Grim Faces of Indian Revolutions for the Students

Students have often participated in social and political revolutions. Students have also gone on agitations to redress their grievances at the institutions of learning. In many parts of India, specially in West Bengal, the students and academicians have been both a great sustainer and victims of socialist  political revolution over the last six decades. 

But who takes care of the interest of the future generations of Indian students? It is only the learned educationists and the elite who have fought for future generation of students. For, the future students cannot be present when steps are to be taken to protect their interest.

Earlier in the 17-20^th century, rich elite and educationists combined to set up school, colleges and universities with support from the Government.  As the State (Governments) became all pervasive in most spheres of life, the Governments have taken charge of planning and implementation of projects for the future students. Since India’s independence, Governments have become the sole organizer of education in all aspects – from funding to setting up systems for teacher recruitment, facilities and infrastructure management, syllabus and curricula, examination and evaluation, admissions, text book publications and approval quality control, registration and governance of educational institutions as also other academic issues. Earlier the educationists and the philanthropic rich elite patronized the Governments: now the politicians and bureaucrats in the Government decide and control education of both the existing students and future generation of students through a system of patronizing professional educationists. As we approached the 21^st century, the governments have run out of monies to increase the supply of education in relation to the tremendous surge in the demand for education from primary stage to the post-graduate stage and research. The Government therefore allowed private sector enter the increasingly profitable business of manufacturing and selling education to students. But Government still continues to dominate the field of education n all spheres.

The most interesting area of education for Government’s participation in education is the area of continuous revolution in the systems of education. Soon after we had passed out of the primary school, the first major reform took place: the secondary school (class 5-10) got upgraded to higher secondary school (class 5- 11), the six year period of university education (two years each for intermediate, bachelors and master degree courses) was correspondingly reduced by a year (three years for a bachelors and two years for a masters degree). Thirty-years after I had graduated, my sons found they had o study one extra year (Class 12) to complete school education with two separate Boards conducting examinations at the ed of Class 10 (secondary terminal( and at 12 (higher secondary terminal). In the meanwhile the minimum age requirement to pass through each stage was increased. My father could have obtained a Master degree at the age of 18 or 19, I could have at the age of 20 0r 21 but my sons could not have obtained a Masters degree until they were 22 or 23.  The future generations of students were gifted additional two years of school life (not counting the current three-years at the pre-primary play cum education stage). A great contribution of the learned politicians, bureaucrats and educationists: they could not find any method or system by which the rapidly expanding knowledge could be absorbed by children in 16 years of formal schooling.

Maybe, the additional years at school has enhanced the quality of students after 10 years of schooling. I do not know about the recent 11^th Class school students: but I had seen that most of the matriculates (class 10 passed) of my fathers’ generation fluent in English, Bengali and Sanskrit languages and literature and excellent in arithmetic. Most of my fellow students in class 11 were weak in English and arithmetic. For a few generations of school students in Wet Bengal in the late 20^th century, English was a new language in class 8, thanks to the great education revolutionaries of the Government: we started picking up English from class1 at the primary school. English has recently returned to primary school after the first anti-English revolutionaries lost face with the results of their uprising against English: a few generations of Bengali students could not communicate and compete with other Indians of their age.

The pace of revolution in education has been quite fast and comprehensive in its coverage. There used to be a centralized extra examination optional for those who completed four years of primary school to compete for financial awards to the top performing students in our time. A few top students of different schools would take this examination, if not for the financial scholarship but for the honor. This examination has never been promoted or upgraded to most 9-10 old students: they now regularly compete in reality shows to win both popularity and prizes in performing arts shown on TV channels not promoted by Governments or educationists.

