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A Strange Obsession Or Two

People write to tell me I'm obsessed with our nuclear bombs. They may be right. But a little meeting I attended last week, and what happened there, was entirely fortuituous, I assure you. I hadn't gone there chasing the obsession; there was just one mention of bombs, which was facetious; and yet I left the meeting brooding more than ever about those bombs. More than ever, I felt the obscenity of building and keeping them.

It was a small gathering, an even dozen of us. We met to listen to a man who helps administer a network of schools run by the Department of Atomic Energy. ("No, we don't teach the kids how to make nuclear bombs", he said in that facetious mention I mentioned). They cater to children of DAE employees, though they are beginning to take in other children too. There are 30 such schools around the country, educating about 30,000 kids all told. The man told us proudly that they make no distinction between the kids. "We have children of some of the top scientists in the world," he said, "sitting alongside their jamadar's kids. Nobody makes a fuss."

So far, so good. However, the good ended there. For the rest of his talk was one long lament about the deteriorating state of the school education system, not excluding the DAE collection. Everything he mentioned was dismal: the schools themselves, teachers, values, the role of parents, government spending, teacher training courses, the attitudes of political leaders towards education. I knew much of what he was saying from the news, or from reading various books. I'm sure you do, too, which is why I won't bombard you in this column with lots of figures about the state of education in India.

Still, it was particularly distressing to hear a man intimately connected with education, with government-run schools, speak with so little hope about so many issues.

One example: We have about 250 million children of school-going age, the man said. To give them all an education, he estimates we need about 12.5 million teachers. How many do we have now, I asked. He waved his hand dismissively. "As good as none," he said. And why is that? Because most teachers are very badly trained, paid and motivated. After all, teaching is everybody's last choice as a profession.

Also, there are coaching classes. For those who can afford them, they have become a sort of parallel system, geared solely towards doing well in exams. Most school teachers now conduct coaching classes after school hours. In fact you hear stories all the time about teachers who tell kids that if they really want to learn the subject, they had better attend the teacher's private classes. Implying, too, that if the kid doesn't do so, he will be victimised come grading time.

All of which is hardly a surprise, considering how poorly paid teaching is and how lucrative coaching is. I know of one recent attempt, at a well-known Bombay school, to stop teachers conducting coaching classes. It met with a near-revolt. "For the teachers," their principal told me, "their salary is just pocket money."

The truly startling thing, for those of us who went through school back in palaeolithic times, is how little actual teaching in actual schools happens these days.

It was this and much else that we heard about from the DAE schools man. Indeed: from a man whose job is to run a network of schools, to find ways to improve the quality of education they offer, it made depressing and disturbing listening. More so because the same man also described his 30 schools as about the best government schools in the country, a step below "perhaps 50 private schools" that he thought were India's best. Saying so, he left us to brood over the obvious thought: what state are the rest of our schools in, government and others? What kind of training for the world are they giving our kids?

And yet -- this is the obsessive part, if you like -- there was a strange irony in hearing all this from a man concerned with Department of Atomic Energy schools. To me, that nearly sums up the maddening conundrum that is India.

The DAE represents India's nuclear bomb, and with it a long-cherished aspiration to be a superpower, a weighty member of the world community. Yet here was someone connected with the DAE's own schools who is deeply worried about those very schools, about the system of education they are part of. Here was a man who sees every day how surely India is destroying its future by letting its education system rot. Yet he works for the organization that stands for what our PM and his admirers claim is the absolute pinnacle of Indian achievement, the guarantor of our future security: the nuke.

Why and how did things get so twisted? When did we decide that we can build bombs, but that we can, with so little fuss, let our schools deteriorate so badly? How is it that the bomb was a matter of national purpose and urgency, but educating our children never has been and never will be? And if you're one of those who is itching to tell me that it's not a tradeoff, that having the bomb doesn't mean we have to ignore education, please save those precious fingertips. Save your theories. In the real India, we are indeed ignoring education, along with innumerable other pressing headaches. Of course there's no tradeoff, because education never was a priority to begin with!

Me, I worry very personally about that. I have a child now, all of four months old this week. I agonise every day: What sort of school will he be going to in a few years? What sort of values will he imbibe there, when few have use for values any longer? Will he have to join the coaching class regimen? And if I worry about all this, what happens below me on the wealth ladder, where surely three-fourths of the country is? What happens to the Indian child whose teacher doesn't bother to come to school, but whose parents cannot afford the coaching classes that same teacher runs privately? Today there are millions of Indian kids like that. How many more will there be in ten years? Twenty? And if so many of us are educated on these worsening terms, what kind of India is my son going to live in, nuke or no nuke?

Tired from agonising like this through his speech, I leaned over and asked the DAE man what must be done to improve the situation. "Off the top of my head," he said, "four things."

First, make exams less important, or get rid of them altogether. That will puncture the entire coaching racket. Second, raise teachers' salaries. That will make the profession attractive again; it will also help puncture the coaching racket. Third, reform the monitoring system. Both teachers and schools must be regularly reviewed, their performance critically evaluated. Fourth, improve teacher-training programmes. Today, all manner of tenth-rate outfits offer worthless B Eds (Bachelor of Education) by correspondence. Even in supposedly reputed institutes, the standard of the course is in steady decline. Make the B Ed course meaningful again and we will produce good teachers again.

There you have it, a four-point agenda for educational reform. Needs fleshing out, of course. Still, will the new government this election gives us make this agenda the country's highest priority, bar none? Will it address it with the same sense of national urgency that nuclear bombs got? What do you think, will we find the resources for education in the same determined way we found them for bombs?

And yes, those bombs brought India security. So we were told. So tell me why I feel deeply, profoundly, insecure about my own son's Indian future.

EARLIER COLUMN:
Classes, classes everywhere, not a stop to think

Dilip D'Souza