THE best piece of advice to a teacher, as she first steps into the world of education, is to shed the notion that a child has only one story. For those that can resist the temptation to stereotype children, the profession becomes an incomparably rewarding experience in understanding the myriad stories that go into the making of a child, and drawing on that understanding to shape a better human being. It would appear that education policy faces a similar challenge in India. If the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) is to be taken at face value, the perspectives of policy-makers on the nature of state and non-state players in education and their respective roles, appear sadly frozen in a one story framework. Much like young teachers, they need to break through their own stereotypes if they are to be able to meaningfully reform education policy in India.

This article offers an alternative perspective on the potential of non-state schools to further the right of children to a quality education. Rather than begin from a starting point of suspicion, viewing such schools as teaching shops, intent on generating quick profits for the owners, it points out that there is great heterogeneity in non-state schools. It discusses the many valuable contributions made by non-state schools, and the reasons why it is important to encourage such schools to flourish. Finally, it makes some concrete suggestions as to how education policy can be crafted to best harness the strengths of such schools to ensure a substantially improved education system.

In writing this article, I draw not only on what I have seen at St. Mary’s, New Delhi, a school of which I have been Principal since 1975, but also on my experience with the Central Board of Secondary Education, and organizations such as The Spastic Society of Northern India, now AADI, Pratham and the Centre for Equity Studies, all of which have given me some perspective on the relative strengths and weaknesses of government and private schools in India.

The emerging educational paradigm currently envisaged by the RTE demands greater inclusion and integration of children to help create a more equitable social milieu for access to opportunities. In today’s post-RTE world, we face the daunting challenge of ensuring that every child has access, not just to education but to an equitable, quality education. However, most policymakers and educational ideologues read the RTE Act as not just differentiating between state and non-state players, but assigning a clear priority to the former. Government schools are meant to lead the charge on education, whereas non-state schools are to be tightly regulated so as to prevent their fleecing innocent parents.

This dichotomy is puzzling, for surely the country’s interests will not be served by dividing schools into those that purportedly deliver an equitable, quality education (government schools) and those that do not (private school). The danger of dividing organizations working in the education sector into state and non-state negates the basic principle on which the Constitution is based. It is important to acknowledge here that the non-state sector is in principle in agreement with the 25% reservation provision. It is on the non-cooperative methods of implementation that the disagreement arises.

 

Non-state schools have a long history in India. Missionary schools in India made an appearance as early as 1780 and by 1840 were established in large numbers in a variety of places like Bengal, the Madras Presidency and the Punjab. The British in 1854 proposed a grants-in-aid scheme, as presented in the Woods Dispatch, to facilitate greater public participation in providing education. The dispatch encouraged individuals to set up schools and provided for grant-in-aid to institutions. (We do realize that the priority of the British was the army and its maintenance. But were they actually abdicating their responsibility when they gave Indians a grant-in-aid to set up schools, or were they extending their brief? Is there a parallel here?) Why, for instance would section 8(a) of the RTE Act state that if a child is admitted in a school other than a school established by the appropriate government… she shall not be entitled to reimbursement. Shouldn’t the state be offering to pay the non-state players for helping with a task that they are mandated to do?

In the early post-independence years, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru called upon the people of the country to come forward and participate in enabling education for all. Individuals responded in large numbers and history as well as fiction is replete with stories of philanthropic individuals who set up educational institutions at great cost to themselves, some even going bankrupt in the process.

 

Let’s fast-forward to the present. Is the RTE a call for people’s participation? Does it inspire the spirit of ‘all hands on deck’? Or does it replace the spirit of a collective national programme with that of a soulless government bureaucracy? Even a casual reading of the act suggests that its approach to private schools is grounded in a desire to control and monitor the participation of non-state institutions in providing education, rather than in effecting systemic changes in both government and non-state schools.

Apart from placing the unaided schools in a separate category, the RTE Act requires private unaided schools to take in 25% children from the economically challenged category, and not just educate them but also provide books, food, and uniforms. All this, while the RTE section 9(b) rules out reimbursement of any kind, particularly for those schools that were given land at ‘concessional rates’ [section 12(2)], whatever that means. Not only does the state not offer reimbursement, it also imposes commercial taxes on non-state schools for essential services like electricity, water and land. Parents whose children study in non-state schools pay an educational cess as well as the school fees.

 

Private unaided schools are also required to provide ‘special training’ to enable children from economically weaker sections to ‘be at par with other children’ (p. 15, Framework of Implementation), to familiarize them to the new, changed educational transactional mode and to enable them to cope with an age appropriate class (chapter IV, clause 2, RTE). This is a problematic understanding of education that through ‘special training’, another word for remediation, all children will arrive at a one size fits all. In my experience, not just children with special needs but also typical children may not keep pace with everybody as required by Section 24(c). What they require is an education that nurtures their strengths while stretching them to the limits of their abilities, not a homogenized, institutionalized education.