The education revolution mission was initially geared to (a) just get more kids into primary schools by expanding the network primary schools all over the country, (b) change the examination and evaluation systems, syllabus, text books, teachers’ training and recruitment standards in the secondary schools, and (c) expand the network of colleges and universities for higher education. With regard to primary education, the Government initiative resulted in many primary schools without teachers or adequate number of teachers or schools with shanty/ unkempt class rooms. But most rural students stayed away from primary schools. The education revolutionaries thought of a great idea of providing free mid-day meals to attract the kids to the schools. This part of the revolutionary strategy has worked well, though there are complaints of leakage of money and serving of sub-standard meals.

The revolutionary challenge with regard to secondary education was even tougher. Many children dropped out at different classes because their poor families did not want to the income contributed by the children in their teens and were not willing to spend money on education: the students who still attended schools irregularly failed in examinations, lost interest and dropped out. The revolutionary educationists found a solution: they first waived all school fees for girl students and then for all students, started proving free cycles to girl students, and where possible provide free or cheap text books, besides banning engagement of child labour in industry and trade. But still many children failed. The revolutionary educationists then thought of reducing the burden of education on the secondary school children. The six-year secondary school system was converted in phases to a system of five-year secondary schooling to be followed by a two-year higher secondary schooling. Further, the examination system was being changed to work towards higher frequency of class tests covering small modules of syllabus thus releasing the burden of having to deal with larger annual syllabus coverage at Annual examinations. Still, there were large failures, especially at the final class ten examination of the secondary stage and class twelve examination of the higher secondary stage where the students had to deal with syllabus coverage of two years teachings (class 9-10 and 11-12). The method of examination was therefore changed to make the secondary terminal examination with virtually all objective type question papers and syllabus-coverage limited to a single year (class 10 and class 12 only for respectively secondary and higher secondary).  Still the drop-out rate and the incidence of failure remained high. The education revolutionaries now have a master stroke idea to solve the drop-out problem by proposing the Right to Education Act to be legislated soon: failures would not restrict students from going to the higher classes: there would be no pass/fail examination in any classes from 5 to 11. A secondary student will automatically receive higher secondary education and will have the right to fail only at the final class 12 Examination. Some teachers are unhappy and are at a loss about how to deal the mix of students in any class where some students know what they were taught in the previous class and others do not know what was taught in the previous class. You may not know about Emperor Akhbar’s rule to study history of British India, but how do you learn to solve a two two-variable simultaneous equations without having understood how to solve a single variable equation or how to teach a student the measurement of volume of a cylinder when the student skipped the learning of measuring the area of a circle?  Quite a revolutionary environment for both teaching and learning in secondary and higher secondary schools will now be under test for few years.

For some time in the past, the revolutionary State-sponsored educationists had been experimenting with the Grading System by abandoning the marking system. A student does not get a score of 67 out of 100 or 457 out of 800 but get a grade A or A+. I understand the evaluation of examination papers were still done by giving numerical scores, but the final results sheet just mentioned the Grades and not the numerical scores (the numerical scores were converted in to grades: for example, numerical score of 35 or below were grouped as D grade meaning failure, scores above 90 are classified as Grade A+ and so on. The beauty of the Grading System is that it is more socialistic: there is no difference between a score of 25 and 34 and there is no difference between a score of 90 and 99. Now, it seems the new elite education revolutionaries want to go back to the Numerical Scoring System and abandon the Grading System. Education revolutionaries seem to enjoy periodic revolutions to achieve new things and then achieve the old gold things as well.

The teachers and educationists are not willing to abandon the concept of evaluation: students will continue to be evaluated at some stage or others by some method or other. For, they enjoy measuring the progress of students learning and rank them. But teachers and educationists do not want them to be ranked and graded. They dislike this very much. But bureaucrat education revolutionaries love to rank and grade those whom they lord over as financiers and regulators. So, evaluation of teachers is not done by the students or based on students’ feedback: such evaluation is done on the basis of years of experience in teaching, participation in continuing education programmes  for teachers, additional qualifications acquired (say, an additional Masters degree or a M.Phil/  Ph d degree) and research papers published. But these evaluations or raking of teachers is not made public: they are only used for the purpose of teacher appointments/ promotions to higher Grades of Pay.

