The present crisis of the education system or, rather, what still remains of it as a system is clearly before us. It is today a decrepit amalgam of dysfunctional ‘sarkari’ schools, proliferating private ‘teaching shops’ and a plethora of ‘alternate’ education centres and non-formal schemes on the one hand and, on the other, a set of elite institutions, both publicly funded (e.g. Kendriya and Navodaya Vidyalayas, Sainik schools, etc) and privately owned, the so-called ‘public schools’ which provide English medium education. There are no prizes for guessing whose children are found on which side of the divide.

The poor and the marginalised, working children, minorities and children from the scheduled castes and tribes, if they are fortunate enough to even set foot in a classroom, are found in the former category of ‘schools’ which lack both trained and committed teachers and even the most basic infrastructure. The privileged elite, wealthy, politically powerful and socially empowered, send their wards to the ‘good’ schools. It is within a social reality marked by stark injustices of this sort that the Right to Education (RTE) Bill 2009 has been introduced in Parliament. The bill itself is almost 50 years overdue, for Article 45 of the Directive Principles of State Policy in the Constitution had required the state to ensure that all children up to the age of 14 years were provided with free and compulsory education by 1960.

Half a century has brought about radical changes in context, in public perception and in the people’s experience. Aspirations and expectations have altered accordingly. So I feel it is necessary to revisit the historical circumstances in which the demand for universalising education was articulated and in the process examine some of the conceptual issues relating to education, to the goal of universalising school education, and perhaps find answers to the question of why we have failed so completely to provide equality of opportunity and access to education of comparable quality for all the children of India.

The demand for the right to education is firmly grounded in the freedom movement. The struggle for independence was a struggle for the creation of a modern nation in which the recognition of the democratic rights of all individuals, irrespective of the section of society to which they belonged, was fundamental. As a result, during the process of the national movement we saw that the fight for a range of democratic rights acquired a new sort of energy and specific movements acquired strength and articulation within the context of the forward march of the national struggle. Dalit rights, women’s rights, peasant rights, tribal rights, the demand for an end to regional, linguistic and religious discrimination, all received an impetus as the people of India struggled for independence from colonial rule.

The significance of the demand for the right to education can only be fully comprehended within this context. The earliest demand for universalising four years of primary education was made in 1881 by Dadabhai Naoroji and placed before the Education Commission (also known as the Hunter Commission). Naoroji had meticulously and persuasively argued that poverty in India was the creation of British rule and the demand that the people should be literate was occasioned by his concern that their poverty should be substantially alleviated. In 1910 Gokhale moved a resolution reiterating Naoroji’s demand in the Central Legislative Assembly and followed it up with a bill in 1912.

The Nagpur Congress (1920) took a qualitative leap forward when it advocated that children should be withdrawn from existing colonial schools and called for the setting up of nationalist schools and colleges. The idea that a system of quality education providing equality of opportunity, and propagating values of patriotism rather than encouraging empire worship, could become an instrument for social transformation emerged as an integral part of nationalist thought. The opposition to the colonial education system because of its inherently elitist character culminated in the Wardha Conference (1937), the deliberations of which were advanced in the Zakir Husain Committee’s report on Nai Talim. This recommended that free and compulsory education in the mother tongue be provided nationwide to all children for a minimum of eight years i.e. up to 14 years of age.

I find it interesting and significant that this whole period of becoming aware of and struggling for democratic rights led to the passing of the resolution to build a national system of education on a wholly new foundation at the Haripura Congress in 1938. The period of resistance also prompted the response of the colonial administration to the growing radicalisation of the people and often it was compelled to introduce relevant changes in policy. Hence the 1944 report of the Central Advisory Board of Education (also referred to as the Sargent Committee) stated that encouraging students in discharging "their duties as citizens" was a necessary goal for a national system of education. Further, it was recognised that for such a system it was "impossible to justify providing facilities for some of the nation’s children and not for others". Both recommendations represented fundamental reversals of the premises of colonial policy. Although Sargent’s report stated that this should be realised over a 40-year period i.e. by 1984, the BG Kher Committee proposed that it be achieved within 16 years i.e. by 1960. This recommendation, reflecting the urgency of the movement with respect to its realisation, was incorporated in the Directive Principles of the Constitution.

