--Originally published at Leadership Boulevard
Traveling around the villages and talukas of Solapur during the past few weeks, I have been struck by the number of ‘prathamik shalas’ (Primary Schools) dotting the landscape. These are decrepit, dilapidated 2-3 room structures with a pencil proclaiming ‘Sarva Siksha Abhiyan’ drawn on whatever surface is available in the building! I have been left wondering if this has not been a colossal waste of money and effort over the past 60 years of Independent India!
One of the guiding tenets of India’s education policy has been to solve the problem of access. In a country where over 60% people live in Tier 5 or 6 centres (as per census these are collections of less than 9999 people), it was considered important to help every child be able to go to school - at least up to 8th standard. This is a laudable tenet. We must enable every child to access excellent education, irrespective of where he or she is born.
The strategy to achieve this goal, however is debatable. We went with the approach of building schools in rural and remote locations. The Right to Education Act infact, formally put the onus on the Government to ensure a Primary school exists within 1 km of a child’s residence. This led to a flurry of construction, adding more classrooms, building boundary walls, toilets etc to ensure schools are available at 1 km distance. But this ignores one fundamental truth about education - A building does not a school make. For learning to happen, at least till Elementary school, we need collaborative groups of children guided by capable teachers. As a professor of IIM, Ahmedabad has pointed out in his analysis re: proliferation of IIMs around the country - it is always better to augment capacity of a good institution instead of opening new institutions. I would alter this a bit in the context of schools to say that schools with 400 to 1000 students will have the physical resources and human resources to drive good learning. So we should enable bigger schools rather than opening more and more small, single room schools in small villages.
So maybe we should have invested in more buses than more buildings? Maybe it was the student who should have gone to the school instead of the school coming to the student. In earlier times, students went to a gurukul. The gurukul didn’t come to the student. A transport model that ensured that within a 30 minute maximum riding distance, there is a school where adequate resources (read: internet, teaching learning material and sports facilities) exist, where a reasonable cohort of trained teachers exist, would be a great learning place for students.
What we have instead is Single teacher schools and single room schools with double digit students often crammed into the same room because it isn’t efficient to teach them their grade level content. We get access but no learning. How do children learn when there are 1 or 2 in a class and they are all sitting in the same room with one teacher? They get marked ‘present’ in school but neither their present or future is being developed at such places!
What we have instead is Single teacher schools and single room schools with double digit students often crammed into the same room because it isn’t efficient to teach them their grade level content. We get access but no learning. How do children learn when there are 1 or 2 in a class and they are all sitting in the same room with one teacher? They get marked ‘present’ in school but neither their present or future is being developed at such places!
Economically too, investing in buses is more efficient than constructing new school buildings. So why did we not consider this as a solution? Did it just skip us as an alternative? Was it politically more sellable to construct schools than put buses? Is traveling to a good school not better than walking to a shitty one?
Let's map India and identify centres that are upto 30 minutes from any hutment. Let's identify existing schools that have reasonable structures, adequate student strength and a working teacher cohort. Let’s then develop these schools with internet, teaching learning resources and teacher upgradation. And let's run buses from the nearby villages to bring students to these schools.
Shut down all single room schools where no learning is really happening. Return this land to the panchayat or the highest bidder and earn some money for the state exchequer or local body. For the pre-primary students for whom traveling is difficult, there are anyways anganwadis (more on them in a separate post!). Wouldn’t this improve the quality of education? Isn’t this a less costly and more effective solution to the problem of access to quality education that plagues India?
Anyone who recommends that we don’t really need this, that the internet will disrupt everything either doesn’t know school education or looks at everything through ‘technology tinted’ glasses. We’ll need knowledgeable adults (humans or bots) who will provide guided learning paths to students at least up to the age of 12-13. Till this age, human development experts will tell you, children are yet to fully develop their ability to of self-direction, self-control, and meta-cognition that are important for self-guided learning. So we need schools for the near to medium future.
Let just have more buses and less buildings!