Many private schools, at least the more sensitive ones, do appreciate that without a critical mass of the poor and disadvantaged, processes of inclusion will not succeed. Their objection is not to the quota but to the denial of assistance flowing out of an absence of togetherness.

The RTE Act makes fine distinctions between state and non-state sector schools. Section IV(27) of the Act, says that teachers from state schools can be deployed for ‘elections to the local authority or the state legislature or parliament as well as for census and disaster relief duties.’ Clause 27, is, however, not binding on non-state sector schools. Considering that government schools are the ones that have a shortage of teachers and high absence rates, it is beyond comprehension why state schools would allow their teachers to be used for anything other than education. To have this stated in the act and to have it also used as a framing device is a classic case of impliculture, which is that government school teachers are not real teachers but clerks who can be ‘deployed’ while non-state players will continue to do the real job of education.

 

In the Framework of Implementation of SSA, the delivery vehicle of the RTE, there is only one solitary mention of private unaided schools and that too towards the end of the document (p. 137) under ‘What can NCPCR monitor’. The NCPCR is required to monitor whether private unaided schools reserve 25% seats for children from weaker sections and disadvantaged groups. What does this total blanking out of the private unaided players mean? Even the chapter on ‘Participation and Role of Community and Civil Society’, which talks of the need for SSA to join hands with ‘experienced and active civil society members’, makes no mention or acknowledgement of private unaided schools.

While the RTE Act is proactive in many areas, it nevertheless leaves far too much ‘impliculture’ or cultural implicativeness.¹ For example:

* The education of children with disabilities is addressed separately in chapter II and not treated as an integral part of the rights of all children [chp II, 3(1)]. Are children with disabilities not a part of all children?

* The constant focus on age appropriate admission when combined with ‘complete entire curriculum within the specified time’ [section 24(c)], ‘all-round development of the child’, and ‘comprehensive and continuous evaluation of child’s understanding of knowledge and his ability to apply the same’ [section 29 (2.b)] raises concerns about the treatment of children with special needs. Rather than enabling children to learn at their own pace and providing the space to do so, the Framework for Implementation seems to believe that all children can pursue the same routine, recommending that ‘the same curriculum be followed for children with and without special needs.’ Does this not go against the spirit of child-centred education? Is homogeneity rather than the celebration and acknowledgment of diversity the goal of the RTE?

* The act seems to be oblivious to the subtle needs of the urban deprived, such as the growing number of homeless street children and migrants who, alongside other disadvantaged groups such as girls from minority communities, require residential schools. Equally, it seems to be blind to the many NGOs and other community-based initiatives that provide education to children in slums and new migrant settlements. What will happen if they are shut down, as is likely, since many of them will find it difficult to comply with the many provisions of the RTE Act? Where will these children go considering that government schools have yet to make a presence in many slums?

 

It is in such a scenario of divide and rule that we discuss what might be the role and contribution of the non-state sector in school education? Is it, as is often asserted, the big bad wolf of school education, only out to make a quick buck from the ‘innocent’ poor desperate for education opportunities. Children in difficult circumstances need different offerings, and given the diversity of circumstances, it is virtually impossible for the state or entities monitored by the state in a bureaucratic framework, to provide all of these. The RTE would do well to acknowledge that infrastructure in itself does not contribute to good pedagogy. Rabindranath Tagore himself advocated an open classroom, back to nature scenario. Private schools are better placed to meet these diverse needs. The reality is that just as it takes all kinds to make the world, and just as the state offers a widely varying bouquet of educational institutions, the non-state sector schools too constitute a diverse range of offerings and intentions.

 

The non-state sector schools range from the newly built, posh, airconditioned international schools, to others low on infrastructure, high on social priority, running in makeshift structures. These schools are found in a variety of locations – in rural areas, busy urban and semi-urban areas, conflict-ridden zones, places no man has ventured – and they cater to diverse aspirational needs. The services offered and the underlying values vary – some are high on heart and moral fibre, some rich in educational pedagogy and thought, while others are rich in materialistic infrastructure. They vary in heart and body from the Ambani School in Bombay to the ones running in the urban slums of Delhi like Deepalaya or the iconic Loretto Girls School at Sealdah.

Each of the schools pursues different routes and processes, but the goal is common. The larger framework covers the languages, mathematics, science and social studies in an effort to provide holistic education. Some, like the schools run by the minority communities, began with an agenda to serve the interests of the community or to raise levels of understanding about the community. A case in point is the Hamdard schools or the many Christian Catholic, convent schools that serve throughout the country. To put these schools into a category that is believed to be commercial and profit-making is to undermine and negate the very spirit with which they were set up. Schools like St. Mary’s and Kathalaya play as important a role as the International School at Kodikanal or the result-oriented DPS schools, or for that matter the state-run Pratibha Vikas Vidyalayas or the Navodaya Vidyalayas.

