According to them, this model will enable the state to provide free and compulsory education to village children and, because it is based on competition, will ensure a better service at a lower cost. Thus, at a time when everyone is saying that more money should go into primary education, this model opts for less.

No one can deny the need for India’s rural children to have the same opportunities in education and in life that their more fortunate urban counterparts have.  It is also true that the many official commissions, reports and resolutions written and passed since Independence have not achieved the objectives of universal elementary education.  Can this model possibly be the answer?

The first point the authors make is that a total and drastic change is needed, something that has never been tried before, a real innovation and entirely new strategy for the delivery of education.

Nothing wrong per se with innovation.  But aren’t all successful innovations, particularly in education, based on past experiences, past mistakes? Leading educational thinkers and practitioners like A.S.Neill and Maria Montessori evolved their revolutionary ideas from the weaknesses and deficiencies they observed in the education that was current at their time.  Surely it would be wise to do so here?  Why has elementary education failed to reach such a vast number of rural children?  Why have the many nationwide literacy programmes had so little effect?  What are the lessons that can be learn from past mistakes? Aren’t such questions pertinent here?

The model suggested is basically eight classrooms grouped around a central playground, with two rooms on each of the four sides..  There are two competing classes for each year, that is, two Class Is, two Class IIs and so on. Four teachers each lease a block of two classrooms with a capacity of 30 pupils per class and hire an assistant whom they pay out of their own total earnings.

The authors then sum up their ideas in six bullet points, beginning with the declaration that, within its economic limits, the state should be responsible for the provision of free, compulsory education to all children. Next they say that competition ”ensures better service at lower cost” 6 but give no reasons or examples to support this statement. They assure us that in the right environment all children are keen to learn, an assurance that most would agree with. Their fourth point is that the “prime objective of primary level education is to help the child acquire the ability to read and write.”7 

True, this is a primary objective.  But should it be the sole one? Is this what one would call ‘education’?  Or merely literacy?  Do we want our rural children to be literate? Or educated?

The key point to their alternative model is the privatization of primary level education by turning it over to teachers with the minimum qualification to run rural schools on an entrepreneurial basis.  The state’s chief role would be as provider of monthly Rs 100 vouchers to eligible students. 

In the more detailed description of the way the model works that follows on from this point-wise summary, the authors reiterate that the “objective of primary (elementary) education is to develop the ability to read, write and do a little bit of arithmetic”8 and consequently they affirm that only two subjects need to be taught, basic maths and one language.  Incorporated in the language lessons may be some general knowledge and moral science.  Earlier they refer to the state-designed curriculum as the one that these model schools should follow.  Presumably, they mean the national curriculum for primary schools that operates statewide throughout the country?  If so, is this all that these curricula recommend for primary education?  No art, no sport or games, no simple science, no history or geography, no music?  Do the best government schools in the country focus solely on basic literacy and numeracy? Or rather, do those that flourish and have parents queuing up to enrol their children teach at least a little of all of these as well as reading and writing?  Ah, but where are these successful schools located?  Not in villages.  You will only find them in the towns and cities. So it seems that the authors are saying that rural children need only to become literate and numerate to a basic standard; they don’t need more than that.

They go on to recommend a teaching day of four hours from 9am until 1pm, which seems a sensible and practical idea.  Children work best in the early hours of the day when they are fresh and rested and schools worldwide plan their core lessons in the mornings; afternoons are invariably devoted to music, art, craft, games, sports etc but this would not be a problem under this particular model since it is made clear that rural children have no need of these. Instead, they will return home to take up their domestic duties, looking after younger siblings or assisting in the fields.

At the same time, they recommend the greatest flexibility in attendance requirements.  Thus these children will not attend in the afternoons so that their parents won’t feel that school is taking them away from more important work and at the same time, they will not have to attend every day.  Some may perhaps attend three days a week, some stay away for a week or two at a time when seasonal work demands it while others may pick and choose as the mood takes them. 

Is this an educationally sound practice?  We are talking of a child from a totally illiterate background who, once he or she leaves school, will return to a home where the printed word is never seen and whose parents will be totally unable to give him or her any help whatsoever with homework.  What happens about the work the child missed on the days he was absent?  What about the key concepts that he did not happen to be there for?  What about the importance of learning to be regular in your attendance at school as a precursor to regular attendance at a job? But then, these children will only be emerging with basic literacy skills so the likelihood of their getting employment is extremely low.