I know that many of us look at the ‘new foundation’ established after 1947 as being a colonial structure which the British had imposed on India for over a hundred years and which we adopted wholesale as being our own. There is a cynicism in this response because it uses the failure to achieve many significant goals of the freedom struggle in order to undermine the truly revolutionary ideal that was developed and taken up by the movement. I want to draw attention to this ideal and to emphasise that the fact of its being adopted was itself a huge achievement because discriminatory and elitist colonial policies were not the only obstacles in the path of conceiving and attempting to implement a radical new vision.

An exclusionary system of education dominated India for thousands of years. Within the rigid inequalities imposed by the caste system, education was restricted entirely to Brahmins and some sections of other higher castes. So the idea of building a national system of education on a new foundation, indeed the very idea of a national system itself, was democratically of great significance. This is why the Right to Education Bill 2009 is such a disappointment. For it deprives us even of the conception of a national system. There is no vision underlying this bill. Several parallel streams, working multitrack to provide educational opportunities to the privileged and to deny such opportunities to the deprived masses, would be institutionalised by the bill in its present form. This bill would actually do great harm. It is not a question of ‘let’s take what we are getting now’ and then remove the ‘anomalies’. The conception of the present bill is flawed. Of course, this flawed conception, which is so distant from the constitutional ideal arising out of the freedom struggle, is itself related to the failure, post-independence, to implement fundamentally egalitarian economic, political and social reforms, for these always have a deep impact on the education system.

The other conclusion that requires to be drawn is that a great value must be placed on the democratic character of the freedom struggle, on the kind of leadership that it threw up and the active participation of the people in that struggle. There are many reasons for valuing democracy but perhaps the most important one is that in 1947 itself one part of undivided India, which was to become Pakistan, chose a different path. India chose to adopt a republican Constitution in which the equal rights of all individuals are enshrined at the core. This was the people’s mandate and it is within this people’s mandate that the full import of the right to education and the conception of a renewal of national life can be comprehended. But we do need to reflect on the fact that a part of the united subcontinent rejected republicanism and therefore we must recognise that the actual choices which are made have a decisive value.

The historical fact of the choice means, firstly, that the choice itself cannot be taken for granted and has to be continuously strengthened and secondly, that a choice once made can still be ‘unworked’ at any time. Academicians and political or social activists often speak about the possibility of a ‘revolution’ if the RTE Bill is not framed and passed in a form that answers to the needs and aspirations of the people. Indeed an RTE Bill that fails to protect the democratic rights of India’s children would certainly weaken constitutional republicanism and be a step in the wrong direction. However, the sociopolitical consciousness of sections of the political leadership and of society at large has moved far from what it was even in the decades after the country gained independence. There is a far graver threat before us now, and it is not revolution.

India has seen the rise and spread of profoundly anti-democratic organisations and vigilante groups in the past two decades. They are engaged in what is euphemistically termed ‘moral policing’, deciding who is going to get jobs where, who will be able to live peacefully as a Muslim or a Christian, where women will be allowed to function with a degree of freedom, whether artists and musicians will be able to paint or perform without fear of attack, which films can be viewed and so on. They may call themselves the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena in Mumbai or Sri Rama Sene in Karnataka, Sri Rama Sena in Delhi, or RSS, Bajrang Dal, VHP or whatever in other regions but the ‘parivarik’ sameness of their acts of vandalism and mob terror is unmistakable. They deny democratic rights to those whom they oppose and hence shrink the democratic space within which choices can be made.

In the early post-independence period of planning and policymaking, the statement made to the Central Advisory Board of Education in 1964 by MC Chagla, then education minister, was like a beacon. Four years after the constitutional deadline for universalising education for children up to 14 years of age had been crossed, Chagla’s words appeared as a warning that the failure to meet the aspirations of the people went against the constitutional directive: "Our Constitution’s fathers did not intend when they enacted Article 45 that we just set up hovels, put students there, give them untrained teachers, no playground and say we have complied with Article 45 and primary education is expanding. The compliance intended by our constitutional fathers was a substantial compliance, they meant that right to education should be given to our children."

There was a living link here between democracy and the right to education, a link which was very clear to the education minister at the time. Now, unfortunately, we have got used to ministers who, apart from promises made during the elections, place before us only the so-called ‘pragmatics’ of public policy. Hence the right to education and other rights, to employment, to shelter, to food security and health, etc, are always presented as a drain on the country’s resources and whatever little is done in this regard is viewed as governmental or administrative ‘favours’ or, even worse, as ‘dole outs’ for which the people must be grateful to political parties and leaders. What is even more regrettable is that the people in general, and the decision-making elite in particular, have come to either accept or actively promote this approach. The importance of a movement for realising the goal of universalising education is patronisingly viewed as the ‘bee in the bonnet’ of some intransigent ‘activists’.

