[This is an excerpt from the book ‘To Kill A Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism’ by Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane, published by Pan Macmillan India, December 16, 2021.]
Studies in the ‘world’s oldest democracy’ of the United States show that children whose parents are in the top 1 per cent of the income distribution are seventy seven times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than children whose parents are in the bottom 20 per cent. The most extreme case is Princeton, where 72 per cent are from the top quintile of income distribution and just 2.2 per cent are from the bottom. SAT college admissions records show that since 1998, the scores of students whose parents are well educated have increased by five points, while those of students whose parents have only an associate’s (two-year college) degree have dropped by 27 points.
In India, paid-for education similarly reproduces economic disparities. Despite government funding of primary education, residual caste discrimination and caste-related poverty continue to lock many future citizens out of the classroom. Oxfam estimates that 75 per cent of the more than 6 million children out of school are either Dalits (32.4 per cent), Muslims (25.7 per cent), or Adivasis (16.6 per cent). Enrolment data from other surveys indicate that it’s primarily the children of the poorest and low-caste families who fill the rosters of government elementary schools as private school enrolment remains biased towards upper castes, the rich, and urban children.
Government schools, the last option for families with higher levels of education and wealth, mostly cater for those who can’t afford private education. It’s not a surprise that 83 per cent of the children of Dalits, 78 per cent of Adivasis, and 83 per cent of the poor are enrolled in government schools. Class and caste are almost co-terminous: 50 per cent of India’s tribal population are classified as ‘multidimensionally poor’ (based on income as well as other indicators such as health, education, nutrition, assets, and living standards), as are 33 per cent of the Dalits and 33 per cent of Muslims. In contrast, only 15 per cent of upper-caste Hindus are multidimensionally poor. Dalit and tribal households respectively earn 21 per cent and 34 per cent less than the national average annual household income, while upper-caste households earn nearly 47 per cent more than the average. An education system mediated by the market is bound to be skewed against those who are socially marginalized. It’s no coincidence that toppers of public examinations, a supposedly meritocratic exercise, are almost never Adivasis or Dalits.
Though caste-based exclusion in today’s India is far less intense than what existed pre-Independence, some 27 per cent of Indian households still practise untouchability. The figure crosses 40 per cent in northern and central India, where caste-related violence, especially sexual assaults on women from lower castes, is commonplace. These wider social injustices are carried over into the classroom, which are often the site of reproduction of damaged social lives. Driven to government schools by poverty, the poor and the marginalized are often driven out by poverty and discrimination. Dalit and Adivasi students seldom make it to the front rows. They are often forced to do menial work at school, such as cleaning the toilets, and are subject to humiliation from both teachers and other students. It’s not unusual for lower-caste children to be made to sit separately at midday meals, eating leftovers off plates they bring from home because they are forbidden to touch school utensils. The impressive school enrolments achieved in recent years are thus undone by the vicious cycle of poverty, poor-quality state schooling, democracy failure, and persistent social divisions. Roughly half the students of state schools drop out before eighth grade. Most of them are from the disesteemed communities. As a result, the class and caste divisions between the education haves and have-nots are replicated in higher levels of education, which become ever more tilted in favour of richer, urban, and higher caste students, at the expense of potential students from rural, poorer, and lower caste backgrounds.
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India’s damaged social foundations mean that there are millions of students who are the first learners in their families. Remedying the complete lack of supervision at home, and the obvious financial hurdles to paying for external guidance in such families, would require the state to play a much more proactive role. Poorly funded and organized state schooling does the very opposite. Government schools account for 72 per cent of all schools, but poor funding and management mean they are best avoided. There are high-quality, federally funded government schools, but they’re reserved for specific target groups, such as children of government employees or those in the armed forces. The reality is that classroom inequalities are worsened by policies designed to encourage the growth of a multiplicity of schools: government-run, government- aided but privately run, special federally aided, religious, low-cost private, middle-rung private, high-end private, and international schools.
