Educating our Education Minister

As someone who believes that the only good thing about Hindutva is its demand that Indian education be Indianised it always shocks me when I...

As someone who believes that the only good thing about Hindutva is its demand that Indian education be Indianised it always shocks me when I see Murli Manohar Joshi waste so much time doing other, quite unnecessary, things instead. The most recent of these is his attempt to meddle with the Indian Institutes of Management. Who is he to decide how many teachers they should have per student? Who is he to decide fee structures or the number of students that should be admitted? And, yet this is exactly what his ministry is doing without noticing that there is not a single government educational institution that comes remotely close to excellence. So why should a bunch of higher division clerks in the Human Resource Development Ministry be allowed to interfere in private institutions that have achieved educational standards that match the best in the world?

Hindutva comes into the picture when you remember that as one of this government’s most ardent proponents of the virtues and beauty of Indian culture should Mr Joshi not have spent more time preserving these? It is disgraceful that more than 55 years after the British left, the best schools and colleges in India are still those that teach in English. As our first Hindutva Education Minister, should Mr Joshi not be spending more time promoting excellence in schools and colleges that teach in Indian languages?

Had he not spent the past four years always climbing the wrong hill he might have noticed that the average Indian school child still knows more about Western culture and values than his own. The result is that the average Indian child grows up slightly ashamed of his own culture and more than slightly in awe of anything that comes from the West. So, instead of engaging in the global village as an equal he is inclined to see himself as a slightly inferior creature. This is dangerous even if we now produce the best software engineers in the world which, incidentally, Mr Joshi might put an end to if he continues to interfere with the IIMs and the IITs.

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We should remember that it is largely because of government interference in fee structures and student admissions that the few good universities and colleges we had have been bankrupted and forced to lower their standards. The only way to save them is to allow them to raise their fees and to collect money from endowments and other private sources. If the government feels it has to continue playing a role to protect the interests of students with financial disabilities then it should restrict itself to providing scholarships to meritorious but indigent students. This would solve the problem without forcing colleges to lower their standards because of keeping fees so low as to make even basic standards hard to maintain. Some colleges charge less for a month’s tuition fees than students spend on a packet of cigarettes or a meal in the college cafe.

It is often pointed out these days, by economists and political pundits, that by the year 2020 India will have the largest population of 21-year-olds in the world. If they remain illiterate or semi-educated they will be unable to compete in the globalised world so changes in our approach to education need to be made urgently. We need hundreds of thousands more colleges and schools and we need them to provide education and not mere functional literacy. Yet, in his four year tenure Mr Joshi has concentrated his efforts on the grandiosely named Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan that will be lucky if it churns out even the functionally literate.

The HRD Ministry routinely produces glossy pamphlets with statistics of how many new schools have been opened and how many more children are going to school. But, it is only if you go to the schools or meet some of the children that study in them that you discover that when they leave school they would not be considered educated, or employable, by any standards. Things are so bad even at the village level that the poorest Indians try to scrape their meagre resources together to send their children to private schools.

Primary education is a state subject, and should remain that way, but if the HRD Ministry has a role to play it is in evolving a policy that could show the way to a better education model. Of this we have so far seen not the faintest sign because to all intents and purposes the HRD Minister has been too busy trying to take control of institutions that have achieved high standards mainly because the state has not interfered.

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Meanwhile, on the Hindutva front the HRD ministry could have performed a historical role if it had examined school and college curricula with the idea of introducing an Indian element. It is farcical that Indian children study comparative literatures of the world without being able to read decent translations of modern writing in Indian languages. Farcical that they should discover Yoga only when it comes back via America and really shameful that it is almost impossible these days to find anyone who can read and write Sanskrit. The situation is so bad that to understand our own ancient texts we might eventually need to import scholars from American universities.

Instead of being concerned about these things, what has the HRD ministry been doing when it is not bringing the IIMs to heel? It has been employing semi-literate bigots to erase details of history on the specious grounds that historical details that offend religious sentiments must not be taught. There is much that has been good, even terrific, about the Vajpayee government but its education policy is not on that list.

— Write to tavleensingh expressindia.com