However, MC Chagla was not talking like a minister 60 years after independence. His tone was set by the fact of his being the education minister just 14 years after the independence struggle and I think it is very important for us to remember this. For the same spirit is found in the report of the Education Commission, also referred to as the Kothari Commission (1964-66). Again, we need focus only on some aspects of the commission’s report.

The goal before the Education Commission was the setting up of a national system of publicly funded compulsory and free education. Hence it was to be the responsibility of the state and be organised primarily through government, local body and government-aided schools of comparable quality. Recognising the presence of what was at that time a small stream of private ‘public schools’ as they are referred to in India, the commission did not see them as the future of the national system of education although it was ready to grant that a section of these elite schools may even be called ‘good’. The Kothari Commission identified common neighbourhood schools, with a socially, culturally and economically diverse student composition, as being both the form and the best instruments for universalising elementary and secondary education. The common neighbourhood school was not an idea that the Kothari Commission happened to chance upon and include in its monumental report. The recommendation was based on the experience of other countries which had successfully universalised education – countries with political, economic and social structures as diverse as those in China, the erstwhile Soviet Union, Japan, the United States of America, France, Cuba, etc.

So I think the question before us now is the following: why did the policies and practices of successive Indian governments move further and further away from this idea when the very first Education Commission had actually recommended this solution? What forces were at play? What were the factors that were involved in bringing about this subversion? For even 60 years after independence and almost 50 years after the failure to meet our constitutional obligation to the children of this country, the preamble to the RTE draft bill (2008) admitted that despite Article 45 of the Directive Principles of the Constitution, out-of-school children from disadvantaged groups and those engaged in labour and children who receive the poorest quality of education constitute the huge majority of children in the relevant age group. It is obvious then that the retreat from the concept of the common neighbourhood school was not the result of having found some other more effective means of reaching the desired goal of universalising education of comparable quality for all children.

Now, I think we can look at this problem in two ways. We can say it is really a problem of implementation and since the government is now collecting an education cess from taxpayers to augment the funds available for the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, we can expect that there will be real improvement and proper monitoring of the implementation of a variety of educational schemes being taken up with a ‘mission’ fervour. But just recently, (The Hindu, February 20, 2009) there was an analysis which was based on the report of the PROBE (Public Report on Basic Education) committee that revisited after a few years villages that they had covered earlier in the educationally backward states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, to evaluate the impact of the new schemes. The findings are revealing. Despite salutary increases in inputs, resulting in much higher levels of enrolment, "the quality of education remains abysmally low for the vast majority of Indian children". The analysis shows that the resort to "short-cut, ad hoc methods", like employing contract para-teachers who are underpaid and under-trained, has not been successful in addressing the issues. Encouraging private schools, another ad hoc solution to cope with the failure of the state to meet its constitutional responsibility, had not helped either.

In fact, it needs to be pointed out that this dependence on private schools has created a new ‘norm’ of education – that the quality of education must be linked to the fee that is paid. If you pay less, you get less. This is a norm which, despite its pedagogical irrationality, has come into education and found acceptance. The justifying of demands being made for exorbitant fees in institutes that offer students five-star facilities is part and parcel of this mind-set. We have accepted a new ‘market model’ for education. But the corollary of this for the poor and disadvantaged is devastating. The mushrooming growth of fee-charging ‘teaching shops’ is a scandal although it is often held up as evidence that even the poor prefer private schools to government ones. The truth is that they are able to attract poor students and those from lower-middle-class families only by the lure of teaching them in ‘English medium’, the hallmark of an elite education which holds out the promise of economic and social advance.

As a teacher at an undergraduate college affiliated to the Delhi University, I have been able to judge the negative impact of this trend over a career spanning three decades. Earlier, students who did not come from elite schools or backgrounds would be fluent in Hindi or Urdu or Hindustani. Not only did they comprehend and participate in class discussions, they had no difficulty in learning an adequate level of English. Today students have no language. They are simply inarticulate and they are sitting in undergraduate and postgraduate classes unable to comprehend or adequately express themselves. They are completely dependent on rote learning. The marks that can be managed, and not what one has learnt, are what matters. This problem affects even children from non-English-speaking families in the so-called ‘good’ schools. My neighbour’s 11-year-old son could recite the answers to questions in his General Knowledge text. So he ‘knew’, for example, what the national trees of Australia were; unfortunately, he had no idea what ‘Australia’ was!

