Politics of education

In Nitin Pai’s column “Education is strategic” (July 13), the writer asks whether the Central and state governments realise the urgency to reform our education system. The answer is “no”. In analysing the cases we need to consider the role of political leadership also — one of them is the ability and perspicacity of the prime ministers to grasp the magnitude of poor standards of education and its complexity in the country.

Post Jawaharlal Nehru no PM, except Manmohan Singh, has had a strategic focus on our education system leave alone reform it. Yet, it was during Singh’s regime that one of his Human Resource Development (HRD) ministers introduced reservation of seats for admissions in premier institutions without due preparation and another got rid of examinations in primary schools with disastrous fall in learning — students studying in class eighth cannot even solve questions of class four.

The other reason pertains to the suitability of the persons chosen to head the ministry of HRD. If we look at the kind of ministers who headed the key ministry after 1977 (with a limited number as exceptions), it becomes evident that calibre was never the criterion. All this has led to politicisation of education in government schools and colleges along with commercialisation of the system in private institutions. Our definition of literacy is too basic but still we have illiterate people. The outcome is a small percentage of graduates from engineering colleges and management degree holders are employable, while the lack of vocational training in schools creates frustrated matriculates waiting for a job for years.

There has been no dearth of expert advice on how to reform our system. But successive governments have been good at forming committees and then allowing their report to gather dust.

Y G Chouksey Pune