Build schools first

There are millions of Indian children who should be going to school but are not. For them metropolitan debates about pedagogy, for example the current one about whether and how to teach contemporary history in schools, would seem bitterly ironical. So much energy spent on what to teach when there’s so little progress on the infrastructure of teaching. As Saturday’s Express report showed, states are misusing funds for the biggest primary education programme, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. CMs as development-oriented but also as politically dissimilar as Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and Narendra Modi are overseeing diversion of funds for their administration’s comforts. Funds that should be building schools, hiring teachers and bettering India’s appalling primary education record.

There’s therefore a sense of disconnect in pedagogic debates in this country. Intellectuals and politicians get exercised over what history and whose history should be taught. They will hate to admit it but when they do this, at least in part, they are using schoolchildren as proxies. Such fights between grown-ups are good and necessary because history is and should be a contested terrain. But those wielding these intellectual toothcombs must have more frequent brushes with this country’s education reality.

Of course, it is possible to debate the finer points of teaching while building the basic infrastructure for it. But it doesn’t happen like that in India. It is not as if the West is a stranger to pedagogic controversies. But the West made primary education compulsory and achieved universal literacy as a matter of nation-building and economic priority. Beyond passing silly, unimplementable laws, our politicians don’t have that sense. They don’t realise that India’s demographic bulge (more young than old people) will come to nothing if a minimum level of primary education is not universally supplied. Sadly, many of our intellectuals end up being led by politicians. Right now, India’s poor children would take functional schools over the ideal history textbook.