School students in Surat pay tribute to Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan on the eve of his birth anniversary.
| Photo Credit: ANI
September 5 is celebrated as Teachers’ Day to mark the birth anniversary of Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, scholar, philosopher and former president of our country. This year it is being marked as Student-Teacher Solidarity Day by hundreds of thousands of students and teachers wearing black badges to protest against the present education crisis in the country.
We remind ourselves of India’s unequivocal commitment to public education for development, social justice and democracy, with the words of its first Education Commission (1948-49) chaired by Dr. Radhakrishnan. One of its members was Dr. Zakir Hussain, chairperson of the Basic Education Committee (1938), and co-founder of Jamia Millia Islamia.
“Freedom of individual development is the basis of democracy. Exclusive control of education by the State has been an important factor in facilitating the maintenance of totalitarian tyrannies. …We must resist, in the interests of our own democracy, the trend towards the governmental domination of the educational process. Higher education is, undoubtedly, an obligation of the State but State aid is not to be confused with State control over academic policies and practices…. Intellectual progress demands the maintenance of the spirit of free inquiry”.
However, the last decade has witnessed an unprecedented trend of increasing centralisation and control by the Union government. Central funding is leveraged to push through its agenda of commercialisation, gross stratification of the public system, early vocationalisation (which can be caste-based) for the proletariat, and distortion and communalisation of curricula. The National Education Policy (NEP 2020) is a generic umbrella for new fiats directed towards institutions and states. Ironically, despite the “concurrent” status of education in the Constitution, the government seems to be bulldozing the best-performing States to succumb and conform.
For instance, two years ago some teachers of Delhi University targeted students of Kerala (having the highest educational indicators), who were admitted through the cut-off system with their Class 12 marks, as beneficiaries of a “marks jihad” state board conspiracy. Moreover, the next year with a shift to a centralised entrance test based on the CBSE curriculum (CBSE students dominate DU admissions), officials stated that the Kerala ‘anomaly’ had been resolved. No such concerns were raised about the numbers admitted from Bihar or Haryana, being under the same dispensation.
Funding ‘exemplar’ schools
Kerala and Tamil Nadu have been facing protracted delays with respect to centrally funded schemes, and have not received pending instalments of the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (SMSA), which expressly aims to ensure equitable access to quality education for all children, including the 6-14 year old under the Right to Education Act. The funding is shared in a 60:40 ratio by most States, amounting to a central support of about ₹3.2 lakh per school (as per 2021-22 figures). Indeed both States have been under implicit pressure to sign an MoU to implement the scheme of selected PM-SHRI schools, which requires states to contribute 40 percent of a much larger sum, but with the implementation of the CBSE curriculum, among other grounds for conformity with NEP.
The current budget allocates a large portion of its funds to this centrally favoured scheme of the ‘exemplar’ PM-SHRI, while substantially reducing funding to SMSA. As per an analysis by Center for Budget Governance and Accountability, of the central budget allocations between the years 2019-20 and 2024-25, while the share of funding to ‘exemplar’ schools increased from 19 percent to 29 percent, the share of SMSA dropped from 62 percent to 51 percent in the Department of School Education budget.
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The PM-SHRI schools selected are 8,108 in number and constitute less than 1% of the 11.6 lakh schools that get funding under the SSA. Each PM-SHRI school has an exclusive budget of about ₹97.5 lakh per year. The rebranding is problematic and leads to a more acutely differentiated public education system.
The recently renamed Kendriya Vidyalas and the Navodaya Vidyalayas, brought under this label, will further privilege a few at the cost of the rest. Schools from States which are being brought under this exclusive centralised model will be taken away from the State Boards, while being subjected to an implicit and expedient seeding of the neo-liberal tenets of NEP. These are already ‘selected’, and after the disproportionately generous funding, can be used to differentiate and ‘showcase’ as the “better performing” exemplars than the poor ‘others’ under the state system. The impact of such discrimination within the State system can be damaging, to say the least.
Recently in a counter affidavit in the Madras High Court, Tamil Nadu explained that being compelled to implement NEP 2020 would be “cruel and disadvantageous to the people of Tamil Nadu”, a state which has already achieved a Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) higher than the target of 50% proposed by NEP to be attained by 2035. It rightfully critiqued the policy with regard to vocational education beginning from Class 6, which would alienate and exclude vulnerable sections from formal education and the formal economy. It also insisted that continuous internal assessment, as per the original RTE mandate, is most appropriate for young students, and not the NEP mandated external tests, which can have an adverse impact on children being failed and forced to drop out.
At the dawn of another Teachers’ Day, we hope States that have followed the spirit of the Constitutional mandate for a more equitable and meaningful education for all will build consensus among other States, agencies and concerned people, and act together to resist the onslaught of detrimental policies that will disenfranchise the majority, already in the throes of poverty and unemployment.
(The author is an educationist and teacher who has served in several positions such as Dean of the Faculty of Education at Delhi University. Prof. Rampal was among experts who worked with the NCERT to develop the National Curriculum Framework 2005 and chaired the primary textbook development teams)
Published – September 05, 2024 09:31 am IST