 

In order to outline the role and area of contribution, as well to demarcate the gamut of offerings and the spirit of holistic education that prevails in the non-state sector, I focus on one school in Delhi, the St. Mary’s School in Safdarjung Enclave, New Delhi, which was started by an air force officer’s wife. Responding to the prime minister’s appeal, calling on the people to help with education, with nothing more than a month’s LTC in hand and a lot of energy, a nursery school was started in rented accommodation. Today that school, close to forty-five years down the line, is a coeducational senior secondary school, affiliated to the CBSE, catering to almost fourteen hundred students.

Being a school set up by an individual, enabled the institution to chart its own course within the broad parameters laid down by the Directorate of Education and the CBSE. The Directorate of Education of Delhi in the ’70s and the ’80s was extremely conscientious, with some very hard working people whose annual inspections served to focus the school on delivering quality, caring education in a clean, healthy environment. The mandate was to make a change in the lives of the children, many of who were, and continue to be, first generation learners. The policy of the school from its inception was to admit any child from the neighbourhood that knocked on its doors. Towards this end, the school offered freeships to ensure that the fee charged did not become a barrier to the economically challenged.

It was in trying to understand and implement inclusion in every sense of the word that the school first modified its infrastructure. Ramps were built wherever possible and subsequently a lift was installed to ensure that children with physical challenges had access to every floor. Furniture was modified to individual needs and toilets were equipped with supporting bars. It took just a single, visually challenged child for the school to realize that most classroom methodologies catered to a homogeneous group. As a diverse student population entered the school, modifications became a daily feature. Each special child meant new challenges and new opportunities for growth. It was only natural and logical that methods of assessment too were modified to suit individual needs and well before CCE was introduced into class IX and X, the school was using a comprehensive and continuous child-centred method to assess its children. Soon lessons from this diversity of classroom transaction and assessment patterns were extended to include all children.

 

When approached from a rights-based perspective (and not through a medical or charity model), inclusion has the ability to transform teaching methodologies and assessment practices. It helps enhance a teacher’s repertoire of classroom transactions. In the quest to reach the child, the teacher has to reach into herself for new ideas and reservoirs of understanding – as a result, teacher empowerment is an important outcome of the ongoing journey of inclusion. It is a journey that requires each group – parents, teachers and children – to examine themselves and to change orientation in order to accommodate each other better. Attitudes that once appeared rigid slowly changed and people became more tolerant and understanding of differences. This melting down of hardened attitudes and prejudices continues to be a major focus in all programmes of the school.

On the basis of an all-India survey commissioned by the MHRD, the school was awarded the title of the ‘No. 1 School with a Heart’ in the year 2000 for its spirit of social empowerment. In the aftermath of 26/11, the governing body of the school decided to proactively admit children from the Muslim community to help combat prejudice and to ensure that children grow in a plural and diverse environment, aware and appreciative of the diversity of our country.

 

It would take another article to describe the issues and challenges faced in becoming a ‘school with a heart’. Starting with adapting the curriculum to make it more inclusive and experiential, the school addressed value systems and assessment procedures. Most importantly, the school learned to work with a judicious mix of formal boards (like the CBSE and the National Open School). Respecting and valuing diversity demands openness to multiple paths. No one path can suit all. This is what enabled the school to ensure that no child drops out because of lack of encouragement and support.

The poor in urban areas are excited about RTE because it gives them a chance to enrol their children in ‘good schools’. Many of them sincerely believe that admission into a private school would create new opportunities for their children – and that their futures would be different. If we dip into our collective memories, there are many educational trusts and missionaries that set up schools which cater to all and provided a huge boost to education. Many of them did not charge high fees! Therefore, it is important to dispel the notion that everything ‘private’ is necessarily expensive.

Equally, it is important for the government to acknowledge that there cannot be one single model which can meaningfully cater to the immense diversity of our children. The government has to ensure adequate space for innovation and experimentation for people and organizations to try out different approaches. By discriminating against a particular group of providers and by ignoring the variety that exists on the ground, the RTE Act has contributed to a divide, which in turn allows for exploitation.

The non-state sector straddles the world of both global international school and the NGO run schools in bastis. It caters to both the rich MNC chief executive as well as the rag picker on the street. It encompasses the schools started by multinational companies and wannabe educators, as well as individual entrepreneurs and social activists starting schools in villages and their homes. All these need encouragement and monitoring to ensure that there is an equitable, quality education available to the children of this country.

It also requires that both the non-state sector schools and the state run schools work together in tandem to deliver a child-centred, locale-specific, age and ability appropriate, global education. Given the freedom and a supportive environment, one that is not discriminatory or suspicious of anything and everything that is ‘non-state’, there is no limit to what is possible.

 

Footnote:

1. See R.B. Nair, Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition, Culture. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2002, p. 188.