alternative has resulted in a curriculum that is far more concerned with doling out certificates and degrees rather than strengthening the fundamentals. The skills of language, comprehension, logic and articulation have been abandoned for the sake of mindless culling of facts. Mediocrity, uniformity and levelling down have become symbols of the Indian achievement.

To hope for a backlash against the perversion of education is to demand the impossible. Policy makers look upon students as guinea pigs for their experiments in social engineering. They have a very demanding constituency to cater to, a constituency that demands dividends without rigour. But even if the imperatives of democracy cannot be ignored, it is possible to give students the choice of opting out. If standards cannot be raised, let the existing board examinations compete with the International Baccalaureate or the A-level. A binary system will not by itself lessen illiteracy, but it could lead to more Indians receiving a better education. China has discarded the debilitating egalitarianism of the Cultural Revolution; India is yet to learn from its own socialist disasters.

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