Remember these classrooms?

Hearing that the visitor was a senior government officer, a demand came from a small group of villagers that had assembled in the meantime, “we must have a high school here.” What would they do with a high school when they can’t manage a middle school? What about the VEC (village education committee) that’s supposed to make sure the school functions and functions well? “One officer had come two years ago to organise the VEC. He called whoever was available. He announced the VEC and put up signatures of those who were not even present at the meeting.” I later recalled his observation to a World Bank official when I was involved with restructuring primary education in the state. “A VEC can’t be formed,” I said. “It has to evolve. We could at best trigger a process, act like a catalytic agent.” The Bank official replied, “Convince your bureaucrat colleagues in Delhi!”

Meanwhile, in the school the conversation returned to the high school demand. “Think about the girls. Where will these adolescents go if there is no high school?” I finally had a reason to be hopeful. Half the children in the tiny room and the verandah were girls. I could hardly recall a few female faces from my time in the school.

Many questions were racing through my mind. Could I ask the villagers to run the middle school first, and think of a high school later? Could I advise the teachers not to be absent when someone calls “from above”? Could I ask them to oppose the opening of private schools and charging money for an education that ought to be free and compulsory, guaranteed as a fundamental right under the Constitution?

And then, in the silence, even more questions. Should I promise a high school? Or, should I disclose that the Kothari Commission had recommended the Common School System with neighbourhood schooling aimed to equalise educational opportunity, remove the caste system in school management, prevent segregation of social classes, encourage involvement of local communities and give freedom to schools for experimentation and creativity? That the 1968 national education policy had fully accepted the commission’s recommendation on the CSS? That the NPE in 1986 and again in 1992 had reiterated the policy on the CSS, but the powers that be has made sure that the CSS was ousted from educational and social discourse, so much so that we have now invented hundreds of reasons, excuses, using beautiful terminology and jargons to say, para-teachers for your children and trained teachers for mine, learning centres for your children, and private schools for mine, literacy for your children and education for my children?

I could not utter a single word, while the villagers kept asking for teachers, for action against the contractor and for a high school. I felt like crying.

Some time later I was running a workshop with some school administrators elsewhere, and I narrated this story without naming the village or the state. Practically every teacher claimed it could be the story of the school in his/her state.

The writer, a civil servant, is researching inclusive education at Oxford