Today, September 5, is celebrated as Teachers’ Day in India.
The Bihar government recently came out with a detailed Request For Proposal (RFP) for the ‘Empanelment of Professional Educational Institutes for Academic Support in Government Senior Secondary School.’
This is for its 9,000 senior secondary schools, in all districts divided into four zones, for the effective implementation of the programme.
However, the ‘academic’ gloss quickly wears off, beginning with listing the expected tasks of providing academic support, taking ‘academic sessions’, to bidding with the ‘lowest cost method’, for taking regular physical or virtual classes during the school time. Moreover the bidding rate is separately asked for physical or virtual classes, and for each of the listed subjects – Science (Physics, Chemistry, Botany and Zoology), Math, Computer Science, Hindi or English. The monthly progress report requires the syllabus covered, the number and duration of lectures taken, and the attendance of lecturers and students.
Indeed, by the time we get to page 11 of the RFP, the plan is clear, the language cold and bold. It demands an Earnest Money Deposit of Rs 5 lakh by a bidder registered under the Bihar Coaching Institute (C&R) Act, 2010, with an “average annual turnover of INR 10 crore or more in the last three financial years as of 31st Mar 2022. From coaching business (sic).”
After several details of the financial kind, including on fraud and corrupt practices, a small note at the end of page 20 says that the minimum qualification of the faculty should be “Post Graduation/B.Tech/or equivalent course in the subject concerned”. This does not include a professional education degree such as a B.Ed. or an M.Ed.
A Deeply Disturbing Teachers’ Day
We are witnessing a deeply disturbing Teachers’ Day, after most states have completely buckled under the lure and guidance of NEP 2020, to aggressively privatise their public education systems through all kinds of means, and abandon commitments for providing quality and equity for all.
Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh went to the World Economic Forum at Davos, to sign a memorandum with the digital coaching provider Byju’s, asking them to improve their curriculum for secondary and senior secondary school. This is notwithstanding charges against Byju’s for malpractices over luring and misinforming parents about their children’s abilities and the need for this coaching. Meanwhile the Delhi government announced it had paid a ‘discounted price’ of Rs 1 crore as the first instalment for affiliating a few of its special schools to the most expensive international board – the International Baccalaureate.
And now Bihar has devised its bizarre scheme for employing and legitimising the coaching industry, to teach its senior most classes. It is also luring large numbers of its unemployed into this business, without any qualifications for being teachers. In one manipulative stroke Bihar does all of this, and brazenly delegitimises the place for professional teacher education and the critical need for sustained long term investment in this area. To pay as per the lowest bid for one class – where a specific subject can be ascribed a different ‘boli’ or call out rate, in a given school or geographical area, is making a farce of teaching.
Our country has been facing the crisis of having very poor quality teacher education, with almost ninety percent of its institutions being run by private players often guided by grossly commercial interests. In fact the public demand for the Right to Education Act 2009 had also voiced concerns that governments were compromising on quality by appointing various kinds of para-teachers, or unqualified and low-paid contractual personnel.
However, even as they grandstand on the qualities of our traditional gurus and aspire for India as a Vishwaguru, NEP 2020 and the NCF 2023 override the RTE in critical ways, closing and merging thousands of schools, promoting ‘alternative pathways’ which include pushing children under 14 years into open and distance learning, or into low-value vocational courses. Now diverting precious public funds to bolster commercial coaching institutes, is like sounding a death knell to a public system that is accountable for much more, than the mere “outcomes” of passing an examination.
On August 23 we watched a serene, intelligently navigated, elegant touchdown on the moon, and acknowledged the indigenous efforts of scientists working on modest budgets, who had studied in smaller regional colleges of science and engineering, not from feted institutes of technology, to which the coaching industry is tethered. Witnessing the moon landing had buoyed aspiring young students to follow their footsteps in science, hopefully to also give them some alternative openings to plan for.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
But strangely, on the same day, a moonstruck National Curriculum Framework 2023 ominously dispensed with science in primary school.
NCF 2023 has pushed out Environmental Studies (EVS) from being one of three main areas of learning at the primary stage. Coining a new inconsequential name – ‘The World Around Us’ – sounding more like a book title than a regular school subject, the NCF indicates this as an informal set of activities and excursions not requiring a textbook.
