Reciprocal truancy

A K Ghosh
The Statesman, 28 November

A report in The Statesman dated 26-10-2007 says: "Mid-day meals, an instrument designed to boost attendance in government schools, has brought in a role reversal of sorts with teachers devising ways to ensure enough money is sanctioned for the schools for the mid-day meal, while the mid-day meal organisers are somehow managing classes."

After 60 years of Independence, Indian children have little to celebrate: about 13.5 million of them in the age group of 6-13 years are still out of school. This, despite a constitutional directive urging all states to provide "free and compulsory education for all children until they complete 14 years". The Constitution envisaged fulfilling this objective by 1960. Yet, if the trend continues, our country will be far from reaching the goal.
It might be a misnomer to assume that poverty keeps children out of school; that they are forced to work to support their families, instead of opting for education. There is often a positive resistance to schooling on the part of the "whining schoolboy creeping unwilling to school", as Shakespeare in his Seven Ages of Man would have us believe. This should induce the removal of anomalies from the school system. Many children reject school because of the teachers' harsh attitude, corporal punishment employed for underachievers and first-generation learners. There are also drop-outs because, as a recent report of Unesco's International Institute for Education Planning says, 25 per cent of primary school teachers in India are absent from their workplace.
Truancy among teachers has assumed an alarming proportion. Many schools in rural areas remain without a teacher. The method of teaching is uninspiring and encourages learning by rote, despite clear directives in the National Policy on Education. The World Bank's mid-term appraisal of the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan also reveals that teacher absenteeism in India is substantially higher, against the average of 18 per cent in such developing countries as Zambia, Peru, Bangladesh and Ecuador.

If the PROBE survey, a few years ago, is any indication, teachers spend little time in active teaching, even when they are present at school. Coming late and leaving early is an accepted practice. Teaching aids are seldom available. Many schools have received new teaching aids through Operation Blackboard but the old traditional stick remains the choice. The teachers are disciplinarians who only try to control the students. They punish them, so the children end up not going to school. Most of the tiny tots stay away mainly because schooling for them is boring and irrelevant.

School drop-outs are often exposed to drugs and gambling. One can see them almost everywhere ~ ragpicking at street comers, shining shoes, as porters, selling newspapers at the traffic lights ~ half-naked, undernourished. Recently, the Border Security Force started considering ways to encourage drop-out children who were used as "carriers" to smuggle out goods along the India-Bangladesh international border to return to school. Schools often lack everything ~ adequate infrastructure, teaching faculties, et al. Children are too tiny to know their right to education. Sometimes governments are encouraged to open schools in good numbers to increase their votebanks.

In some cases, the building is used by the teachers for residential purposes; the premises are used as a store, as a cattleshed or even a public toilet. In 1993, 65 per cent of all schools had a pucca building, 4 per cent were run in open space, 3 per cent in thatched huts, and 0.3 per cent in tents. Fifty-six per cent of schools had no drinking water facilities and 70 per cent no toilets. The Sixth All India Education Survey also shows that in 1993, about 20 per cent of primary schools were single-teacher schools and 0.8 per cent had no teachers.

The Assembly Standing Committee on education, information and cultural affairs in its 10th report last year, recorded that 20,468 primary schools in West Bengal do not have toilets.

Also, 9,316 primary and 522 upper primary schools do not have drinking water facilities. As many as 3,046 schools have one teacher, while 10,094 primary schools have only one classroom. Even in Kolkata, as per the findings of the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (2003-04), nearly 200 primary schools have only one classroom.

More than 350 primary schools and 17 upper primary schools in the city do not have any drinking water facilities. More than a dozen do not even have blackboards. To top it all, only 22 per cent of them have toilets for girls. While free education is a constitutional right, primary education in our country is not that free. The PROBE survey found that on an average the expenditure on fees, books, slates and uniforms for a child was Rs 318 a year. This financial liability has a particularly harmful effect on the schooling of girls.

Most girls in India, especially in rural areas, are conservative, and therefore hesitant to attend schools. Bogged down by household chores, girls may not have the time or the inclination to educated themselves. Economic pressure on families for basic survival sometimes force girls to share the burden.

Traditional families also view being taught by male teachers with suspicion. Also, a sense of insecurity prevents many adolescent girls from continuing with their education. A study conducted in rural areas reveals that barely 40 adolescent girls of every 100 make it to Class V. The drop-out rate is found to be much higher among tribes and castes that are patriarchal by nature.

Early marriage and shortage of women teachers are also factors leading parents to pull their daughters out of schools. In many cases, girls and boys suffer frequent bouts of illness due to malnutrition which force them to drop out of school.

If the report of 2006, released by the DFID, the British government's aid agency, mentioning largescale absenteeism of teachers, hostile attitude towards disadvantaged children and lack of accountability in the system, is to be believed, it is easier to understand why so many children dropout of schools despite a high-level of parental interest in their education.
What seems to be most disquieting, however, is that the guardians of education do still find it easy to suggest that the major factor behind the high drop-out rate is the consistently meagre financial provision for primary education.

(The author is Reader, Department of English, Gurudas College, Kolkata.)