Lopsided school system
According to the 2015-’16 report of the only government database on schooling, the District Information System for Education, Uttar Pradesh has about 1.2 crore children in secondary school.
But the state has just 2,152 high schools with Classes 9 and 10, and inter-colleges with Classes 11 and 12. To put that in perspective, Delhi, with a little over 12 lakh students in secondary education, has over 1,000 schools with those classes.
No steady policy
“Education policy has never been fully under government control in Uttar Pradesh,” observed Lalmani Dwivedi, who teaches at an aided school himself. In 1921, the Uttar Pradesh Intermediate Education Act was passed and based on it, the board was created. A provision of filling 24 of its 72 posts with elected representatives of teachers and principals was introduced in the late 1970s.
“Uttar Pradesh was divided into 12 constituencies and each had one teacher and one principal, from government and aided schools, representing it,” said Dwivedi. .
Since 1984, school teachers and principals have had practically no say in education policies, he added. In 2006, the Allahabad High Court directed the government to hold elections but the Samajwadi Party government amended the law to abolish the elected positions altogether.
“The parties that ruled the state nominated their own people into the board,” said Chet Narayan, member of the Legislative Council from the teacher’s group, Varanasi. “Without elected representatives, there was no check on it.” He argued that this led to the board indiscriminately recognising private schools with no emphasis on quality. He alleged the recognition process, too, was riddled with corruption.
While each Bharatiya Janata Party government took strong action against cheating – a move Dwivedi lauded – and subsequent ones reversed the changes, no government addressed the underlying flaws that engendered this racket.
Primary education got some attention after the Right to Education Act, 2009, was passed, but the state’s retreat from secondary education continued with policies swinging wildly with every change in regime. No matter who came to power, with every change in government, syllabi were altered, recruitment policies changed, schemes launched and withdrawn, said Dwivedi. But very few new government schools were opened. “Sab apni manmani se chalate the,” agreed Narayan. Successive governments ran secondary schooling by the own whims. Teachers bodies are now petitioning the state government to address this problem and grant them a role in decision-making.
“One government says ‘Teach Ram Manohar Lohia’ [a freedom fighter and socialist] and the next one says, ‘Teach Deen Dayal Upadhyay’ [a Right-wing ideologue],” complained Dwivedi. “Once the system ceased to be democratic, no one who had the actual experience of a classroom and knew the real state of education and children was involved. If teachers were still a part of the board, our children would not be impacted every time the government changed. But we have never had a steady policy.”