Funding Public Education Should Be the First Priority

 

Funding Public Education Should Be the First Priority

Academic Institutions and Organisations are going overboard and competing to organize seminars and conferences to endorse and implement the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, and trying to be in the good books of the regulating authorities and the establishment in the process, rather than offering a critical review of the NEP and the manner in which it sought to be implemented.

 

The NEP envisages to ‘promote increased access, equity, and inclusion through a range of measures, including greater opportunities for outstanding public education’. The ‘outstanding public education’ is possible only when the state funding in public education raises substantially. The Education Policy of 1968, based on the Kothari Commission, proposed spending 6% of GDP on education, reiterated in the 1986 education policy and reaffirmed in the 1992 review of the policy. The NEP endorses a substantial increase in public investment by the Central and State governments to ensure 6% of GDP is spent on education as raising public funding is ‘extremely critical for achieving the high quality and equitable public education system’.  

 

However, in spite of all these laudable objectives, the expenditure on higher education, the Centre and states taken together, nosedived from 0.86% of GDP in 2010-11 to a measly 0.52% in 2019-20.  And the Centre’s expenditure on higher edition dropped from 0.33% of GDP to a mere 0.16%. This is despite the Centre’s revenue increasing three times from Rs.7.5 lakh crore in 2011-12 to more than Rs.22 lakh crore in 2019-20, and the total receipts from Rs.13.07 lakh crore to Rs.33.44 lakh core in 2022-23. As a percentage of the total receipt, the allocation for higher education fell from 1.49% to 1.04% during the corresponding period (The Hindu 6/9). The Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said, in a reply to a debate during the last Lok Sabha session, that people should let go of the idea that universities must be funded only by the government. Of course, no one expects the government to fund all the universities’ expenses entirely. But funding substantially is a sine qua non to ensure quality education accessible and affordable to all, particularly the poor, the weak and the marginalised.

 

The EdTech revolution in the education sector has not helped the poor and people in rural areas.  The large proportion of children who dropped out during the pandemic are unlikely to return to school. A large number of people on the other side of the digital divide are left behind. The innovations in the information and communication technology largely benefited  the well-off and tech-savvy.  As Professor Furqan Qamar says ‘62.5% of our population have to be provided free ration to save them from destitution’. Do their children not have a right to education? Privatisation of education is growing exponentially. And with private educational institutions running on self-financed basis and meeting the total cost of education by charging exorbitant fees, how can these poor people, who find it difficult to survive, afford private education for their children? The idea that higher education could be funded by the students or their parents out of their savings or through loans is highly misleading.

 

We are witnessing a very disturbing trend. A staggering number of parents have moved their children to low-fee private sub-standard schools. Between 2010 and 2019, as many as 2.7 core children left public schools for private ones. By 2019, 48% of 10 lakh public elementary schools were left with only 60 or fewer children each.  What the Centre and Sates fail to understand is raising the standard of public schools by filling nearly 1.7 million vacancies of teachers; and providing basic amenities and improving general hygienic environment in schools to arrest the migration of children to private institutions. And most importantly to provide effective mechanism for supervision and control, to check corrupt practices and ensure efficient functioning and transparency and accountability. 

 

The rapid fall in the Human Development Index (HDI) of India is a serious matter.  According to the UNDP, India’s global HDI has slipped from 129 in 2019 to 132 in 2021. India’s per capita income in terms of purchasing power parity has gone down by 5% compared to a 2% increase for the developing countries, resulting in fall in life expectancy from 69.7 in 2019 to 67.2 in 2021, undoing a decade-long improvement. This shows the extent of poverty and poor quality of life.  

 

Who is benefitting by the present education system? It is catering mainly to the rich from urban areas. Look at the results of JEE, NEET, and now CUET; it is largely the rich and well-to-do kids from elite institutions who crack these tests by solely depending on the parallel system of coaching classes. Nonetheless, the system puts too much pressure on students. As per a survey report released by the Union Education Ministry- the first of its kind nation- wide mental health survey- published in The Hindustan Time, September 6,2022- a whopping 81% school students say studies, exams and results are a major cause of anxiety, the most cause of anxiety being studies (50%), followed by exams and results, the anxiety increasing as students move from middle to secondary stage. The level of anxiety is high among girls. Fewer people available for students to share their feelings, with 37% students finding teachers not paying attention bothersome. And only 39% students are satisfied with their academic performance. The report highlights one-in-three students acting under peer pressure most of the time and 36% students attributing doing well in academics for social acceptance. It is a tinderbox waiting to explode and consume our children. In India, every one hour a student is committing suicide, unable to cope up with the academic pressure

 

A friend has sent me this post that makes us to think relevance of our education system:

 

“At the end of World War II, this letter was found in a Nazi concentration camp. It is addressed to teachers. Dear Teachers, I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness. Gas chambers built by learned engineers, children poisoned by educated physicians, infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot and burnt by High School and College Graduates. So, I am suspicious of education. My request is: help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled Psychopaths, educated illiterates, Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve towards making our children more human.”

  

Our education system, being totally commercialized and catering to the needs of corporates and trade and commerce, is producing self-centered greedy individuals, with materialistic outlook, for whom making money is all that matters. What is the relevance of education, with digital and gender divide, that lays undue emphasis on SMET to produce professionals and technocrats through rote learning, many of whom eventually opt out to leave India in search of greener pastures abroad, and where the State leaves the field for free play by private players, playing itself a minimal role? What is the relevance of higher education that neglects the study of humanities and social sciences; that doesn’t encourage independent and critical thinking; and that doesn’t produce thinkers, writers, philosophers, intellectuals and public-spirited men and women?

 

Education must promote a holistic development of individual, deemphasizing on exams and marks and reducing pressure on students. This is possible only when good public education, with emphasis on ethics and morals, is made accessible and affordable to every child. A massive funding of public education should be the first priority, if we have to safeguard democracy and social harmony. Nothing matters in life except good education. All else is secondary. Imagine where the persons occupying high positions in our public life would have been without good public education.

 

We have misplaced priorities - artificial intelligence, EdTech revolution, raising our universities to ‘international standard’ and the like, when children from weaker section do not even get good basic education? We are so cut-off from the ground reality of our own country. Everyone has a right to the basic minimum to realise his full potential. Our education policy makers do not seem to have realized that since the elites, the rich and the affluent, have already crossed a gross enrolment ratio of 100%, the future growth in education will have to come from the under privileged and disadvantaged groups. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be making policy decisions tilted against the poor and the marginalised.