TALES OF TRAVESTY
DR. JITENDRA SINGH
For a nation which is bemoaning the poor quality of mid-day meal served in its schools, an equally if not more ignominous fact is that over 25% of the country’s schools are without a blackboard. At a time, when tablets, smart screens and latest hi-tech teaching techniques have entered the classrooms of a handful of elite schools which charge exorbitant fee, a survey titled “Learning Blocks” and conducted by an NGO called “Child Relief and You” (CRY) makes the shocking disclosure that while 25% of the country’s schools carry on their teaching without a blackboard, leave alone mid-day meal, there are as many as 20% schools which expect their wards to bear with the pangs of thirst all through the school hours because there is no provision for drinking water.
Long time ago, in the years soon after Independence, there were a number of schools in the country which did not have a building or a roof overhead but, considering the importance of a blackboard, even for an open-air class-room, a board used to be hung from a tree trunk… a 1947 India phenomenon symbolically portrayed in a popular Raj Kapoor– Nargis starrer. That truly is the traditional importance attached to a blackboard or, to use an adage, school education is synonymous with blackboard.
The CRY survey report published last week and based on countrywide inputs from several states including Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Karnataka as well as three metro cities of Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai, goes on to make several more unflattering revelations like, for example, 11% of schools donot have toilets, 49% have common toilets for staff and students, 60% don’t have playgrounds and a library..as if it is an unncessary ingredient… was not found to be there in over 74% of schools. Obnoxiously, 80% of schools surveyed did not have cleaning staff to keep the toilets clean… which speaks volumes about the hygiene care of children studying there and also simultaneously explains the presence of worms, cockroaches and insects in the mid-day meal served in these schools.
Francis Bacon once said, the greatest harm to the cause of literature has been done by the teachers of literature. In the same vein, perhaps, one could suspect, the greatest harm to the cause of school education is being inflicted by none other than the socalled educationists or learned planners of the country’s education policy. The government policy of allowing unchecked mushrooming of private or socalled public schools inspired by a business or merchantile interest rather than any commitment to the cause of education coupled with criminal neglect of government sector schools has ended up taking toll of the opportunity of education available to the children of lower socio-economic.
For the independent India that began its tryst with education with Moulana Abu Kalam Azad, one of the world’s greatest educationists of his time and the country’s first Education Minister, and for a country that today makes noble declarations of intent like ‘‘Education for all’’ as much as ‘‘Food for all’’, the findings of the above survey are a grim reminder of the thin veil of hypocrisy and illusion that blinds our eyes.
And, even as the common man tries his best to disbelieve the prospect of schools without blackboard and instead lures himself to believe what the leaders at the helm say, Umapathy props in to drop the Iqbal refrain ‘‘…Guftar Ka Qazi Ban To Gaya, Kardar Ka Qazi Ban Na Saka !’’
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