India Needs to Shut Half of its Government Schools

 How many schools do we have in India? We have 1.5 million schools in our country, yes 15 lakh schools and China just has 2.5 lakh. A country which is more populous than ours and is about three times our size China has only 1/6th of our schools. And when it comes to learning, Chinese kids are among the top 5 globally and Indian kids, unfortunately, they are in the bottom 5. More than 50% kids in India cannot read fluently and cannot do basic addition. 

As a country we have one of the largest footprints of schools and one of the deepest learning crisis. Experts say that our learning crisis is linked to our footprints and so India needs to shut down half of its government schools. If we want to improve education in India, not for a few but for all of our kids we really need to shut down 5 lakh government schools in the country.

 The picture above shows exactly what a government school looks like in the rural India, it has 45-50 kids and perhaps 2 classrooms, electricity and water are now pretty common, computers and library are a fairly distant dreams. The schools is allocated 2 teachers, no principal, no clerk and one cook by the administration. So, how does a school like this actually run, early mornings in the schools there are fairly excited chaos, there are children sauntering in at various points of time, there are kids playing in the playground, there are other older kids  helping the teacher to clean the veranda. Then there is a morning assembly and all the kids walk in to the classroom, but it is when you enter in a classroom the scene becomes very depressive. Imagine one teacher trying to teach classes 1st, 2nd and 3rd classes all together in one room because her peer is teaching classes 4th and 5th. The period is of maths and she is wondering, what should I teach, should I teach numbers from the class 1 book or addition from the class 2 book or may be multiplication from the class 3 book, at the end she decides to do a sing- song recitation of tables. It is not the case of only maths but it is same for all the subjects. After a couple of hours of this she moves in the staff room because there is no clerk, she does the accounts, mark the attendance and transfer the scholarship money to the students account. At noon she has to supervise the mid-day meal, its cooking and servicing. After lunch there are some half hearted and futile attempts to get the students back into the classroom and by 1:30 pm the entire school is dispersed.

None of us can call this a school, at best it can be called as a day care center serving a meal. This is not the story of only one school but its the story of nearly 5 lakh government schools in India. All the students are supposed to learn with very poor resources and one or two teachers, and thus no learning happens. We should think how do we came here, what lead to this, perhaps this is because of a fairly faulty policy of the government on how to increase enrollment. So when we wanted to bring children into schools, what we decided was that we are going to take schools to every child rather than bringing children into schools.

So what the government has done over the last 20 years, is that they have made many tiny schools, in every village, every hamlet and in every nook and corner of the country. Of course we have given the children a place to go to but unfortunately, not a place to learn. There has been many valiant attempts in making education happen in these schools, we have given the teachers lots of training, we have given them computers and even guest teachers, but nothing works.  It is nearly impossible to make sure that there can be a high quality teaching in a school which is run by one or two teachers end to end. 

What can be the solution to such a problem? Recently a school was made in Jharkhand by merging three such government schools, so it was a school with 150 kids and 4 teachers. Today this school has 225 kids and 7 teachers, all the kids from the smaller schools have access to a better playground, better facility and infrastructure. The government is using the saved money from the 2 smaller schools to install a library and few computers. Now every class has got its own teacher and they know what to teach and which book to teach from. Children are getting a customized education and they are truly learning. Parents of these students were initially very hesitant about sending their kids to a school that is slightly far away, but today they love their discipline. 

This is not a stray example, there are 4,700 schools in Jharkhand which have been merged out of the total of 40,000 schools. There are other schools that are so well resourced that they look like the DPSs and 7 lakh kids have been benefited from this. In Rajasthan over the past 4 years, 20,000 schools have been merged into bigger schools benefiting to nearly 20-30 lakh kids. In the last National Achievements Survey of kids across India, Rajasthani kids stood 1st and 2nd in the country. 

What has started in Rajasthan and Jharkhand has to be replicated across the country. There has been many attempts by the state governments trying to merge schools but most of these attempts have failed because of some wrong reasons. We have nearly 3 crore kids who study in 5 lakh sub-scale schools in India which are being run by one or two teacher. These kids deserve a better education and we need to reconsider our bases. Having more is not better always sometimes we need less, we have to for the quality of education and not the quantity of schools. So, to improve education in India we need to shut down half of our government schools. What you think about this? Let me know in the comments.