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The crafts museum situated at Pragati Maidan invites acclaimed artisans from all over the country to stay in Delhi for a month. The arrangement permits at least some members...

The crafts museum situated at Pragati Maidan invites acclaimed artisans from all over the country to stay in Delhi for a month. The arrangement permits at least some members of the metropolitan middle class, apart from tourists, to keep in touch with the endangered world of India8217;s heritage crafts. This month8217;s artisans include Mantu and Jaba Chitrakar from Naya village of western Midnapur. They have come with their six-year-old daughter Sonia, who has already been initiated into scroll painting and narrative singing her parents excel in. Last week when I heard her narration of a scroll painting her mother had made, I wondered how long she would survive at her village school. Oblivious of her skill and its significance, will the school catch her for shortage of attendance? An accomplished artist, Sonia8217;s mother could not proceed beyond class four. Whether Sonia fares any better depends not so much on her motivation to succeed at school, but rather on the capacity of our system of education to reform itself sufficiently to retain Sonia and to let her excel. Given how the system works, Sonia8217;s chances of success are bleak.

The curricular routines of our schools are so rigidly structured around the textbook and examination that children8217;s imagination and cultural learning simply don8217;t count. In cities the system is sharply divided between the educated middle class and the poor who have migrated from the rural hinterland. The former prepares its children for what the school is geared to provide 8212; alphabetisation, cramming, and minting marks. The rat race for marks begins in nursery and goes right up to class twelve.

Our 8216;public8217; schools cannot let children spend the time it takes to observe nature. It is anyone8217;s guess how they might teach the new environment studies textbook for class four, Looking Around. This book starts by asking children to notice how they get from home to school: from bamboo bridges to bricks placed in muddy lanes, in different regions of India. Demanding observation and activity, the textbook carries on to treat topics like livelihood and health, life-support systems, vegetation and animals. To bring this kind of textbook to life, a teacher needs confidence and freedom to localise the curriculum, and to assess the progress of children who must learn at their own pace.

Such an approach has the potential to do justice to the rural child, but a lot of preparatory reforms are needed. State governments would have to spend a lot more on SCERTs, giving them status and autonomy. Decentralisation is part of a core jargon these days; in reality, a massive centralisation is taking place as a result of sharpening social divides. The growth of CBSE-affiliated schools is a good measure of the urban elite8217;s urge to secede from the provincial system. This is happening even in states like Kerala. The media is assisting this divisiveness by ignoring the good effort made by several state governments at curricular reforms. In Delhi you never hear about the SCERT8217;s Indradhanush series of textbooks. Media attention is on NCERT8217;s textbooks, even at the primary level, where the emphasis should be on the child8217;s interaction with the immediate milieu. Elite schools simply refuse to look at SCERT books. The same goes for other states.

Instead of using NCERT books as exemplar material, quite a few states now simply reprint them. It means little to remind them that the National Policy on Education, 1986 and the National Curriculum Framework, 2005 aim at making the child the centre of curricular design and learning. NCF also speaks of plurality of textbooks and an all-round improvement in the quality and availability of different kinds of pedagogic material. This should also apply to privately published material.

It is difficult to imagine how educational policy by itself can stem the growing urban-rural divide, which is merely a symptom of the growing depression in many parts of rural India. The despair arises from a sense of helplessness and defeat. When malnourished eyes stare at glamorous advertisements on the television, the despair turns into anger, sometimes violence. Despite significant efforts made under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, basic necessities for a pleasant experience at school are scarce in rural India. What is sadder, teaching the young has lost what little social value it had. There is no incentive for good teachers, nor any deterrent for the indifferent.

Privatisation is growing in rural areas too, creating the delusion that education will improve if the state stops interfering. Public-private partnership is in fashion these days, but it cannot mean outsourcing the state8217;s responsibility to private hands. Health and education have been core areas of state responsibility the wide world over. It can hardly be otherwise in India at a time when a crisis of gigantic proportions has become all too visible in vast parts of the rural hinterland. A state-led agenda for reform of rural education, focusing on infrastructure, training and the integration of arts, crafts and productive skills in the daily curriculum, is urgently needed.

The writer is director, NCERT