Teachers therefore continue to enjoy the privilege of not being publicly ranked. But the academic institutions get ranked publicly. This is done by magazines and newspapers based on the information that they get from official documents and the schools themselves. But such evaluation and ranking has been limited largely to business schools in India and sometimes engineering colleges. But Universities and individual subject departments are not yet publicly ranked. Teachers do not like this. Rather, they find out reason why the Universities should not be ranked and compared. Recently, I came across an article by a retired economics Professor of Jahwarlal University in Delhi. He was very sad that Prof Amartya Sen, the only India economist Nobel Laureate had remarked that none of the Indian Universities finds place in the top 100 or 500 Universities internationally. He has argued that such ranking is unscientific, misleading and does not serve any purpose. He was not suggesting that there were no deficiencies of Indian Universities: indeed Indian universities suffer from weaknesses. But international ranking of universities are conceptually faulty. He argues that the present international ranking of the universities are based on criteria that may be appropriate to the societal context, consistent with the dominant ideology of free market competitive markets and perspectives in Western countries and based on the role model of fund-rich Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard Universities and most inappropriate to evaluate the relative position of financially-starved Indian universities. He argues that Indian Universities have a role in Nation Building and they should be geared to education and research to solve India’s socio-economic problem in the context of India ideologies that seek to establish a socialistic, non-exploitative and egalitarian order.

The Prof’s arguments are good, conventional run-of-the-mill ideological prose but are devoid of any logic from any perspective. He argues the same way when Indians react to low credit rating of India or when the Americans get angry with the downgrade of US sovereign rating. Just because I think I am the best in my own way does not mean that there cannot exit standard methods independent of ideologies, societal expectations and socio-economic problems of different sections of the mankind at any point of time. If Indian universities in their great role of nation building could not do anything by way of teaching and research to stop unabated high corruption and dishonesty in India society over the last sixty years, how can they be any better than foreign universities? If the Indians continue to depend primarily on the progress of science and technology achieved by foreign universities to solve India’s socio-economic problems, how could the Indian universities assume that they cannot be compared with foreign universities? Indian come to know of what resources India has from foreign sources, what has the Indian universities been doing. Indian governments may have time to time established special universities to encourage academicians who sound socialistic and critique of capitalistic, competitive market economic system, does not mean that these universities have done anything worthwhile: these universities were essentially set up as a part of Indian politicians’ attempt to project their socialist credentials. The retired professor may feel bad at the end of his career that Indian universities, of which professors like him were eminent constituents, do not appear to be nowhere near to the top international universities in terms of quality. But it is only natural that the academicians who were led in to believing that they had a great role to play in laying the foundations of the future of India will feel hurt if at the end of the career they could not make their contribution felt in India while the foreign universities continue to make significant contributions to the countries they are located in as well as the entire mankind.

The generations of intellectuals and academic elite who have retired in the last thirty years or will retire in the next 20 years must face the reality that they were great failures as a group in making their impact felt in India or internationally. And, this is what gets reflected in the low international ranking of Indian universities. There is no point in trying to suggest that a different generally acceptable methodology of ranking would have helped Indian universities to be seen in much better light. There is also no point that in building up a new faith that Indian universities are a special class by themselves and cannot be scientifically compared with foreign universities. Everyone knows that trees are known by the fruits they yield.

Revolutions in Education in India may continue fast apace at the expense of tax payers, but continuing and prolonged revolutions by Government-sponsored bureaucratic and academic intelligentsia has so far not been able to show any signs of causing a great vibrancy and high-yielding transformation in the quality of the educated. If any thing, the most talented and outstanding academicians, researchers and educated professional and bureaucrats in India have established themselves not primarily because of the quality of Indian Universities but essentially because of their own efforts, determination and persistence.