Agreed with your point.

Policy reform can speeden up the whole process. But again, the policy reformers and business should work in conjunction and not disjoint with each other. Sadly, many a times they are at loggerheads which is very disappointing, but still.

What I was trying to say was that we need to make sure that the work is ‘joint and additive’.

I agree that I should pay some more attention to the ‘fine-grained’ statistics that exist here, and that will make the description very precise and throw more insight into the problem.

Thank you for you comment!

I could not help but not agree when you said
a very strong economic progress can push a large section from part d) to part c) in another two decades, thus making the task of policy reform for schools in part (d) again pointless, because the economy is itself creating the transformation that policy makers would essentially be wasting their time trying to do.

Any help done by policy reformers irrespective of the economic progress can only help speed up the transition. Thus, that work can never be a waste of time.

I did not mean to say that *all* descriptive work must be done before prescription begins. Further, description includes both data and theory or models for secular trends.

What I think is important is that the descriptive work be clearly reported so that people can figure out the basis for your prescriptions. In your case, you could use anecdotes and examples from your own work and other srces to clarify what you mean.

There are lots of statistics on education and it would be good for you to reference them. I think that there is scope for collecting more, for reasons given below.

Large scale statistics often under-count private unregistered schools, pay too much attention to tangibles such as building and playground size rather than intangibles such as teacher regularity and student ethusiasm, and are too often of little help in comparing any two specific approaches because they don’t have fine-grained information on student characteristics.

Your point about the usage that is inadequate and faulty as well as potentially misleading is well taken!

I will see if I can edit this, and definitely keep it in mind for the future posts!

I just read your first comment. So I will form a reply to that first.

I agree with your distinction between description and prescription.

However, I tend to disagree that these need to be disjoint and cannot be done simultaneously within a single framework. Eg. If I say that I ‘describe’ something as ‘bad’, then I believe that it is also my duty to give some approach to a ‘solution’ immediately, so as to make sure that the description does not take a severely pessimistic tone.

So the idea is that the very act of giving a highly accurate description also helps us infer some possible prescriptions, because very insightful prescriptions can be discerned from the very act of prescription.

About field work, incidentally, I have done ‘field work’ in India for an year! So I was just writing from my personal notes, because I have really done this work in a lot of detail in the state of UP.

Thank you so much for your reference. I would definitely see if I can find something from this.

As another note, the very emphasis on ‘data collection’ dissuades me somewhat from reading this reference, because I really believe that there is abundance of data on these issues available.

What I was also trying to indicate in the later part of the post, and what I also truly believe is that most of this data is irrelevant, since the situation is fast fluctuating, hence say a 5 year old data become irrelevant very quickly and cannot be used for any meaningful discussion 5 year hence.

Therefore, as I argued, the necessity of creating a model that has ‘predictive ability’, therefore sidelining the task of data collection and focusing on the ‘bigger’ and to my mind, harder ‘task’ of an ‘experiential framework’ which ‘approximately’ captures most of the issues.

Cheers!

“d) An even more significant and largely ignored urban urban population, that enrolls in the ill functioning government schools or community run / NGO run private schools.”

“largely ignored” by whom exactly? And “significant” to whom? And does your adjective “ill functioning” apply to “government schools” or to “community run / NGO run private schools”, or both?

Let’s start with “ignored” — most people ignore most other people, so what does it even mean to call a population an “ignored population”? Most of the people who have lived near me have ignored me, and I’ve ignored them — does this make me an “ignored person”? The adjective makes sense if this population deserves a certain level of attention which it is not getting. But attention from whom exactly?

The people in the poor urban populations aren’t ignoring themselves, and, to the best of my knowledge, in so far as they live near and interact with each other, they aren’t ignoring each other. People in other areas who don’t interact with them probably ignore them, but is this a big surprise? People in poor urban populations probably “ignore” Ratan Tata and Narayan Murthy, does this make these captains of industry ignored?

Perhaps what you mean is that the urban poor are a small minority and are ignored by the elite, who are the majority? To the best of my knowledge, even in urban areas, the poor are of comparable numbers to the rich, and probably more in number in many urban areas. So, this interpretation does not make sense to me.

Are you claiming that they are ignored by the political process? I don’t know if this is true, but my anecdotal evidence suggests that politicians care a lot more about getting the votes of poor people than about getting the votes of rich people. In the urban areas where I’ve lived, the majority of people attending political rallies were either lower middle class (the non-elite non-poor) or poor. And the poor were also much more likely to vote. It is still possible (and plausible) that the poor participate more in the political charade but it’s the rich who affect the actual decisions made by politicians. If your argument is a variant of this, I’d like to hear it more clearly.

Perhaps what you mean is that their paying attention to each other isn’t important, because the “elite” are ignoring them. But why should attention from the “elite” count for more (from the perspective of measuring degree of attention or ignoredness) than attention from each other? Is it because the elite are in a greater position to bestow favours or create real improvement, and the urban poor can’t do much for themselves?

I think this last argument is defensible (though I don’t fully agree with it — poor people, even if less equipped with general intelligence or knowledge, may still be better equipped with the local and circumstantial knowledge that is needed to help themselves than well meaning outsiders), but if this is the real claim, I’d like it if you made it explicit.

Okay, that is enough quibbling about the meaning of one word — “ignored” — something that I could well have ignored. But words play an important role in shaping the way we think, and they both reveal and affect our underlying assumptions. I don’t know what your underlying assumptions were when you used this word, and I’ve just listed some possibilities. I would like to know what you had in mind.

Another word I have often seen in this context is “underserved” — underserved by whom? As an amusing aside, “underserved” is often mis-spelled as “undeserved” which can of course be interpreted as “undeserving”. Some might argue that this slight mis-spelling completely transforms the meaning of the word. Others might consider it a Freudian slip.

I have a lot of things to say about your post, so I’ll take them up one by one.

There are two aspects to what you’re doing: a descriptive (or “positive”) aspect which attempts to accurately describe and clearly model the current state of Indian education from nursery/kindergarten to high school, and a second, prescriptive (or “normative”) aspect where you use this information along with certain moral values that you have to suggest possible changes. There could then also be a third aspect, which actually involves trying to figure out how to bring about those changes. (Some of your recommendations may involve activities that individuals can take on their own, some may involve government policy that individuals may be able to influence, etc.)

Basically, first figure out where things are, then figure out where you’d like them to be, then figure out how you can try to manipulate things to get from here to there.

I think you made a good first attempt at getting a descriptive account — which is what the first few paragraphs were — but then, moved too quickly to the world of prescription, and then swung back to descriptive mode. It seems to me that a lot more effort is needed just to get the descriptive story straight. It is not necessary, of course, that each one of us do fieldwork throughout all parts of India to get the descriptive story straight. But some people have done fieldwork and aggregate statistical data, and this can be used as a starting point.

One of the most interesting directions of research in Indian education, in my opinion, is the work conducted by James Tooley, now at the E. G. West Centre at the University of Newcastle. Tooley describes much of his research in the book “The Beautiful Tree” (see here for links to purchase and reviews). He discovers that people in some very poor communities in India, Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya, are ditching the free public schools in those communities and choosing private schools. This isn’t really that new a discovery — the Oxfam Educational Report and Amartya Sen also note similar things. But Tooley went further and tried to determine why parents were making the choices they did, and whether the private schools were outperforming their government school counterparts. His research also led him to the conclusion that private education must be a major component of any strategy to achieve universal literacy. Whether you agree with his conclusions, the data he has collected (along with the personal anecdotes) make his work worth a read.

Since this comment is getting too long, I will comment later on some of the specific issues, language, and assumptions of your post.