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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Written-off in the hinterland -Krishna Kumar

Written-off in the hinterland -Krishna Kumar

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published Published on Jul 3, 2017   modified Modified on Jul 3, 2017
-The Hindu

Our education system has failed to integrate the rural into the larger political community, the nation

Rural Mandsaur, where five persons were killed during a demonstration recently, is a prosperous region of western Madhya Pradesh. More than a decade ago, I had the opportunity of spending two days with the children of a private residential school in Mandsaur.

At that time, it was the only English-medium residential school. Its vast and opulent campus in the middle of sprawling green fields was a great anomaly. The school had little to do with its milieu. It represented the dream of a philanthropist to export the best human talent of his region to the global market. This dream resonated national policy trends which, since the mid-1980s, had chosen to view education mainly as human resource development. The idea that education can serve a village in ways that allow it to retain its best boys and girls had been discarded long ago. If you carried in your mind any residues of Gandhi’s ideas about village education, you would see the residential academy in rural Mandsaur as an incongruity.

Here was an institution set up to give its metropolitan counterparts stiff competition on global playgrounds. The school had invested heavily in computers. Its strategy to serve rural children was neither purely commercial nor patronising. It was a professional bid to give rural youth an opportunity to aspire for legitimate heights. Some of them belonged to well-off farming families who could afford to send them to study in a residential school. But there were quite a few whose parents had small land holdings or minor jobs. For them, the school meant a potential break from the likelihood of a life dependent on shrinking income from agriculture and labour.

A supplier of talent

The impact of education on rural life has remained consistent since colonial days. When a village boy did well at school, he was expected to shift to a nearby town. That is where he could expect his talent to be recognised. Gradually, villages became the supplier of talent to the city. Only those who were dependent on land stayed back. With the passage of time, land got subdivided into smaller pieces, making agriculture unattractive. In recent times, investments made land more productive, but real income declined. Work opportunities in villages in non-agricultural pursuits remained scarce, and, in the recent past, job growth has come to a standstill. The phenomenon of ‘waiting’ to find work, described by Craig Jeffrey in the context of Uttarakhand and western Uttar Pradesh, is valid elsewhere too. One part of this phenomenon is the struggle to sustain one’s aspiration and the other part is living with frustration.

It is quite common these days among parents in all districts of M.P. to send their sons and daughters to towns such as Bhopal and Indore for coaching. As a broad spectrum industry, coaching now represents an acceptable way of spending much of your youth. It fills time and protects you from feeling constantly frustrated. Countless young men and women find themselves in a formidable situation that offers neither a choice nor the hope that something will eventually turn up. Coaching classes provide access to a peer group where everyone is faced with a similar, chronic crisis. Lakhs of students from rural and semi-urban areas spend their youth getting coached indiscriminately for competitive entry into an ever-shrinking opportunity market. Every year, a new army of candidates for coaching is spewed out by rural schools. Many get absorbed in the coaching industry itself, or in its ancillary industry of private tuition.

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The Hindu, 3 July, 2017, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/education-system-written-off-in-the-hinterland/article19198865.ece


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