Emergic

By Atanu Dey

The education system is embedded in the bigger socio-political order of the economy. To a large degree, the larger system dictates the characteristics of its subsystems. In its broadest terms, the government of India is an extractive and exploitative system created specifically for that purpose during the hundred years of its existence as a British colony before it became politically independent. The British, as a colonial power, created a system designed to control every aspect of the economy to maximize their extraction. The challenge of administering such a large population required a certain small percentage of the native population to be educated in a very specific way. Therefore the total and absolute control of the education system was a necessity.

Even after British left, the structures they had created for controlling the economy in general, and the educational system more specifically, remained intact. The new political leaders saw it was beneficial for them not to deviate from the old colonial goal of imposing an extractive and exploitative government on the people. By continuing to control the education system, they were able to impose a degree of control over the population that would be unthinkable in a free society.

Universal primary education was especially neglected because it would have given rise to universal literacy. Universal literacy is not a good thing if the status quo is to be maintained in a regime which allows freedom of the press. It is safe to allow a free press if two out of three people cannot read. Freedom of the press is not meaningful in a society of illiterates. We should note in passing that whether literate or not, people can hear and speak. So while the press was allowed freedom in a largely illiterate society, radio was absolutely government controlled, consistent with the aim of an exploitative and extractive system.

To be perfectly clear, whether a system is judged to be a failure or not depends on the objective that the system was created to serve. The Indian education system is definitely successful because it does meet the objectives that the British created it for, and which the successive Indian governments have implicitly endorsed: control the supply of education and dictate to the finest detail the nature of the education provided and to whom. Universal primary education, or even universal literacy, was never its goal. To fault the current educational system on its inability to meet the needs of a developing society is to miss the point that it was meant as an instrument for extractive purposes.

If the preceding picture painted hastily with broad brush strokes is reasonably accurate, then it implies that for the education system to serve the needs of a developing nation, the objectives of the system will have to change. Since the same structure cannot serve an orthogonal set of objectives, the whole system will have to be redesigned. If there is one thing I would like to convey in this brief series, it is this: change the system radically if it has to serve a different objective. It should be evident that anything less than a radical re-thinking of the system would be a pointless waste of time.

The current educational system has an objective dictated by the British and which the governments of independent India inherited: To choose from within the huge population a small subset and educate them so that they will serve the needs of the government. That objective should have been replaced with something like this: To develop the human potential of every citizen in the broadest sense, so that the individual is best able to serve his own interests and the interests of the world he lives in. In other words, the citizens are not seen as serving the interests of the government but instead the governments objective is to serve the people.

The alternate objective would require liberalizing the education sector from government control. We will go into some specifics of the liberalization of the sector later in the series.

Write to atanudey at gmail.com if you have questions or comments.

Tomorrow: Thinking ROI

Continue reading TECH TALK: Doing Education Right: Changing Objectives

By Atanu Dey

Education matters immensely when it comes to the health of an economy. There is a positive correlation between years of schooling and the GDP per capita. Lets look at the numbers that are indicative of the generalization. In 2001, school-life expectancy and the ppp GDP per capita for Ethiopia were (4.3 years, and $675); for Indonesia (10, and $2,844), for China (12.4, and $4,065), for South Korea (14.6, and $17,048), Japan (14.3, and $25,559), and the US (15.2, and $32,764).

Not just that, there is a correlation between growth and educational attainment. Consider one measure of the educational level of an economy, the literacy rate of adults (defined as those above the age of 15 years). In 1970, adult literacy rate in China was 54 percent, compared to Indias 34 percent. The ppp GDP per capita income of India in 1970 was $1,034, nearly double that of Chinas $571. Yet, twenty years later, China surpassed Indias annual per capita income: India $1,587, China $1,617. The adult literacy rates in 1990: China 78 percent, India 49 percent. By 2001, China had 86 percent adult literacy rate and a ppp GDP per capita of $4,065, and India languished at 58 percent and $2,319.

There are many reasons for modern Chinas meteoritic rise from its humble beginnings. But one of the most important factors must be their youth literacy rate, which is defined for the population between 15 and 24 years of age. In 1970, Chinas youth literacy rate was a whopping 83 percent, compared to Indias 46 percent. It is more than a little depressing to note that more than half of Indias youth were illiterate, leave alone educated, as late as 1970. By 2000, India was just at 73 percent, not even at the level at which China was 30 years before. Now China has achieved nearly universal youth literacy. The lesson is unavoidable: compared to China, Indias prospects are dim if education has anything to do with economic prosperity and potential.

It is important to note the sequence of development. Literacy preceded economic growth for China, as it does for every successful development story. Note that China was more literate than India in 1970 even though it was poorer than India. Thus poverty does not automatically condemn a population to illiteracy. It is a matter of choice: like individuals, countries can also choose to invest in education.

I deliberately chose China as a counterpoint to India in this narrative. I can tell the same story of how Singapore transformed itself from a mosquito infested swamp to a developed economy within a single generation. But then the usual objection is that Singapore is a tiny city-state and a behemoth like India cannot transform itself. It is a just-so argument, supposed to be compelling enough that no reason has to be advanced why the Singapores tiny size in the context of development is relevant.

But another just-so argument is introduced when India and China are compared. It says that China cannot be compared to India because India is a democracy. Again, no reason is provided why democracy prevents policy makers from choosing to invest in education. However, one can argue that Indias political structure has something naturally to do with Indias dismal failure in educating its population. I describe India as a pseudo-democracy, something that has the superficial trappings of democracy but just below the surface it is anything but.

Democracy, if it means anything at all, is more than mere head-counting. It has something to do with informed choice of the population at large, which in turn depends on the populations ability to understand the issues, which finally rests on the ability to read, write, and carefully consider the alternatives that confront them. As it happened, when India achieved political freedom from the British, the population was told that their emancipator knew best and all they had to do was vote for them, and the government so constituted would magically take care of their every wish. How that transformed India from being the darling candidate for becoming a developed economy in the 1950s to actually being a laggard in economic development we shall briefly note the next time.

Write to atanudey at gmail.com if you have questions or comments.

Tomorrow: Changing Objectives

Continue reading TECH TALK: Doing Education Right: China Comparison