Schools are running, but Education has lost its way

Dr Navneet Kour

jkngosocial@gmail.com

Social Reformer, Jammu & Kashmir

I recently visited a school in Jammu. The building was there, the enrolment register was full, the smart board was on. But the teacher was not in the classroom. She was in the office, uploading data on a portal. That one scene explains the crisis of Indian education today. Schools are running, but education has lost its way.

We have measured education through buildings, enrolment and portals, and we have forgotten the only thing that makes a school - a teacher who has the time, energy and dignity to teach.

The backbone we broke

There was a time we understood this. Operation Blackboard in the 1980s said a primary school needs more than walls - it needs a globe, a tabla, storybooks, a magnifying lens. Children must learn by doing.

That vision was scaled by DPEP and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. They did not just build schools; they built a humane support system for teachers - Cluster Resource Centres, Block Resource Centres and DIETs. They were meant to be mentors, not monitors.

Today that backbone has collapsed. DIETs, including in Jammu & Kashmir, are running with less than half their staff. CRCs and BRCs are rooms full of files. The blueprints that once tried to harmonize our old administrative system with this new academic vision lie unread. Civil servants come and go, programmes carry on.

The result? Nearly 84,000 government schools have been shut in the name of consolidation. A rural child now walks farther to reach a school that still does not have a science lab, a library or stable connectivity. We closed schools to save the system, but we lost the child.

The teacher who is not allowed to teach

If you ask any teacher honestly, she will tell you - I want to teach, but I am not allowed to. We have trapped her in a vicious cycle: Vacancies lead to administrative overload, which leads to deployment for SIR, election duty, surveys and endless entries on APAAR, UDISE and other portals, which leads to loss of classroom time, which finally leads to weak learning.

We ask her to deliver competency-based, joyful, inclusive learning, but we give her 60 to 65 children in one room. Every child has a different story, a different attention span, a different need to be seen. How can one teacher see 65 stories in 40 minutes?

Our meetings are never about the classroom or the pupil-teacher relationship. They are about whether data has been uploaded.

In our country, a teacher has been reduced to an ad hoc clerk, a free and readily available workforce for every government scheme. In private schools, the face is different but the wound is the same - low and irregular salary, certificates kept as security, leave at loss of pay, teachers treated as admission campaigners and test-score managers. This is not professionalism. It is exploitation.

A stressed, insulted, emotionally exhausted teacher cannot raise a conscious child.

The illusion of reform

We believe new programmes will reform education. We believe technology will solve quality.

Both are illusions. Reforms are designed by those who have never taught a single day. NEP speaks of self-knowledge, critical thinking and lifelong learning, but on the ground it remains unexecuted because we never audited our schools before prescribing solutions.

Technology cannot replace a teacher. Its real value is in freeing the teacher from repetitive work so she can do what only a human can do - mentor, inspire, build character and help a child learn how to learn, how to unlearn, and how to discover the true Self.

But we have done the opposite. We have made teaching secondary to paperwork. We have a system that appears to prioritize data collection over actual learning.

What must change

Strong learning outcomes begin only with supported teachers. For Jammu & Kashmir, I propose five non-negotiables:

Protected Teaching Time: By law, teaching hours must be sacrosanct. No non-teaching duty during school hours.

Rational Class Size and Teaching Assistants: No class beyond 35. Appoint local teaching assistants who aspire to teach.

One Portal, One Clerk: Merge all data entries and provide one dedicated clerk per school. Teachers must teach, not type.

Revive Academic Support: Fill all vacancies in CRCs, BRCs and DIETs with mentors whose sole job is to support teachers.

Selection by Aptitude, Education by Cooperation: We need cooperative education - of the people, by the people, for the people. Select teachers for aptitude, not just availability, and restore dignity with fair salary, training, time and trust.

A society cannot be reformed without its schools. And schools cannot be reformed without freeing its teachers.

If we cannot fix what already exists, no new programme and no new technology can save us.