The elite education is geared toward how to act elite and how to control and lead the common folks.
The education to the common people is geared to teach obedience and conformity and so basic skills to work in a factory or office.They are deliberately dumbed down in the fear that they will revolt against the system.
This is probably the reason why a student is punished for coming late to class or for speaking in the class and not punished or concerned when he scores average marks.
This is not only true in India but it is universal and it is also seen in America and elsewhere.

Governments cannot solve this problem because they follow the edicts of the world bank and the IMF.These institutions force governments to implement structural adjustments in return for loans and thus money for programs like education and health are forced to be cut.Since these intellectuals in government by design serve their masters they obediently comply and in return get some goodies.

Private enterprises cannot solve this problem because it is not in their best interest either. Education in India and elsewhere is increasingly becoming just vocational training. One of the reasons for this I think is the increased influence of private enterprises on government educational policies. Industries need people with specialized skills and so they need engineers, doctors,technicians,financial consultants etc. and not people who can think independently,creatively and who can question and who cannot put up with all these exploitations.These independent and creative thinkers are recognized and filtered out by our educational system from a very early stage.

What we need is a totally different kind of society which is not based on exploitation and which is not class based and this society will create systems which will work for the common good of the people.

The idea of liberalising education is unlikely to materialise from within the system. If only some “right” things occur and scale up before the jaggernaut notices it – somewhat like the mobile phones phenomena! Have been pondering over the idea of inviting the senior citizens to donate their time, effort and experience to fill in the gap for school teaching … enhancing local language capabilities from within by writing books etc. Still have no idea to scale up . Any suggestions?

- Abhijat

We have already seen the impact of newly privatised engg/medical colleges; which are mainly run by politicians. Some of them are better; but most of them are not anyway better than existing govt run colleges.

I can say about US. Schools are run by counties and many of them are quite decent. I am sure it is the case in almost all developed world. So, why can’t we learn about governance from these and improve the existing education system?

Just for my understanding :::

Can the RTI be used to determine where and how the funds were used – to drill down – the distribution of funds?.

I had a look at the Ministry of HRD site :
http://ssa.nic.in/ssamissionstat.asp

But this just talks of the schemes and the targets set by the Govt. Can you post your understanding on the existing schemes that are already under implementation?.

The government retains control of the alternative system through a “gating” process which enables a beautiful coexistence with complementary systems like the “missionary education mafia” so the only decent alternative is the missionary school system (the madrassa system of course is worse) and does not permit other systems to come in in the regular stream.

This has taken a long while to even partly unravel (ex. some non missionary good schools, some good private colleges which depend on very large donations and very determined actions to establish and maintain since non minority institutions are difficult to establish)

So here we have the problem:
The public (read government) education system is actively undermined. The private systems are either very expensive to run or controlled by mafias and there is every reason for the bureaucracy to maintain status quo – I have not even come to the syllabus and regulation aspects.

According to me the only way this will break or slowly dissolve is when there is much more prosperity – more people can afford private education, more private parties can set up charitable institutions because they are rich and/or more private employers build supplementary systems (this has been tried with some limited success in the IT area) or if there is some disruptive technology.

So though this may sound pessimistic, my feeling is that improvement in education will lag prosperity growth till the demand for educated people reaches a threshold level.

Sorry for the long post. This is something I feel strongly about and am frustrated about.

When you have some time, could you also do a post (or a series of posts) on *how* this liberalization should be carried out? A plan of action, sort of.
TIA.