The other way of looking at the present situation is to see how policy has failed to tackle the structural impediments to universalising quality elementary education. To illustrate this point, I would like to refer to the paper on regional imbalances and social inequalities in literacy and elementary education in India by Prof Govinda (National Seminar, NUEPA, December 26-28, 2006), which points to the persisting nature of regional imbalances and social inequalities. When the Planning Commission was preparing the documents of the sixth five-year plan in 1978, they had identified Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal as being among the most educationally backward states. These same states, with Uttar Pradesh and Bihar dominantly so, were on most indicators found to be underachievers even after five more plans had been implemented. Seventy per cent of all out-of-school children and 76 per cent of scheduled caste out-of-school students of the relevant age group were concentrated in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal. Along with Gujarat and Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan account for 68 per cent of the scheduled tribe out-of-school students. Predictably, this group of educationally backward states also comprises the six poorest states. The study concludes that the link between deprivation and lack of opportunity has strengthened over the years because "ad hoc measures cannot drive long-term progress".

It is obvious from both the account of activists and the academic study that merely increasing inputs mechanically or creating ‘Abhiyans’ is not going to help. What we need is that the state be prepared to play a dominant role through innovative policies and financial support in reforming the structure and content of the entire education system to facilitate achievement and progress for those who are marginalised. Unfortunately, state policy has moved further and further away from this responsibility since the time that the National Policy on Education 1986 and its companion Programme of Action were framed. Approved and then revised in 1992 by Parliament a year after the neo-liberal economic reforms were put into effect, this document made two crucial breaks with earlier education policy. Despite the failure to implement it, policy statements had continued to support the common school system. The 1986 document proposed a large non-formal education (NFE) sector which was to be treated as ‘equivalent to schooling’, for those children who could not "be expected to attend a full day at school".

Children living in habitations with no schooling facilities, poor children who had to work, including boys and girls with household responsibilities, children from marginalised groups, constituting over 80 per cent of children of the relevant age group, were excluded from the range of the formal education system. This decision, influenced by the World Bank’s prescriptions and pressures for developing nations, declared that providing education of comparable quality for all India’s children was no longer a priority for state policy. Financial constraints were offered as justification for what was clearly an unjust ‘solution’ to the abject failure of the state to implement a pedagogically sound and socially inclusive education policy. Indeed from this time onwards, whenever money was made available, and it was usually sourced from foreign agencies, a series of ‘schemes’ and ‘missions’ were substituted for the task of establishing a national system of formal education. Each of these carried the negative features of policies that justified setting lower goals at lesser cost for the education of the masses. The deep crisis in which we find the system today can therefore be seen as the outcome of changed and inegalitarian policy decisions.

Why was the attempt to build a formal system of education adequate to the requirements of all children in India given up? I think there are two reasons – of course, there are many other contributory factors but I think these two have a determining role to play. In the first place, we have deeply entrenched practices of social exclusiveness as evident in the role played by caste identity, privileges and antagonisms. I find it surprising that people do not really consider caste when it comes to proposing or evaluating policies and schemes in education as a whole although there are studies on the impact of these policies on children from the scheduled castes and tribes. The two issues are quite distinct. I think that caste identity and prejudice constitute the biggest obstacles to universalising education through a formal system of quality learning. It was this that ensured that no serious attempt to implement the common school system was ever really made and that the concept was allowed to die a natural death in policy statements. Secondly, and this is certainly a related idea, is the elitist conception of what constitutes ‘quality’ and ‘merit’.

The concept of ‘good’ education is based on the prejudice which lies entrenched in the concepts of quality and merit. This explains why such concepts are so easily promoted by those who oppose any form of affirmative action in education. The claim, for example, that reservation constitutes a form of discrimination against the ‘deserving’ is born of this training in prejudice. What ‘we’ are, what our life’s privileges have made us, that is what is worthy; ‘they’, the ‘other’ stigmatised by lack of opportunity and backwardness, are the unworthy. If one recalls the agitation about two years ago by students of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, enjoying perhaps one of the most privileged forms of reservation at taxpayers’ expense, one would remember that they vented their anger against reservation for scheduled caste and scheduled tribe students by sweeping the streets in protest. This display of a most obnoxious form of caste antagonism went largely unnoticed. But the problem goes beyond this – after all, these young people, and those who failed to be outraged by their mode of protest, are themselves victims of a deep-rooted caste consciousness.

