By Patricia Mukhim
It’s time to face some home truths ….Education has never been an election agenda in Meghalaya. Politicians have never been told to fix education or people would not vote for them. The focus has always been to ‘protect’ the people from the ubiquitous outsider without ever defining who that ‘outsider’ is. But this has never failed to score political mileage every five years. Noted Sociologist, Durkheim has correctly observed that he was very sceptical of the power of unaided reason to penetrate the complexities of social and moral realities. This exactly is the problem with large sections of voters in Meghalaya. Their priorities during elections are picnics and freeloading – not asking questions from their candidates and putting out a set of pragmatic demands that would benefit people at large. About education as a poll issue, the less said the better. It never was and perhaps never will be a matter that supersedes all other issues even if that is what is the most crucial agenda. No wonder education is in such an abysmal state.
The other day while on a visit to Lawpyllun which is one of the 266 villages under the Umsning Block, Ri Bhoi district, I learned that the village has only one primary school and most children drop out since they have to travel some distance to reach the high school in Umsning. Also, the young adolescents there showed no enthusiasm about the whole idea of continuing with their education. The 10-12 year old young children were quite happy to stay at home and do housework. Why is it that education is not a priority for most rural households? Is it any surprise then that we have teenage pregnancies since there seems to be no other attraction for the young except sex. And since they have never been taught safe sex and condom use, the girls bear the burden of pregnancy and a series of childbirths. Few of these adolescent cohabitations last. The boy/man finds that sex was just a delusion of grandeur – a temporary enjoyment and he does not have the wherewithal to carry the burden of a family. So, he leaves the girl high and dry. This is the reason for such huge numbers of single-parent headed households in Meghalaya.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former member of the United States Senate very presciently observed that the rise of single parent households would make poverty more intractable. Moynihan couldn’t have been more correct when he said, “A community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families – never acquiring any stable relationship to make authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future – that community asks for and gets chaos.” Moynihan speaks from personal experience. He has himself grown up in a single mother household and worked as a shoe-shine boy at the corner of Broadway.
On January 13,2025 when Chief Minister, Conrad Sangma inaugurated the Captain Sangma State University, he also made a powerpoint presentation about the dismal state of education in Meghalaya. Perhaps this is the first time that a sitting Chief Minister has decided to look at the problem from an objective set of lenses. His presentation highlights the humongous problems for education in Meghalaya where funds have been sunk into schools that did not exist or schools that were in dilapidated condition and have since closed.
We have heard of ghost schools operating for several years in Meghalaya but no government has had the gumption to shut down those schools and stop the revenue leakage. This is because all governments have allowed political pressure to override pragmatic action to arrest the decline in educational standards. When Chief Minister Conrad Sangma in his presentation showed the graphic figures one could see the discomfiture in the room. It’s not as if this is not known to the MLAs/ministers and bureaucrats present. The real problem was that no decision could be taken without calculating the political implications of such decisions.
So the facts as presented by the CM are stark and shocking. Out of the total of 14,582 schools in Meghalaya, 206 schools have zero students yet teachers are teaching ghost pupils and the government has been paying them. Over and above that there are 2,269 schools with single digit students. Yet no rationalisation has been attempted.
Of the Deficit and Ad-hoc schools – there are 18 schools with zero enrolment and 1141 schools with single digit enrolment.
Compared to the other states Meghalaya with population of 29.66 lakhs has 14,582 schools and 55,160 teachers with 7783 government schools and 4172 aided ones. In Nagaland there are no aided schools and 1960 government schools with 31,402 teachers. Tripura with a much higher population at 36.73 lakhs has only 4,929 schools, 36,433 teachers and 43 aided schools. Manipur with 25.70 lakh population has 4,617 schools and 42,684 teachers with 583 aided schools.
Think of the huge amount of money, perhaps thousands of crores of rupees spent over 50 years or rather that has been leaked into a bottomless pit to pay non-existent teachers or so-called teachers who have enjoyed their salaries without teaching. Do we wonder then why education in Meghalaya is in a state of near collapse particularly in the rural areas and why the drop-out rate is escalating?
The reality is that we have far too many people calling themselves teachers but very few tried and tested educators. One might ask what the difference between a teacher and an educator is since the two words are often used interchangeably as if they carry the same meaning when they don’t.
A teacher is someone who imparts knowledge and instructs students in a specific subject or skill. Teachers focus on delivering information and ensuring that students understand and apply that information in their day to day lives, but without the commitment and drive to follow up on each student. An educator on the other hand does not just teach but also inspires and shapes a student’s persona, his/her worldviews. An educator hand-holds the students and treats them like mentees. For an educator, teaching does not end in the classroom. Educators interact with students outside the classroom too, to grasp what they really feel about life and what they go through in their homes and families. Hence an educator has empathy which most teachers lack.
Above all, an educator fosters critical thinking, encourages creativity, and instils values and life skills. Teachers on the other hand limit themselves to a classroom setting. So while both the teacher and educator play their own roles in shaping the minds and future of students, I would like to believe that educators have a broader scope of influence. And students who are in the hands of an educator would not drop out of school. How many teachers visit the home of a student to find out why she/he has opted not to study anymore and engage with the student so as to be able to address the problem and perhaps find resources for the student to return to school.
Now that the Chief Minister himself has analysed the problem of education like no one else before him has done, he would also require the courage of conviction to deal with the farce of continuing to pay teachers who teach ghost pupils and also rationalise those schools with single digit students. Money saved can be put to use by finding the best sets of educators who will give their best to the cause of uplifting education. Let’s all bear in mind one reality – appointing teachers based on reservation and religion is what has brought education to its nadir.