This graded educational system mirrors the country’s stubbornly rigid social hierarchies. The poorest children attend the free government- run schools and those from the highest echelons of Indian society increasingly attend international and other elite schools, with the rest of the society caught in between. After graduating from good schools, those with better education (generally the better off, higher castes, and living in cities) have a head start in gaining entrance to good public-funded institutions of higher studies, especially for professional degrees such as medicine and engineering. If they still can’t make it to public colleges and universities, they can simply buy themselves into a preferred course at one of the many private institutions at home and abroad, where they study subjects from law and medicine to management and liberal arts. By contrast, the products of free state-run schools (mostly from poor, lower caste, and rural households) settle for menial or lower-order jobs, if they’re available, or gravitate towards humanities degrees in low-ranking colleges with low entry bar and poor job prospects. Studies show that students from rural backgrounds, who by necessity mostly come from government schools, have low chances of getting into engineering colleges. Multiple simultaneous handicaps, such as being poor and rural, or Adivasi and rural, or Dalit and rural, reduce these chances to virtually zero.
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Like elsewhere in the world, the curriculum-based mass education system that was eventually adopted in India — the kind that Dewey and Tagore rebelled against — is an elaborate system of picking winners and losers based on ‘merit’, measured by skills in mastering a centralized curriculum. As is typical of every ‘meritocratic’ system, India’s elaborate process of educational ranking fails to alleviate social inequality. Hiding behind the cloak of supposed competitiveness of public examinations that hold the key to college and university places, the schooling system privileges the socially advantaged and replicates the existing class and caste hierarchies, in a phenomenon that The Economist calls ‘hereditary meritocracy’.
Aggressive affirmative action and greater spread of education enable more students from socially marginalized groups to access higher education than before. But they face hostility from higher-caste teachers and classmates who see them as undeserving occupants of precious college and university seats through reservations at the expense of more meritorious ‘general category’ (higher-caste) students. Students who come through reserved quotas for marginalized groups struggle to bridge the gap between the standards of the humble high schools they come from and those demanded at elite institutions. The harassment and stress can push students over the edge. Students from low-caste and low-income backgrounds often drop out and have been found to be disproportionately high in suicide cases at top engineering and medical institutions. Those who complete higher education against all odds continue to be dogged by the inequities of social life. Studies of private-sector companies show that they use ‘cosmopolitan attitudes’ and ‘family background’ as hiring criteria, which are loaded against poor and lower-caste candidates. Dalit applicants to private-sector jobs are found to be 33 per cent less likely to get a call back from a company, while Muslims are 66 per cent less likely. ‘Fluency in English’ is among the most elementary of these coded filtering mechanisms.
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Ham-handed government measures to level the educational field and admit others to this exclusive club haven’t ended well. Deep-seated prejudice against poorer classes burst out in the open after the Right to Education (RTE) Act stipulated that 25 per cent of places in private schools should be reserved for children from economically disadvantaged classes. Court cases, resistance, and protests by angry parents, elite school administrators, and teachers resulted in limited implementation of the rule. It didn’t help that governments often failed to reimburse private schools for expenses towards fees, uniforms, books, and other activities (like tours) borne by poor students. That led to many private schools boycotting the RTE programme altogether. Very few elite schools in India now abide by it. Even when they do, disadvantaged students suddenly implanted in the midst of rich kids are often cruelly reminded of their disadvantage and undesirability in these upper-class settings. Unsurprisingly, RTE provisions have caused a spurt of dropouts and have hardly made a dent in the persistent pattern of inequalities.
India issued a ‘New Education Policy’ in July 2020, which vowed to break down the English caste barrier by discarding English as the medium of instruction in junior school, and replace it with regional languages ‘wherever possible’. It sounds radical, but it isn’t. Government schools already mostly teach in the vernacular, and private schools are unlikely to stop teaching in English. Parents prefer private education over government schools precisely because they teach in English. So, nothing will change. A highly graded schooling system fundamentally stacked against less powerful, rural, poor, and marginalized people will continue to tear the fabric of Indian social life. The educated, English-speaking elite will remain the elite. The stratified classroom will breed and protect the social privileges of the dominant classes. As if the British had never left.
(Courtesy: The Wire.)
