Young Indians deserve to be a top priority for the state

Educate them, and not into stupidity

A country can go to rack and ruin either dramatically, or in a less sexy but more apocalyptic fashion. There’s been a lot of the dramatic stuff recently, including the debacle involving the CBI and the Modi government and Mamata Banerjee’s dharna, and that was all very dreadful and exciting. 

But the piece of news that stuck in my head related to the Budget. I don’t read the Budget, on account of preferring to be stabbed repeatedly in the eye, but other, better people read it and make good points about it. In this case, IndiaSpend pointed out that since 2014-15, while higher education funding has increased by 28 per cent, school education has decreased by 3 per cent, and teacher training has plummeted by 87 per cent (from Rs 1,158 core to Rs 150 crore). Expenditure on education as a percentage of GDP has declined from 0.53 per cent to 0.45 per cent, and is “falling below anticipated collections for 2018-19 (revised estimates) and 2019-20 (budget estimates), indicating that the proposed budget is lower than even the anticipated cess collections. This means that there is no other revenue being directed towards creating and strengthening public education. It also implies that revenue collected through cess, over which the states have no control, is perhaps being readied to be diverted elsewhere.”

I don’t know if you’ve seen those documentary videos made by people wandering the land—particularly, but not exclusively, in UP and Bihar—asking schoolteachers and schoolchildren in government schools basic questions. Even if you disregard the appalling squalor of the ‘schools’, the ignorance and misinformation of teachers will leave you breathless. 

It’s not the teachers’ fault, nor the students’. They are doing the best they can (if we disregard those teachers who don’t show up). But given this grim background, cutting educational resources should tell the much-mentioned “youth of the country” that the state treats them as no more or less than a kind of political udder.

It’s not very hard to join the dots between poorly educated teachers teaching poorly educated students, and a workforce and citizenry robbed of its own potential. Nor is it hard to join the dots between a population thus disempowered, and one susceptible to the excesses and abuses of state power and the snake oil of political religion.

It’s nice that the IITs, IIMs and other higher educational institutes shine, but how does that help the vast majority of underprivileged schoolchildren break through the darkness that is mass school education? A few days ago this newspaper broke the huge jobs fiasco story, which shows unemployment at a 45-year high. When you have an economic and jobs crisis that forces MBAs and engineers to apply for the position of government sweeper, what hope is there be for those who don’t have even a reasonable primary school education?

In the realm of higher education and research, too, the state is marching purposefully backwards—I’m thinking of the thickening file of excruciating stories about the Indian Science Congress, a serious academic gathering now infiltrated by right wing pseudoscience. Andhra University Vice Chancellor G. Nageswara Rao told an assembly of children that ancient India had stem cell research, test tube babies, and guided missiles, evidenced in the stories of the Mahabharata, which describe the Kauravas being hatched in 100 earthen pots, and Lord Ram having weapons that went after targets and returned to him. This kind of peak loony tunes—let’s call it mythinformation—is a poor education taken to its logical conclusion. And the worse our education, the lower we set qualifying standards, as we see in one Dr. Kanan Jegathala Krishnan, who (as News18 reports), is “a management graduate-cum-electrical engineer and not a physicist” guided by “‘Yogin’ Sathyamurthy, a lab technician by qualification, who teaches yoga” and who said that “Isaac Newton had very little understanding of gravitational forces,” and “Albert Einstein had misled the world with the theory of relativity”.

I fear that we’ll be seeing more of this in the newly-minted Bharatiya Shiksha Board (BSB), a Vedic studies-focused alternative to the CBSE, with its own exams and certification. Unless the perfectly legitimate field of Vedic studies is firewalled against political meddling and mythinformation, it will only produce more Professor Raos and Dr Krishnans. It is possible to educate people into stupidity.

There is, as far as I can tell, only one government that is making visible headway in the direction of supporting “the youth of the nation”, and that is the Aam Aadmi Party, whose transformation of Delhi government schools is so admirable that the spearhead of that effort, Atishi, was summarily dismissed by the central government. Until education is propelled to the top of the national agenda, appropriately supported by funding and expertise, and consciously cleansed of toxic politics, no government can claim to care for India’s people.