In a Bengali quiz show, titled Dadagiri, on prime-time television last Monday, the elimination round had the following question: Where is the Taj Mahal located? And the options were a) New Delhi, b) Agra and c) Kolkata. Sourav Ganguly (that explains the name of the show), who is the quizmaster, announced with a straight face that six of the 20 participants had given "C" as their answer, and he wished they were correct.
The participants - from some of the prominent districts of West Bengal - didn't look like people who were deprived of a good formal education. In case this sounds like a gathering of a few half-witted boys and girls just to increase the comic quotient of the show, here is another example from a premier English medium private school in a tony suburb of Mumbai. More than half of a Class VI batch of students got the name of the president wrong - some even going to the extent of naming Mamata Banerjee, L K Advani and even "Prabha Devi", the name of a prominent locality in the city. The last answer was, of course, the result of a confusion over the name of Pratibha Patil, the former president. A few students did marginally better by answering "Pranav Banerjee".
But that's not worse than the faux pas made by two of Bollywood's Gen X heart-throbs (both passed out from a premier private school in Mumbai) in a popular talk show recently. Asked to name the president, one of them said Manmohan Singh and the other confidently answered Prithviraj Chavan.
It would be wrong to dismiss this as a shocking display of poor knowledge of celluloid celebrities for a survey done by Wipro and Ahmedabad-based Educational Initiatives has shown how teaching at India's most popular private schools (for admission into which there are annual stampedes) isn't all that great. The four month-long study conducted among 23,000 students of 89 English-medium private schools in five metropolitan cities, also showed how India's top private schools are accustomed to rote learning and their academic performance is below par.
For example, 67 per cent of Class IV students of the most popular metro schools could not answer a simple question about the length of a pencil placed against a ruler, while 38 per cent gave an incorrect answer to the question: "Among these people, who is alive today - Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi or Sonia Gandhi?" And nearly half of the students assessed in a 45-minute written test opined that spiders have six legs.
These are startling facts at a time when reams have been written on the poor quality of education in rural India, and there is a general impression that private schools in metros have done a fairly decent job. Over 80 per cent of households in Mumbai have opted for private schools instead of municipal ones because of this belief.
These parents, however, would be disappointed to know that according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Programme for International Student Assessment, Indian eighth graders have maths skills comparable to South Korean third graders, and Indian students ranked second to last in 75 countries surveyed in writing and mathematics, ahead of tiny, landlocked Kyrgyzstan.
The results of the Wipro- Educational Initiatives survey do present a dismal picture of student learning in the country's premier schools. But studies are just one part of the problem. Given that these schools are role model institutions and produce a large number of future leaders, important issues such as student attitude and values are often ignored. For example, over 40 per cent of Class IV, VI and VIII students said they thought educating girl children is not as important as boys' education, and that educating girls is a waste of household and public resources.
A major part of the reason for this sorry state of affairs, even in these so-called showcase schools, is the quality of teachers who complain of poor pay, stressful work conditions and shoddy management practices. A study conducted by a forum of parents and teachers in Mumbai, covered 400 teachers in 60 private schools spread across the city and found that a majority of primary teachers at privately-run institutes literally hate their job.
A whopping 85 per cent of the surveyed teachers have no job satisfaction, 83 per cent are burdened with more students than they can handle, 86 per cent find training programmes ineffective and 90 per cent felt they were not paid enough. For example, teachers in many of these schools with 25 years of experience take home around Rs 30,000.
Another reason is that women once considered teaching an attractive profession because their opportunities were tightly circumscribed. Despite the low wages, teaching was a far better line of work than slaving away in a lowly-paid corporate job. However, the past 20 years since liberalisation have opened a vast new world of opportunities to educated women.
That's little consolation for the quality of education in India's top-ranked private schools.
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