Putting Underprivileged Students Into College Classrooms: A Market Approach

(This article was originally written for Youth Ki Awaaz)

Children, they say, are the future of a nation. If that be true, India’s potential is unmatched across the world. We have one of the largest and at the same time youngest populations. So is the future one happy story for India? Er, not really. Poverty is widespread in our country despite the gains made through six decades of planning. Although the Government would tell us that one in three persons is poor, this figure isn’t a reliable estimate of the number of Indians who will grow up without access to what modern civilisation considers basic needs: health care, sanitation and education. The World Bank figure of more than one in two Indians suffering from multidimensional poverty tells a more accurate story of the structural constraints facing children in India today.

india calcutta bookstore (Photo credit: FriskoDude)

With more than half of our population poor, and relatively high birth rates among the poor in India, nearly three-fifths of India’s children are born in underprivileged households. And their chances to lead an educated, dignified life with economic and social freedom are stunted to say the least. As a nation, it is imperative upon us to allow all our children to access basic social infrastructure like good education and gain the capabilities that will arm them enough to contribute positively towards the development of themselves, their society and the country. As of today, this aim is just that: an aim. Nearly 60 per cent of children hailing from underprivileged backgrounds drop out of school and have very little chances of going to college, forget completing a course there. Poverty, which ushers in the necessity to work and earn a living from a very early age, is the predominant factor behind this state of affairs.

This leads us to the question as to what we can do to change the ground realities. What indeed are the stumbling blocks that contribute to our abysmally low percentage of college graduates and what steps need be taken to address the problem? The approach I’ll be taking is one that attempts to enhance the freedoms people, including poor people, enjoy rather than restrict their options in order to achieve the same goal.

Creativity and the Indian Education System

Last night, I sat down to watch Sir Ken Robinson’s TED lecture on whether schools kill creativity. Indeed, the 2006 lecture filled with humorous anecdotes and references couldn’t have discussed the issue better. A parallel discussion on the issue of the victimisation of creativity at the hands of public education systems in the Indian context is long overdue. Throughout my following attempt to do so, I will refrain from considering creativity in schools in isolation but rather consider the broader social and institutional framework in which such creativity is nurtured, or in the present context, systematically stifled.

    In the recent past, specifically in 2010, India’s University Grants Commission (UGC) introduced the Career Advancement Scheme (CAS) for university teachers which defines the rules for promotion in the academic hierarchy on the basis of “points” earned based on number of conferences attended, number of publications, years taught rather than the quality of such work. At the highest levels of the Indian education scene, standardisation has been conveniently substituted for standards. Can portents indeed be better at the school level?

    The answer to that question can safely be said to be no. And the pessimism in this regard is far from being unjustified. India’s public education system was structured to meet the needs of increasing literacy post-Independence to stoke the development process in the country. Over the decades, a lot of debate has ensued over whether literacy should constitute simply writing one’s name or whether a more broad-based criteria of functional literacy should be considered. Given this rudimentary background, creativity has unquestionably taken the backseat, with the aim remaining to help children attain a standardised norm of educational attainment. Any historical criticism on this regard would be unfair if we ignore the strains of educating the entire diverse nation on a war footing with very limited resources. But after six decades of gains on the front of education as well as development in itself, is it time we once again take a look at creativity as an equally important component of education as literacy?

    Picasso had famously remarked that all children are born artists and as Sir Robinson pointed out, we get educated out of our inherent art and creativity as we grow up. This excerpt from Stephen Nachmanovitch seems apt here:

“The child we were (and still are) learns by exploring and experimenting, insistently snooping into every little corner that is open to us — and into the forbidden corners too! But sooner or later our wings get clipped. The real world created by grown-ups comes to bear down upon growing children, molding them into progressively more predictable members of society.”

    There are three main ways in which creativity is gagged in Indian education.