Below standard

Is the right to education merely the right to schooling? That is the question raised by the Annual Status of Education Report 2010,and it comes out of some disturbing statistics. The survey,which covered seven lakh children in 14,000 villages,found that while 96.5 per cent of children in the six to 14 age group in rural India are enrolled in school,the quality of their education left much to be desired. When only half the number of students surveyed in Class V can read a Class II text,when nearly 30 per cent of Class V students can do neither subtraction nor division,it is time to seriously ponder the slow decline in the quality of education in our rural areas and assess why we are going wrong at the very basic level.

It’s not that there aren’t any positive developments. Thanks to the standards imposed by the Right to Education Act and the far-reaching effects of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan,there are more children in school: the percentage of five-year-olds enrolled in schools has increased from 54.6 in 2009 to 62.8 in 2010. The girls in the 11-14 age group still out of school has come down,too. Now,the imperative should be on providing them with the kind of education that is their right.

Infrastructure is essential. Students need classrooms and blackboards. They need drinking water and warm meals. They also require qualified,enthusiastic teachers — for the quality of education a student receives depends on the quality of her teachers. And that’s where Punjab,where its children have shown a marked improvement in basic arithmetic,has scored. The survey points out how the state is focusing on teachers as much as it is on students. It has schemes intent on upgrading pedagogy. And that can be a lesson for everyone. Let us start with better pay for schoolteachers,followed by incentivising them to deliver the best and then make them accountable for the results. Only then can children get the kind of education they deserve.