Hopefully, the promised new education policy will give us a system which will have a decentralised structure like in earlier times
We have become so adept at looking at Western models that every time we think of revamping our system, we try to look for a model in a Western country. We are a nation of 1.34 billion people and our model cannot be borrowed from Finland, which has slightly less than 10 million or Sweden, which has less than seven million people. Education is not only completely funded by the Government but it is compulsory for all children to be in school till they pass K12, which is 12 years of schooling. Japan during the Meiji era achieved complete literacy. It was reported that “…whereas in 1893, one-third of the army recruits were illiterate, already by 1906 there was hardly anyone in that condition. By 1910, Japan was almost fully literate, at least for the young…” But we cannot replicate the Finnish or the Japanese model to achieve the feat they achieved. There is no year when a team from the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) has not visited Finland or Sweden or Japan to study their schooling model. But unfortunately, even after so many visits, our schools remain as bereft of quality as ever. We are looking for a black cat in a dark room painted black and where the cat does not exist.
There are more children between the ages of 6 to 14 years in India than the total population of many countries. The total Indian Education Budget is larger than perhaps the National Budget of many small countries.The management of the Budget is a cumbersome process. But Thomas Macaulay gave us the system of central management and financing of education and we are still carrying forward this legacy, in spite of the fact that we have been criticising Macaulay and his model for the last 70 years. In 1990 we embarked on the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP). The DPEP was funded by the World Bank. India took a massive amount as loan and started the DPEP but fortunately then Minister of Human Resources Development (HRD), Professor Murli Manohar Joshi soon realised that we are getting into a debt trap and closed the programme.
The programme which replaced the DPEP was Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, which was funded through an additional cess on taxpayers. Unfortunately, in spite of all the money spent and the statistics telling us that most children in the age group of 6 to 14 are in school, every survey also tells us that millions of children are out of school and even those who are in school know little. Perhaps it is time we realise that children’s education is a local issue. It is a concern of the parents and the community and there cannot be a centralised scheme for the education of all children in a country the size of India.
The Indian philosophy has been that it's the process of Vidya, which is not just for individual good but for the good of the society and the humanity. Vidya is a process of search for truth ultimately leading to Moksha — Sa Vidya ya Vimuktaye. If we look below the surface, the process of knowledge creation, preservation and transfer has been linked to the life and the next lives, which is what Hinduism professes. Those who are involved in the process of knowledge are serving the society and it becomes the moral responsibility of the society to take care of it. We need to look at the process of Yagyopavit closely to understand how education was funded. The child on attaining the age of 6 was sent to the guru's ashram, where he stayed for the next 12 years. Before leaving for the ashram he was given yagyopavit.
There was neither a fixed amount nor a form of payment. The child and his family collected whatever they could and gave it to the child to be presented to the guru.The learner renounced all his belongings and went away to the guru's house to live with the guru's family till his studies continued. Before the child left for the ashram, he begged for alms to pay to his teacher. All the family members of the extended family contributed towards his studies because his family could not fund it alone. We need to look at our present fee pattern. Those who can pay more should pay and those who cannot should be admitted for free. The uniform pattern of fee payment affected our system adversely.
In later times, when the ashrams were converted into institutions, the Kings often funded the ashrams of the gurus and common people contributed by offering meals, clothes and also shramdaan to maintain the institutions. We have the Jataka tales narrating stories of scholars and their backgrounds who travelled for months on end to be admitted to institutions like Taxila from far of lands including foreigners like Fa Hien, Hiuen Tsang and others because the quality and content of Indian education was well-known at that time. If combined, present day temples like the Balaji temple of Tirupati, the Vishwanath temple of Varanasi and similar other temples have more funds than the entire Education Budget of India.
We need to have smaller units of governance as it has become nearly impossible to provide an efficient system of governance in such a large nation. Earlier, society was in charge of education of their children but Macaulay wanted a centralised system primarily to have control and more importantly, perhaps to damage the age-old system, which Gandhiji mentioned in his public speech in london in 1931, through which India attained more than 95 per cent literacy.
Instead of travelling to foreign countries and looking at their success stories, we need to look at our own traditional system. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) manifesto also promised a new education policy which should have given a society-based Indian system of primary education. Hopefully, the promised new education policy will give us a system which will have a decentralised system like in earlier times.
(The writer is Professor of Education at Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi. Views expressed are personal)