The draft NCF (May 2023) said that teachers are not able to teach EVS, the only subject which integrated primary science and social science, because of it being interdisciplinary. This is in stark contradiction to its own position, where it repeatedly promotes multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary courses. It questionably places the onus on teachers, to throw out EVS, because they are unable to ‘drive discussions’ about the social environment. But it clearly doesn’t tell us how teachers are to be professionally trained to reflect on and address social realities.
The killing fields of Kota
We are everyday hearing poignant stories from the killing fields of the Kota coaching industry. An image last week of the institutes’ buildings securely covered with ‘safety nets’ – to make them suicide proof – was almost surreal in its dehumanised complacence. Who would have thought of a ‘safety net’ literally to fall to this deathly interpretation. The police mobilisation seems to be more to manage ‘crime’ prevention. Some observations or advice by counsellors attribute the problem to the mental health of students.
We do not have nuanced information about what shape the bugeoning industry has taken and why. Some numbers which came out in the media are staggering – of the centres, the students, the instructors, the rooms in which they spend the entire day, and those they remain holed up in at night. What they are paying for all this is not out. Some incidents of parents having sold their small portions of land or indebted with hefty loans are sporadically heard. More crucially, what never gets revealed is the dismally low chance of getting through the joint entrance test for the ‘professional education’ programmes in engineering or medicine, after all the coaching they go through.
A very worrying development is the market unscrupulously spreading its tentacles into smaller towns and low middle class homes, where parents and children are being misled and ensnared into this trap. Not being exposed to the extremely challenging nature of these entrance tests, designed to effectively eliminate the massive majority, for the relatively few seats available, these families are being shown false scenarios and pushed into mortgaging their assets or their future security. Without an assessment of children’s interests or educational grounding to be able to deal with the entrance test requirements, we only hear of how these institutes farm out to ‘counsel’ families, almost similar to what BYJU’S was alleged to be doing. This is brazenly playing on people’s vulnerabilities to entrap them in a protracted and losing gamble.
More criminal is making young children helpless pawns of this gruesome game. Pushed out of their homes and secure support systems, some as young as 14 years old, they are all by themselves, advised not to waste time building friendships with those who are in any case competitors. In the cruel isolation and taxing regime of preparing for the test, against all odds, they feel burdened with the moral and economic responsibility of not letting their parents’ investment go down the drain. Not knowing that the chance of that not happening is indeed minuscule. They do not make it once and feel obliged to ‘work harder’ the next year, spending still more money. But the cruelly extractive coaching callously carries on, knowing well their chances of not making it. We need a serious fact finding exercise and rigorous study to look into these practices, and to ban those that are damaging young lives. How can such dehumanised professional coaching institutes be sought and promoted by our government school systems?
To together bear witness to Tripta Tyagis or Chail Singhs
Ironically, right now, in Delhi University we are shockingly witnessing the planned closure of a major teacher education programme that we have caringly nurtured – the B.El. Ed. – the integrated four-year Bachelor of Elementary Education programme.
Over the last three decades it has shown that investing in humanistic professional development can indeed prepare sensitive good quality teachers, curriculum developers and teacher educators, committed to education, especially for those being marked and pushed out, on grounds of religion, caste, economic vulnerability, gender or ethnicity. A centralised dual degree Integrated Teacher Education programme (ITEP) is being pushed through, in colleges running the B.El.Ed. This phasing out or ‘transition’ as it is called, has seen strong protests from college faculty, students, alumni and educationists, but the government seems determined to close a progressive programme that upholds the constitutional commitment to education for democracy, fraternity, equity and liberty, also encoded in the RTE.
We have watched teacher and principal Tripta Tyagi, of a private school in Muzaffarnagar ordering young children to slap and hit hard their sobbing and distraught Muslim classmate for not remembering his multiplication tables, while passing derogatory comments on his religion. This week we have also seen verbal assaults on Muslim children in a Delhi government school, and elsewhere. Last year we were witness to the gruesome death of a young Dalit boy in Surana village of Jalore district, after he was beaten in school by his teacher Chail Singh for touching and drinking water from a pot.
On Teachers’ Day let us together bear witness to this hate and violence, to take moral responsibility for transformative education, to halt such assaults on our learners selves. We must ensure that teachers get the academic freedom to engender humanistic education – to reflect on their own and their students’ social realities, to interrogate their own biases and beliefs, to challenge social media that poisons or numbs them all, or transgress the systemic pressures and surveillance that strive to frighten or silence them?
Anita Rampal taught at the Faculty of Education, Delhi University.