How to improve school education

It is probably a little early to start talking of portfolios in the next government, but one thing does seem on the cards: Murli Manohar Joshi may not be a minister any more. An NDA defeat will rule him out automatically and an NDA win is likely to get him a governorship.

This is not something to be unqualifiedly or automatically happy about, for he is not entirely the villain he is made out to be. On balance, though, given the way he picked his policy objectives, it might be best to distance him from the government. His judgement appears severely flawed.

Or could it be that, perhaps, he was deliberately being difficult with a view to embarrassing the government and Mr Vajpayee? The IIM fee issue was too small for a minister of his stature to become involved in and his colleagues certainly are wondering.

An important but unacknowledged problem is that the education ministry has always been regarded as a dustbin for unwanted heavyweights in the party. The last education minister who thought he had been given a great job was Nurul Hassan (1971-77). But that was because he was not a heavyweight and had no political ambitions.

At any rate, for the last 20 years education ministers have shown two broad responses to their assignments -- depression and indifference, as in the case of P V Narasimha Rao after Rajiv sent him there or "I'll-show-you" as in the case of Arjun Singh when Narasimha Rao sent him there. Mr Joshi after the first two years, appears to have rejected the Rao model in favour of the Arjun Singh one.

Which, actually, brings up the central issue: if an economist makes a better finance minister, why should an educationist not make a good education minister? Why is the education ministry treated as a tool for insulting an important rival? Come to think of it, it is also insulting to the Indian people that they should be asked to judge the importance of a ministry by the political weight of its minister.

I am not one of those who think that economists make better finance ministers than politicians. The job is essentially political because the finance minister has to balance different interests in a manner that is broadly consistent with the very few basic norms of sensible economics. An intelligent politician will always make a better finance minister than the most brilliant economist.

But education is not essentially political in the way finance is because there are no competing interests that need to be reconciled in a political way. It is a completely non-zero sum game and there is no need for one group to gain at the expense of another, unless you want to make it appear so for political reasons. So lesson number one, surely, must be to assign it to non-politicians.

In the unlikely event of this suggestion being accepted, I would go a step further to say that we need an educationist who has specialised in school level education. This has emerged as the weakest link in the education chain because of 50 years of persistent neglect. If this can be fixed, the major part of the job will have been done.

In fact, I would go even further and say that from within the set of educationists who have specialised in school level education, we need a good school principal rather than some pedagogue with a pet theory to test when he gets the chance as the education minister.

This is because despite pretence to the contrary by so-called experts, school education at the macro level is largely about two things only: a reasonable syllabus and a good textbook. The rest is mostly mumbo-jumbo.

Syllabi are so out of kilter because people with hobby horses have been put in charge of devising them. As for textbooks, the whole thing is a gross commercial racket, with the result that what we produce is utter and complete rubbish. (Indeed, why not just import them? If ever there was a case for jettisoning the policy of import substitution, it is for school textbooks). And if these two things were fixed, the problems with the examination system would also be sorted out very quickly.

In India, as with other simple things, a great deal of fuss is made over syllabi. But the whole issue is really quite straightforward and it consists of deciding just three things: what, how and why. That is, you teach children what happens (or if it is history, happened); how it happens, that is, the process; and why it happens, which is the set of reasons.

With the exception of history, where all countries like to present versions that are doctored in some manner, all other subjects lend themselves to this method. And yet, thanks to so-called experts and politicians, there is neither consistency nor agreement. It need not be so.

One way out of the problem is to have good textbooks. By and large Indian textbooks are terrible. The reason is either too much competition as in the ISC system, or none at all as in the CBSE system.

The former refuses to prescribe textbooks, probably on the grounds that it leads to enticements being offered to teachers by publishers. The worst case is when heads of departments in schools co-author textbooks with some junior. The CBSE, favouring standardisation, simply offers the NCERT books.

The net result, if you are a teacher, is having to choose from what is for all practical purposes a null set. This leads to garbage in (and in exams) garbage out. Can anything be sillier, especially if the whole thing can be set right with a little import competition?

My son has two imported textbooks printed under licence in India and three Indian ones. The difference is as stark as in any other small-scale industry product. This fact has been recognised at the college level and, except in history, an overwhelming majority of the textbooks are foreign.

I can almost hear the hissing from the Left, the Right and the academics, especially the higher up ones. Politicians will be politicians but of the academics who protest I would like to ask: why don't you write a good textbook, the way the best in the West have done?

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