State gives lessons in tokenism

Tokenism rather than real education is the leitmotif of Uttar Pradesh education even in the schools that Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh...

Tokenism rather than real education is the leitmotif of Uttar Pradesh education even in the schools that Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav has built in Saifayi.

The first school came up in 1994 and is named after Amitabh Bachchan who came personally to inaugurate the Amitabh Bachchan Rajkiya Intermediate College. At first glance, it8217;s a fine building with classrooms and teachers and grounds for the children to play in. But when you talk to the teachers or visit the classrooms, you encounter the same empty tokenism.

Not only do students pay a token fee of five rupees a month at the junior level but the government actually goes to the trouble of giving each student five rupees a year in lieu of their midday meal. When I asked the Principal what the point was, he said it was government policy.

The result of money being spent in this token fashion and fees being collected in a similar fashion is that the Amitabh Bachchan school building is already showing ravages of poor maintenance. Classrooms are filthy, furniture broken and the general degradation of UP seems to have crept into everything.

8216;8216;What to do,8217;8217; said the Principal, 8216;8216;the government makes provision for us to employ only one bhangi, how can we keep the school clean? As for the garden being overgrown, you must understand the school is built on wasteland so nothing will grow here.8217;8217;

Mulayam8217;s other contribution to Saifayi8217;s education is the S S Memorial Public School which he has built in his father8217;s memory, allegedly with funds collected from the constituency development funds of SP legislators. It is, without question, the finest of the schools I visited on my tour and is better maintained because it charges a relatively reasonable tuition fee: Rs 250 at the junior level and Rs 350 for the higher classes.

The building is well appointed and the classrooms furnished with proper desks and chairs but, for reasons unknown, the school8217;s medium of instruction is English. This is extraordinary when you remember how Mulayam has spent his whole life trying to impose Hindi on the rest of the world. As Defence Minister, he ordered all files to be translated into Hindi and insisted that it be the ministry8217;s lingua franca.

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When I asked why English was the medium in his home school, nobody had an answer. What was more worrying was that none of the students I spoke to in English understood a single word. Tokenism, yet again, and this time with consequences that could be tragic since the children of S S Memorial could end up speaking neither Hindi nor English.

At the end of my school tour of UP, the thing that struck me most forcefully was that it8217;s not lack of funds that8217;s the problem so much as their mismanagement. It is better to have 10,000 good schools than 21,219 bad ones and this is something that appears not to have been understood.

Nor has it been understood yet that education, like governance, requires a degree of expertise and if it8217;s left in the hands of petty officials and vainglorious politicians, all you will end up with are schools that are schools in name only.

Education should mean more than mere literacy but if the schools I visited are anything to go by then what you have in UP is only a literacy programme. Not a single school had a decent library or the sort of extra-curricular activities that are so essentially a part of a child8217;s education. What can you expect a child to learn in a classroom that does not have a single picture on its walls leave alone reference books, maps and other teaching aids like computers and libraries.

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All in all, it was a dismal, depressing tour whose images in no way resembled the glossy pictures and statistics in HRD Minister Murli Manohar Joshi8217;s pamphlet. Since both he and the Prime Minister get elected from UP, it might be a good idea for them to do their own school tour before they talk about 8216;8216;Strides in Education8217;8217; or the achievements of the NDA government. The only thing achieved so far is shameless tokenism and no amount of glossy propaganda pamphlets can hide this.

PART II 8211; Joshi class: all ears, nose pressed
PART I 8211; All Maya, Joshi8217;s 8216;strides8217; invisible