The State of Education in Rural India: Are the impoverished youth in India actually learning?
It is no surprise that the public education system in India is shameful. There is no proper regard given to students who cannot afford private education, teachers care least about teaching, insufficient public funds are provided to government schools to cover infrastructural costs, and impecunious students are not provided with basic facilities for learning like books and stationary.
According to a survey by the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), only 43% of students among 14 to 18 year old's could solve a class IV mathematics problem. Only 40% of 18-year-olds could take 10% off a given number. More than that percentage could not locate their state on a map of India. Twenty-seven percent of 14-year-olds, and 21% of 18-year-olds could not read a class II textbook in the regional language, and more than 40% in each age group could not read a simple sentence in English (such as “What is the time?”).
This is appalling, even after the government implemented The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act in 2009. The act emphasizes the importance of free and compulsory education for children between 6 and 14 in India under Article 21a of the Indian Constitution. Yet, the impoverished youth of India remains uneducated.
Many families who lack resources still refuse to send their children to school. The act exists in theory but there has been no proper enforcement of it to ensure poor families are actually making use of such a provision. A report on the status of implementation of the Act was released by the Ministry of Human Resource Development on the one year anniversary of the Act. The report admitted that 8.1 million children in the age group six-14 remained out of school and there was a shortage of 508,000 teachers country-wide.
The children who do end up in government schools are not presented with any fruitful learning. There is no performance check of teachers in such schools, or evaluation of their teaching system. They only care about sustaining their jobs and not for the students’ learning. If the free education system is not educating children, how is it at all beneficial?
The families who put hope in the free education and government school system believe that their children will help uplift them from the harrows of their poverty. But, how will the young people find quality jobs when they are being taught in such a shabby manner. The point of education is to help students grow but that is the least care of government schools in India. We need more effective policies for this system and enforcement of conceptual and experiential learning.
By Alankrita Arora