Delhi-Unconnected dots malaise

The 13th Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018 — the labour of love of 30,000 volunteers (mainly college students) mobilised by the globally-respected Mumbai/Delhi-based NGO Pratham Education Foundation (estb.1994) — released in New Delhi on January 15, has caused a storm in the teacups of the small number of academics, intellectuals and media pundits who appreciate the critical value of real rather than ritual education as the foundation block of national development. Immediately after ASER 2018 was formally released by a group of ASER volunteers in mid-January, loud lamentations broke out across the country with national dailies penning breast-beating and hand-wringing editorials. A lead editorial (January 17) in the Indian Express comments: “Like its previous editions, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018 raises several worrying questions… one out of four children in rural India leaves class VIII without basic reading skills and over half of them cannot solve a basic division problem. It’s high time that the government joins the dots between the predicaments it faces in the economy and the malaise in the educational sector.” The editors of the best-selling Times of India — India’s #1 English language daily with 14 editions countrywide which (like most mainstream media) regards education of the masses as a matter of peripheral interest — also seem to have belatedly become aware of the enormity of the crisis in public primary education and are beginning to join the dots. “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,” said the lead editorial in the Times of India (January 17), evidently unaware that EducationWorld has been warning of this “full-blown education crisis” since 1999 when it was launched with the mission statement to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”. The belated alarm of media pundits is understandable. Although the authors of ASER 2018 report that the percentage of class V children who can read class II texts has increased from 47.9 percent in 2016 to 50.3 percent in 2018, and the proportion of class V children who can correctly do simple division sums has inched up from 26 to 27.8 percent, these ‘improvements’ in learning outcomes are too insignificant and well within the margin of statistical error to be given any weightage. ASER 2018 is yet another indictment of the country’s low-quality politicians who still can’t connect the dots between the country’s agrarian disaster (32 rural suicides per day) and the dysfunctional rural school system which is disgorging millions of wholly unprepared, if not illiterate, youth into the Indian economy. Yet despite this annual litany highlighting the shocking dysfunction of the rural primary education system dominated by state government schools, there’s a curious reluctance within the Central and state governments, and the establishment, to call for larger budgetary provision for education, particularly school education. Neither…