There won’t be any tests or examinations in this model school.  For four years, the students will go without any formal system of testing and evaluating their progress since the authors feel that to do so would only “frighten first-generation learners unnecessarily”.9 This extraordinary assumption almost beggars belief.  Anyone who has ever taught young children of virtually any age knows how much a child who has been properly taught loves to see a formal result of their efforts.  A good teacher can very easily ensure that no child feels fear at the prospect of such tests.  If each child is made to feel special to the teacher, then even the child who only gets 1 or 2 marks out of 20 can be enabled to see this as a stepping stone to the next test when they will aim to get 4 or maybe even 5.  Children taught by committed, well-trained teachers in a happy, stimulating environment take the greatest pleasure in doing appropriate exams and proudly showing their results. 

However, when they move from Class IV to another school for Class V, these children, who have never sat a test in their lives, will have to “clear an eligibility test” 10 of the kind run yearly by the state.  Surely this will put them at a tremendous disadvantage?  Their more fortunate peers who have studied in schools where tests are the norm will know just what to do and how to answer questions and follow guidelines but these children will be totally at sea and their results will hardly be likely to ensure that they clear the hurdles necessary to continue with their education.

The authors strongly specify that these model schools should not include any co- or extra-curricular activities, their reasons being that no games or sports are needed since “physical exercise is inbuilt in rural life.”11 Surely physical fitness is only one of many reasons for including games and sports in school curricula.  What about the excellent opportunities they offer for learning how to work with others and compete as part of a team?  If urban children need to learn these skills, don’t rural children also?  And if rural pupils are already so fit, why wouldn’t we want to encourage them further by providing first-rate sports facilities in the hope of discovering future world-class athletes, cricketers and tennis players?

The school is to be built using either land that the government purchases for the purpose or common land that just happens to be available in a part of the village that makes access to it easy for pupils and particularly for girls. The ease with which the model’s inventors suggest this makes one wonder where they have been for the last few decades.  Not in India, it seems, where problems over the use and ownership of common land are legendary. Moreover, starting again from scratch, going through the lengthy and expensive business of acquiring suitable land and then building new schools will cost a great deal of money. Surely it would make more sense to use those primary school buildings already in existence and only build new ones where none exist?  Updating and refurbishing the current ones would be far more cost effective.

The state will build the school and own it but only classrooms will be constructed. To keep costs down, there will be no toilets, store rooms, kitchen or activity rooms within that area; indeed, the authors declare that without proper maintenance such places invariably “turn into smelly potholes”12 and should therefore not be allowed inside the school premises.

Is this a good reason for not having them?  Do we want to teach rural children to read and write but not how to use toilets properly?  Or do we want to use the school environment, where learning of many kinds should be taking place, as an excellent opportunity to show these children a better, cleaner way of ridding the body of its waste materials and encouraging them to use these facilities in an acceptable manner?  By teaching them at such an early age, could we not sow the seeds of a desire for such facilities in their own homes when they are financially able to have them?  Currently, several programmes in rural areas for building superior toilet facilities are facing great difficulties as villagers simply don’t use them for the purpose for which they were designed or just ignore them altogether once the programme staff have left.  Would this not be a great opportunity to teach young children the importance of hygiene and health-related issues?

The minimum qualification for primary teachers is HSC and this is what is recommended.  Given the lack of success of so many earlier efforts to improve rural education at this level, one would hope for some special training to be recommended too but the authors feel that hiring HSC teachers would make a significant impact on unemployment in rural areas.  Whilst we can hardly argue with this, it would seem good practice to include a practical training to help these inexperienced, hitherto unemployed and only minimally qualified teachers to deliver education in the most effective way possible.  However, since they are primarily required to impart only basic literacy and numeracy, perhaps no training is necessary.

The authors also declare that the inbuilt competition will lead to regular attendance of pupils yet earlier they urge a very flexible and liberal attendance requirement.  There seems to be some contradiction here.

The privatization of the system is urged as a way of boosting the teachers’ commitment.  They will have to pay at least Rs 500 a month per two-room block as rent but will have no restrictions on the use of these blocks once the morning school is over. They can undertake as much tuition as they like as long as it is not of their own classes, though the authors do not say how that will be prevented.  In a country where before- and after-school tuition is the norm rather than the exception and a frightening number of teachers do little teaching in the classroom in order to make it imperative for their students to pay for tuition, it is difficult to imagine teachers sticking to such a condition.  Class IV pupils who wanted to go on to Class V would be especially vulnerable as they have a test to pass for admission to another school.  What a perfect excuse for tuition!