Elitist concepts of merit underlie all forms of social exclusion, theoretical and practical. Particularly in this day and age, it is difficult to explicitly deny the claims of others to social benefits on the basis of caste, gender, region, religion, etc. It is always due to the absence of some ‘merit’ that those who are excluded are judged to be undeserving. There is a tendency to see knowledge as homogeneous and to deny space and sanction to divergent characteristics, perspectives, criteria of evaluation and structures of knowledge. From this there follows the need to secure the system against persons who are most likely to articulate deviant views. Exclusion therefore is inbuilt in elite conceptions of merit and occurs even when diversities are extolled as being the basis of a vigorous exchange of ideas. Diversity is devalued here because the focus is merely on how to get more of it within existing structures of dominance and marginalisation.

So, for example, those who adopt the privileged norms and mores of ‘merit’ want a greater and greater variety of elite institutions to choose from but are unable to consider the possibility of an education that can be egalitarian and good at the same time. There is no will to break out of the structures of inequality at all. There is reluctance, if not direct refusal, to question how various forms of social privilege influence knowledge patterns and mould educational institutions. Hence the entrenched preference in India, for example, is for the upper caste, English-speaking, public school-educated, economically well-endowed students who have the capacity and conditions to permit a single-minded focus on achieving higher grades through expensive and time-consuming coaching classes. These are the students that we identify as meritorious, these are the students that are sought out by the selection procedures of the educational institutions that we find meritorious and this is the notion of merit with which we deny any value to the varied experiences and knowledge of the rest of our people. They are excluded with one stroke of the pen from being considered even as potential contributors to the national pool of knowledge.

Education policy has to be pulled out of this stranglehold of entrenched privilege. The door to this was legally pushed open by the 1993 Unnikrishnan judgement of the Supreme Court. It interpreted Article 45 of the Directive Principles in conjunction with Article 21, stating that the right to life and liberty were deprived of meaning if even free and compulsory elementary education could not be provided to all children. Economic and financial constraints of the state did not constitute grounds for the failure to ensure free and compulsory elementary education. The judgement acknowledged the right to education as a fundamental right of all children. The RTE Bill 2009, delayed by reluctant governments for over a decade and still not passed by Parliament, was a necessary consequence of the path-breaking judgement. However, the bill, claiming to correct the policy waywardness seen since 1986, cannot lift the education system out of the confines of entrenched privilege. The RTE Bill 2009 accepts and provides discriminatory streams for the privileged and the marginalised. If implemented, the structure it proposes would continue to reproduce existing inequalities throughout the education system. It would certainly not bring to an end the discriminatory practices which the constitutional right to education of comparable quality for all children was intended to achieve by transforming the education system and rebuilding it on a "wholly new foundation".

The only way to achieve this goal is to recognise the possibilities that are opened up by acknowledging heterogeneity, and not an elite homogeneity, as the real challenge of quality education. Homogenising students and curricula in the classroom is a recipe for ‘manufacturing’ a product, not for ‘educating’ an individual. The richness and complexity of social diversity must enter the classroom through the composition of its students and teachers and the knowledge skills and life experiences that they bring with them. The pedagogical challenge for the ‘educator’, now sometimes the teacher but oftentimes the students, lies in transforming such diverse groups into rich learning resources for the development of sensibilities that are not marked by conformism and prejudice but are open to critical self-questioning. How do we interact with and understand ‘each other’? This pluralist sensibility replaces the exclusionary paradigm, how do ‘we’ deal with ‘them’? The Kothari Commission report had already accepted this shift when it commended the common neighbourhood school precisely for the heterogeneous character of its student body because this encouraged social learning and integration. More than 40 years later the centrality of the concept of heterogeneity in defining the very nature of knowledge and in providing vitality to the learning process has acquired a lot of prominence and is supported by an extensive and varied body of research.

The common school system therefore has not only proven historically to be the most successful means of universalising education, it is also in keeping with the most progressive contemporary trends in pedagogical theory. It recognises the inherent dignity and worth of all children and takes up the challenge of providing an environment and curriculum that allows every child equal opportunity to develop to the fullest extent by benefiting from sharing and learning across a wide range of diversities and abilities. Learning takes place everywhere in society and a formal system of education is a significant contributor only to the extent that it is able to respond to these processes critically and creatively.

The common neighbourhood school system, structured along lines that are conducive to these ideas, provides the most fertile environment for quality learning for all children.