Dumbing down

Dumbing down

Quotas across the board will be disastrous for higher education.

While India’s agrarian crisis is well recognised by now, less mentioned is that India also has a full-blown education crisis on its hands – of which the latest ASER report by NGO Pratham is an indicator. Among class VIII children 56% are unable to divide a 3 digit number by a 1 digit one; a quarter of them lack even basic reading skills. Standards have declined even over the past decade. In 2008, 37% of class V children could do basic math and 84.8% of class VIII students could read class II level texts; now those numbers have declined to 28% and 72.8% respectively.

Moreover, recent government actions appear calculated to make India’s education crisis worse. Scrapping the no-detention policy means that children will be penalised for the education system’s failures. It is also likely to increase the dropout rate. Alongside, HRD minister Prakash Javadekar announced reservations will be extended to all private higher educational institutions, including unaided ones. This means that merit as well as the fundamental right to equality will be superseded by caste. It also destroys space for policy autonomy of private institutions, including unaided ones, and is legally contentious. The Allahabad high court ruled in 2011 that quotas do not apply to private unaided institutions.

The government is likely to introduce a bill to override legal objections. But SC should not allow legislation to trample on the fundamental right to equality, part of the Constitution’s basic structure. The Centre seems to be extending a familiar povertarian logic into education, which will only deepen its crisis: make up for public sector deficiencies by beating up on the private sector. If schools functioned well and imparted decent education to all, there would be no need for reservations in higher education.

While India seems to have adopted the Maoist dictum of “politics in command” when it comes to education, it’s instructive to look at how far China has come since it discarded Maoist precepts (at which time India and China were roughly level in scientific, educational and economic terms). Now, Times Higher Education rankings feature seven Chinese universities in the top 200, and zero Indian. The emerging economy rankings feature 25 Indian but 72 Chinese institutions, including four in the top five. China has overtaken the US in number of scientific papers. Meritocracy and vaulting ambition, in place of pretend egalitarianism and fake science, make China five times richer than India today. And thereby hangs a tale.