“The destiny of India is now being shaped in her classrooms. This, we believe, is no mere rhetoric. In a world based on science and technology, it is education that determines the level of prosperity, welfare and security of the people.” Kothari Commission Report, 1966.
R.V. Vaidyanatha Ayyar’s history of post-Independence education policymaking in India begins with the great project of the Kothari Commission, which he describes as “the last hurrah of the nation building phase.” Set up shortly after the death of Prime Minister Nehru, the Commission was international in character, a conscious decision.
‘No time for education’
In its report, the Commission remarked on the transformative power of education to shape the destinies of India’s children. But as it turned out, it would not be the same for all children. The roads that the new republic took towards education for its young people led in different directions.
By the late 1980s, as described in a key chapter titled ‘Education Secretary Has No Time for Education’, the education sector (Ayyar uses the example of Andhra Pradesh) had grown into a vast, complex and highly centralised bureaucracy: consuming about a quarter of the state budget, with 2.5 lakh teachers, 70,000 educational institutions, over a crore students, 19 heads of departments and 10 universities: in short, “a mammoth licence-permit-inspectorate Raj which was collapsing under its own weight. The administrative machinery was so much overwhelmed by the burden of enforcement that it could not give attention to the more important academic supervision.”
It was time for India to seek new ways to approach the goal of education for all. In February 1990, Ernakulam in Kerala was declared the first totally literate district in the country. On the Ernakulam model, the National Literary Mission began to initiate Total Literacy Campaigns in districts across the country.
During the same period, a different debate was playing out over the fraught question of equity in school education — an issue at the heart of any narrative about education in India. The government had decided to set up, in each of over 400 districts in the country, a model school which would later be known as Navodaya Vidyalaya. Ayyar quotes a deeply thoughtful note written in response by the great Anil Bordia, then Education Secretary to Government of India, seeking a reversal of the decision.
Bordia argued that the decision would lead to creating islands of excellence in an ocean of poorly-resourced government schools. The unit costs were high; the investment could be used instead to build more classrooms in primary schools; the new model schools might even widen socio-economic disparities. Bordia proposed, instead, an egalitarian school system: “It has often been argued that our education system has become so large and there are such severe financial constraints that improvement of all education institutions is an impossible task and, therefore, we should make a beginning with a small number of schools. It is further argued that establishment of model schools would lead to the general improvement of standards because there would be a general tendency to emulate them. Indeed, the idea of establishment of model schools goes back to the Indian Education Commission (1882) and was also strongly supported by Curzon during his viceroyalty. However, Surendranath Banerjee, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Gokhale, and Agarkar resolutely pleaded in favour of a common school system encompassing universal education of satisfactory standard, rather than stress on selective excellence. This emphasis was supported in Sargent report (1944) and Rajagopalachari characterized the idea of special schools or model schools for the gifted children as the ‘best becoming the enemies of the good’. It hardly needs to be mentioned that Gandhi’s ideas on education are at total variation from the model school approach.”
From the Kothari Commission to the National Policy on Education (1986) and its revised version (1992), to the National Curriculum Framework (2005) and the Right to Education Act (2009), it is often believed that there are enough policy statements about education, and that all that needs to be done is to implement them.
This is not exactly true. If policy is an expression of people’s aspirations, every generation needs to interpret the policies of the past and re-articulate them for their own time. There are today more Indian children in school than ever before, many of them first-generation learners; yet, some children are still left out. Reflecting honestly on the successes and failures of past decades can help us to devise the most appropriate policy interventions, to ensure that all our children are in school and learning well — including those who are not yet in any school, and who are still excluded, even today.
History of Education Policymaking in India 1947-2016 ; R.V. Vaidyanatha Ayyar, Oxford University Press, ₹1,995.
Published - February 23, 2019 07:27 pm IST
