There
is no question that education in our country is in a state of crisis.
While primary school enrolment may have increased, it is still far from
adequate, and far below even the rates in our South Asian neighbours
like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The Constitution which, more than half a
century ago, promised to ensure universal primary education within a
decade, is now being derided in practice to the extent that more than 70
million children in the age-group 6 to 14 years are either school
dropouts or are have never been enrolled in school at all. Many more
children may be formally registered but barely attend. This is not
surprising because the bulk of primary schools in the country suffer
from huge deficits in the most basic resources: teachers, buildings,
blackboards, toilets, textbooks, and so on.
In higher education the situation is no better, and may even be worse
because of the decline of many institutions, which were once respected
seats of advanced learning and research. India is already among the
worst performing nations in terms on share of GDP devoted to public
spending on education (less than 3 per cent, compared to international
norms of 6 per cent and as much as 12-15 per cent in some dynamic
countries of East Asia).
But even within this pitiful amount, the share of higher education has
shrunk. And so institutions of higher learning are increasingly starved
of funds and forced into the commercialisation and privatisation of many
activities simply to ensure survival. This in turn means that many
formerly impressive institutions have declined beyond all recognition,
and that the less well-off sections of society are denied access to
higher education.
In such a dire context, it may not be surprising that the current NDA
government is obsessed with education. Unfortunately, however, the
obsession has not meant any attempts to change the desperate material
straits of the education system as a whole. In fact, quite the opposite
tendency is apparent. The BJP-led government has actually accelerated
and worsened these negative trends by introducing further cuts in
expenditure, throwing more responsibility onto the private sector
especially for higher education, and relying on parallel experimental
projects aided by international donors, which bypass and undermine the
public primary education system.
Meanwhile, the government's focus on education has taken the utterly
counterproductive form of messing about with syllabi and trying to
introduce all manner of extraneous or even misleading subjects and
material into basic compulsory textbooks. This has resulted in
continuous debates that have resulted, over the interpretation of
history, over what constitutes "national culture" and desirable values,
over the introduction of dubious "disciplines" like Vedic astrology, and
so on.
These have meant precious little improvement (and possibly some
deterioration) in the conditions and the content of public education.
But they may instead have served the politically useful purpose of
diverting the attention of many progressive citizens from confronting
other even greater transgressions of the government, and forced them to
expend their energies in protesting against these often revanchist and
sectarian tendencies in education instead.
The most recent such protest relates to the National Curriculum
Framework for School Education (NCSFE) of the NCERT. This curriculum
framework had already been severely criticised by various groups,
including not just educational experts but groups of concerned parents
as well, for a number of reasons. A petition filed in the Supreme Court
by Aruna Roy and B. G. Verghese had argued for a stay on the new
curriculum and the introduction of new textbooks associated with it, on
the grounds that it had been done without consulting the Central
Advisory Board on Education (CABE) which has been non-functional since
1996, and that it attempted to introduce religious instruction into what
should be a secular exercise in learning.
In a recent judgment, the Supreme Court has now vacated the stay on the
new social sciences and Hindi syllabi and upheld the NCFSE. This has
been interpreted by some – notably Minister Murli Manohar Joshi – as a
defeat for the rationalist secular position, and a vindication of the
current government's attempts to alter school curricula in the light of
its own extremely problematic and often obscurantist notions.
But such a conclusion may not be valid. It is important to note that the
Supreme Court has not presumed to comment on the substance of the
changes in the curricula, which it does not see as its purview. The
judgment states that "it is not the province of the court to decide on
the good or bad points" and that "it is ultimately for Parliament to
take a decision on the national education policy one way or other".
In fact, the Supreme Court's judgment has basically made two points.
First, that non-consultation with the CABE cannot be a ground for
setting aside the NCFSE because it is not a statutory body. Second, that
the introduction of the study of religions is not a violation of Article
28 of the Indian Constitution, which prohibits religious instruction.
