"Class Struggle: India's Experiment In Schooling Tests Rich and Poor"
For those of you in different countries who may not have access to the news paper, I will try to give the high lights of the article, to the best of my memory capabilities:
A new school, Shri Ram School, was founded in 1988 by the scions of DCM family, as the name suggests.
The school encourages creative thinking as against the prevalent rote learning.
The children of elite attend the school, including grand children of Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi.
It costs $1350 per year.
Under the recently passed "The Right to Education Act-2009", all private schools are mandated to enroll 25% of students from the underprivileged class. The school will be given $300 per kid enrolled.
The Public schools run by the state are in dire straits due to absent teachers and poor infra structure.
Thus, the children of domestic servants are in the same class as the owners children.
This has led to dis-content in the English-speaking class.
The kids of Hindi-speaking class are struggling mostly to stay abreast the other kids.
The English-speaking (ES) parents resent lowering of the standards to compensate for the under achievement of the Hindi-speaking (HS) kids.
The socio-economic back ground of the HS kids is a constraint in their assimilation.
The parents of ES kids have gone to the Supreme Court to challenge the authority of the government to impose the Act.
Now what is written is my opinion:
While I applaud the effort to close the widening gap between the rich and poor, the affirmative action plan being forced on private sector may not beget the best results. A good education is the surest route for the under class to move up the food chain. For any society to be all inclusive, where every citizen has the opportunity to achieve his/her dreams, a quality education is the essential game changer.
Is the State abdicating it's obligation to provide these tools by forcing the private sector to take up the slack. Even if the quota is raised to 50%, the problem will not go away. After all, the private schools are in the better-off cities, whereas the majority of the under performing kids are in secondary cities or rural areas. The schools run by state aid in these areas are in such sorry condition that all efforts are wasted. The teachers do not show up to work. Funds are mis-appropriated by politicians. Kids just hang around all day doing nothing. No wonder, the poor parents would rather have the children provide labor on the meager plot of a farm.
I think a better strategy will be for the State to provide, even a mediocre education to the part of the 60% of the society that lives on less than $2 a day. It will do much more to open the doors, barely open now, that allow the cross-pollination between the socio-economic classes. A society is just and equal when the lower strata have a good chance of breaking the "Class Barrier" and move upscale. This can come only when the temples of education are blessing all in an equitable manner.
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