The promulgators of this model say frankly that “coverage is prime, quality follows.”13 They do not say when or how. Instead, they maintain that “inbuilt competition among them to attract students to their schools to increase their income”14 will “ensure the quality of education”.15 It seems extraordinarily naïve to assume that putting the schools on a competitive free market basis will ensure good teaching.  The authors say that the teachers will be committed to their pupils because they will be keen to fill every one of the possible 60 places they can offer but why should the teachers see first-rate teaching as the only way to do this?  There are any number of easier, quicker ways to fill those seats and experience tells us that the teachers will rapidly find them.

While it would seem to be true that there would be competition between the teachers since there would be two of everything – two classes for every year group –can we really assume that this would mean teachers would commit themselves fully to their teaching in order to attract the maximum number of pupils to their class?  These teachers have not been trained; their commitment is most likely to be to their earnings, not to their pupils.  Surely they will be more inclined to look for other, easier ways to increase their earnings?  And the authors have provided the perfect method to do this.  The monthly Rs 100 voucher system.

The teacher collects the vouchers from the parents and, having obtained a thumb impression or signature from them, cashes them at a local post office or bank.  We are talking of the poor children of poor parents here.  An enterprising teacher could very easily bribe parents to send their children to his classes in return for a small portion of the voucher money.  Corruption is rife in education. In Bihar, for example, there are cluster government schools with one head teacher responsible for withdrawing the salaries. He won’t sign the necessary papers for any teacher until he gets a portion of that teacher’s salary – and this is despite the fact that the salaries are high, none less than Rs 8000 a month.

Thus the authors’ avowal that these teachers will not require any supervision is unrealistic in the extreme. 

On top of this, the model’s authors say, “judgment of the quality of education should be left to the parents”.16 At no point do they suggest how the parents will judge this or what criteria they will use.  Remember, virtually all these parents will be illiterate; we are trying to cover those rural children who, despite numerous government programmes, have still remained untouched by education.  Their parents are either too poor or too ignorant to understand the value of literacy. Perhaps they are too busy trying to survive or perhaps they cannot see any value for their children from going to school. At any rate, we are not talking about parents who have any understanding of education or any idea of what makes a good teacher.  The only way they will be able to make a decision is by asking their offspring.  In other words, children aged between 6 and 10 who have never been to school before and are totally illiterate are going to give their parents a considered opinion on which teacher is best.  If anything, these children will be even more vulnerable to bribes and blackmail from teachers anxious to fill every place in their classrooms.

Fifty-six years after Independence, Indian voters still do not know how to choose whom to vote for and are all too easily influenced by wily politicians.  Is it really likely that illiterate parents would know which teacher is the most effective?

In one puzzling paragraph, the authors recommend that the movement of vouchers be part of an internet system, in the way that railway reservations now are.  Who exactly would monitor the voucher movement?  What exactly would they be able to determine from it?  And how?  This is never explained.

The authors envisage a bond forming between parents, empowered by the vouchers they receive, and teachers.  Just why and how this bond would form is never clarified. They also state that no supervision is necessary as the teachers will have such a “sincerity of purpose” 17, a sincerity coming from ‘the constant scrutiny of ‘voucher empowered parents’.”18 How on earth are these poor, illiterate, rural parents supposed to scrutinize their children’s teachers is never explained.

It is good to see an attempt to solve the chronic problem of literacy rates in rural areas.  It is not so rewarding to see such a lack of understanding of the real needs and issues.  Without a close look at existing models and their weaknesses, how can we ensure that any alternative will work?  And putting vouchers into the hands of poor villagers does certainly not befit them for the difficult task of assessing the performance of the teachers.  Even educated, urban parents find that hard.

But most of all, what this model proposes would only widen the already huge gap between rich and poor and urban and rural folk.  Is the need for literacy so pressing and so important that all other educational considerations should be ignored?  What would the country do with 30 million barely literate and numerate children who have never sat a test and have no reason to want to continue with their education beyond Class IV?  Would they be employable?  Has anything in the educational model described equipped them for further education or for better management of their family’s assets?  Has it made them feel that they are now getting the same opportunities in life as their urban and/or richer counterparts? 

Or has it left them exactly where they were before, second best and second rate, only now able to read and write just enough to realize this?

Do we really want to perpetuate and institutionalize the gap between town and country by adding education to the list of inferior services that country folk receive?  Towns have regular rubbish collections, villages have none; towns receive priority for electricity; villages get what’s left; towns have phone lines, public sanitation, sewerage, public water supplies, better health provisions – the list is endless.  Is lengthening it even further the best way forward?