By Albert Thyrniang
“Education and Health – Need for a Special Assembly Session” (6th January, 2014) by Toki Blah captures the gloomy education and health scenario in the state. The ICARE president rightly pointed out that Education and Health care are two crucial sectors that indicate the society’s level of progress. In Meghalaya, the quality of these two segments is, in general, poor. Therefore, the state is undeveloped. The focus of this article is on education/government schools in rural areas.
Mr. Blah listed the reasons for our pathetically poor education – visionless parents, teachers and government, outdated (rote) teaching method, poorly paid and ill-equipped teachers, ‘surrogate parenting’ among others. Due to these defects, education in the state runs the risk of a total collapse. The education imparted has lost relevance and credibility.
Hoping to avoid an impending disaster and to comprehensively revamp the system to make education relevant to the 21st century, the writer has called for a special Assembly session. He concluded with a challenge to state leaders, “Will our MLAs have the nerve to take it up?” Well, it could be an embarrassing ‘No’! Do our legislators know the importance of education? Some of them are ‘uneducated’ and ‘unqualified’. The richest MLA is a class eight passed. Many of them murmur something in public functions indicating an un-reflected mind. Surely, foreign official tours are for sightseeing only!
Do we have thinkers in the law making house? Do we have policy framers? Do we have ‘legislators’? Or instead do we have businessmen, coal barons, weigh bridge owners? What are the preoccupations of these businessmen-politicians? Their own business interests? The environment? The economy? Unemployment? Social unrest? Heath care? Or education? Do they realize the need to frame new educational policies to suit the present age?
Returning to poor quality education in the state, probably the reason goes right to the Lower Primary level. Last year a survey for rural Karnataka by Pratham, an NGO came up the “Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2013”. Some of the shocking findings were published in the Shillong Times recently. More than half of class I students can read only letters but not words. 42.2 percent children of class V can read only class II-level text books. Only 28 percent students of Class III can do subtraction.
If this is the state of affairs in Karnataka, a progressive state, the condition in Meghalaya could be worse. We do not have a similar survey here, so no comparative study. Statistics may be unavailable but the ground reality remains: education is qualitatively poor particularly in rural areas. Unfortunately contributors are teachers themselves.
Last month, in a public meeting in Gabil village, North Garo Hills, people complained that the headmaster of the Government L.P. School of the village was absent for the whole year. If this is so, how and what do the children learn? What do teachers teach? No wonder the Gabil village and its surroundings remain one of the most backward areas. L.P. schools have to function regularly. This is the first and sure road to development.
Gabil’s case is not isolated. A whole year absence may be extreme but teachers’ irregularity is common in all rural villages. Illiterate, ignorant and un-empowered parents do not complain and hence the ‘no work culture’ goes on unabated. Often one finds children playing in schools’ courtyards till late morning. When they are fed up or hungry they return home. At times a teacher appears all of a sudden, orders the children in, halfheartedly takes a half an hour class and dismisses children back home.
These absentee and irregular teachers are shrewd. To please parents they pass all the children in all the classes. Marks in the progress report are very impressive. But in reality children know little. Class I students can’t read words like ‘cow’, ‘dog’, ‘boy’ or ‘girl’. Class IV students can’t write their name and do single digit arithmetic additions. Now teachers have a ‘legal’ excuse: RTE does not allow teachers to fail any one.
It is learned that there are a lot of irregularities in L.P. schools. One of them is subcontracting the job. An appointed teacher does not teach. He/she ‘appoints’ an unqualified unemployed to do the job by proxy. While he/she draws a hefty salary, the subcontracted teacher gets a meager share.
The blame for the anomalies is squarely on the absence of inspection. Concerned officials don’t inspect schools. They rely on attendance registers (teachers and students) which are naturally tiptop and spick and span. The subcontract business is never detected for the same reason – nil inspection. Even if discovered, a bribe is paid and it’s business as usual.
If this is the case, rural Meghalaya will be certainly worse than rural Karnataka. Class I students are not able to read words. Class III students can solve simple addition and subtraction problems. Class V can’t even read text books of class II.
The story is pretty much the same in Upper Primary and Secondary schools. About SSA schools, the less said the better. They have six teachers with 10-15 registered students. The required qualification for teachers is Higher Secondary passed or graduate. Majority of these teachers have only Arts background. Some might have failed in Mathematics or Science in SSLC examination but teach Mathematics and Science. SSA schools are actually lowering the quality of education in the state to a great extent.
The government has to hold teachers responsible. Through routine and surprise inspections they have to ensure that teachers attend duty regularly. Stern action must be taken against erring teachers. Teachers have to realize that it is their own children who stand to lose. It is children of their villages who are deprived of a rightful education. It is the children of their own community who are being destroyed by their negligence. Parents may be illiterate and indifferent. But teachers are not. They are paid to educate young minds and are ought to do so with all seriousness.
The lack of good foundation in arithmetic and language skills is carried on into the Upper Primary and is acutely felt at Secondary and Higher Secondary levels when students have to appear in public examinations. Unable to cope with the demands there is large scale drop-out and failure. Meghalaya produces hundreds of drop-outs and failures every year at the Secondary and Higher Secondary stages in spite of the MBOSE’s graciousness of passing students who fail in one of the subjects. The state, therefore, faces a cumulative problem of failures and drop-outs year after year.
Even those who succeed academically are not guaranteed employment. As they come through a faulty system that emphasizes on mere marks, they are unskilled and un-enterprising. A lucky few, mostly by bribe and influence, will get government jobs. The rest remain unemployed and unemployable youths who turn up to be anti-social elements, militants, law breakers and creators of social unrest.
Rural inhabitants constitute 80 per cent of Meghalaya’s population. Therefore, to raise the quality of education in the state rural education has to improve first. Is there any other option? The responsibility falls on the government as it is the main provider of education in rural areas. As everywhere, in our state too education has been a major tool of social transformation. But as quality has dipped alarmingly, education has to now drastically change itself. The enforcer of that change is obviously the government. Without ignoring parents and students, teachers are the next in order of importance.