By Napoleon S. Mawphniang
Socrates once said that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what, I want to ask is the unexamined school? What of the unexamined policy? What of the government that signs documents and issues press releases and then — quietly, efficiently, almost artistically — looks the other way?
Let me start with a number. Just one. Sixteen point zero five percent.
That’s the Higher Secondary retention rate in Meghalaya. Sixteen percent. Meaning that out of every hundred children who walk through a school gate in this state with notebooks and a little hope tucked under their arms, only sixteen — sixteen — make it through to Higher Secondary level. The Meghalaya State Education Commission (MSEC) Report 2025 confirmed this. It’s not a rumour. It’s not opposition propaganda. It’s our own government’s commissioned data, sitting there like a body nobody wants to identify. ( as per The Shillong Times, November 26, 2025, citing the MSEC findings in a detailed analysis on education reform.)
Dostoevsky once wrote, “The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” I would add a corollary for our age: the degree of a government’s seriousness can be judged by entering its classrooms. Go. Visit one. Not the ones they photograph for brochures. Go to a lower primary school in North Garo Hills, where the secondary dropout rate is a staggering 43.54%. Tell me what civilisation looks like there.
There’s a Greek myth — Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, only for it to roll back down every time. Our education system is Sisyphean. We enrol children. We celebrate numbers. And then, quietly, we watch them leave — and we start again, celebrating fresh enrolments, pretending the haemorrhage didn’t happen. One in four students at the secondary level doesn’t complete Class X, according to the same MSEC Report. At the transition from Class X to XI? Only 35.28% of students make it. The boulder doesn’t even reach halfway up the hill.
And yet — here’s the question I can’t shake — where is the urgency? Where is the Chief Minister’s emergency press conference? Where is the Education Minister’s public apology to the parents of North Garo Hills, whose children are dropping out at rates that would embarrass a post-conflict nation?
Paulo Freire called education either a practice of freedom or a practice of domination. In our state Meghalaya, it has quietly, without announcement, become neither. It has become a practice of negligence. Which, in its own way, is the most insidious domination of all — because it doesn’t look like violence. It looks like bureaucratic inertia. It looks like officers juggling three district roles simultaneously because there simply aren’t enough people. It looks like a DIET faculty vacancy rate of 47% in Resubelpara. It looks like 95% of elementary schools having no electricity and 97% having no functional headmaster’s room. (as per The Shillong Times, November 26, 2025.)
Ask yourself: would you send your child to a school without electricity? Without a library? Without a trained teacher? No. Of course not. And neither would the Education Minister, if he’s being honest. But the children of our villages — our children, flesh of this soil — have no alternative.
Now comes the New Education Policy 2020. Bold. Ambitious. Transformative, they said as per policy. A 5+3+3+4 structure. Foundational Literacy and Numeracy missions. Twenty-first-century skills. Mother tongue instruction. All beautifully written. All magnificently framed.
And all, in Meghalaya, performing the role of decoration.
Wittgenstein said that language disguises thought. The NEP 2020 is extraordinarily skilled at this disguise. It speaks of “holistic development” and “multidisciplinary learning” — gorgeous, weightless phrases that cost nothing to write and apparently even less to implement. Hermeneutics teaches us to look past the surface of a text, to ask what the speaker actually means. Apply that lens to any government statement on education in Meghalaya, and the gap between what is said and what is done yawns like an abyss.
Meanwhile, nearly 30% of Meghalaya’s entire teaching workforce — 16,428 teachers — holds no professional teaching qualification. ( as perThe Shillong Times, November 26, 2025.) The largest concentration is at the Lower Primary level, where children are most vulnerable, most impressionable, most in need of pedagogical skill. And at the DIETs — the institutions tasked with training these very teachers — 30% of faculty positions sit vacant. Between 2019 and 2024, DIETs collectively trained only 18.85% of elementary teachers. Eighteen percent. In five years.
Ambedkar understood something that our present government seems to have forgotten entirely: that education is not charity to us . It is a constitutional obligation. It is the mechanism by which a democracy renews itself. Article 21A of the Constitution of India mandates free and compulsory education for children aged six to fourteen. It does not say “where convenient.” It does not say “subject to staff availability.” It says: compulsory.
Joost Meerloo, in The Rape of the Mind, described how the systematic erosion of critical thinking — through propaganda, through confusion, through deliberate institutional fatigue — produces populations who no longer question those who govern them. I’m not accusing our government of anything as calculated as that. But I am asking: when a government persistently fails to act on documented, published, peer-reviewed evidence of educational catastrophe — when the MSEC Report sits on shelves while children in North Garo Hills stop going to school — is there not something mildly Meerloovian about the silence that follows? The studied indifference? The press releases about digital transformation while 26.4% of schools have internet access?
Kafka would’ve recognised this system immediately. The Form Submitted But Never Processed. The Officer In Charge Of Three Districts Who Can Inspect None Properly. The Training That 81% of Teachers Never Received. The Policy Announced With Great Fanfare That Cannot Be Implemented Because The Infrastructure For It Doesn’t Exist. This is bureaucratic absurdism dressed in ministerial language, and the children caught inside it have no Gregor Samsa moment of revelation — they simply disappear. Into early labour. Into migration. Into the great statistical silence of “dropout.”
Orwell warned us – in Politics and the English Language that political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. When the Meghalaya government speaks of “alignment with NEP 2020,” I reach for Bah G Orwell. When they speak of “transformative reforms” while 84% of teachers go untrained in five years, I reach for Orwell again. The language is immaculate. The reality is grotesque.
So. What are the questions that demand answers?
Why has the government of Meghalaya not declared the education dropout rate a state emergency? Why are DIET faculty positions still vacant despite documented evidence of their critical role? Why was mother tongue instruction described as a “rhetorical aspiration” in the MSEC Report rather than operational reality? Why are untrained teachers being sent to West Bengal for training with, as The Shillong Times noted, “little information available on their performance”?
And the deepest question of all — the one Socrates might have asked, slowly, sitting in the agora, making the powerful uncomfortable — who is responsible? Not as a matter of blame, but as a matter of governance. Who owns this failure?
Education, BR Ambedkar believed, was the sunlight that the oppressed needed most desperately. In our state Meghalaya today, that sunlight is being blocked — not by malice, perhaps, but by something equally dangerous: by indifference wearing the face of governance. By a government that signs policy documents the way someone signs a menu at a restaurant — present for the ritual, absent for the consequences.
Sixteen percent retained. Eighty-four percent lost.
The boulder rolls back down. And Sisyphus — wearing the face of a child from North Garo Hills or Syad Lyngdoh Village — picks it up again.
The question is not whether Meghalaya’s children deserve better. The question is when we — the governed, the voters, the parents, the conscience of this state — will refuse to accept an answer that isn’t yes.
(Napoleon S. Mawphniang writes as a concerned citizen. The views expressed are entirely his own and represent no political affiliation).
