and remove all the other private education boards.
Indian bureaucrats have a long history of hating private schools. In this country, if you want to set up your own school, you will not be allowed to do so, unless it meets every stringent criteria the government expects of you. In fact, they have guidelines on what the minimum size of the school should be, on having a mandatory physical education ground, on making sure that the ground is of the exact dimensions the government expects, on making sure that there as many other mandated facilities - even if they will never be used - , on how the school conducts its timings, and so on and so on. Through this they make sure that minimum investment outlay for the school is as high as possible, and as few private parties as possible ever get to start schools.
Running a school on its own is a complex activity that involves hiring good teachers, organizing all the departments for different subjects, organizing all the classrooms and the sizes of students, organizing the class routines, organizing the coursework for all the classes and sections, organizing the plan for teaching the coursework, and even after these plans are laid out, organizing extra classes if the students turn out to be slow, evaluating and checking the abilities of students to adjust the pacing of classes accordingly, preparing feedback for parents based on those student’s academic progress, finding out how to deal with individual students. The time and cost of this obviously can not be underestimated and need to be planned and managed accordingly, and yet all the resources of the school are already stretched out in meeting government criteria.
Private schools thus also barely end up with enough funds to expand and replace existing facilities of the school. Classrooms can not be notoriously crowded and the teachers barely find an accomodable class size to whom to teach. The stairs and hallways can be crowded down with students, while every single object and place in the school wears out from use over and over. Normally, any venture that involves work on a fixed premises would be adding an additional block, shifting work there, renovating old blocks, and regularly increasing the capacity to meet more students.
This is, of course, what has been going on for the past sixty years here, but government officials still feel they have not crippled private education enough. Once, I saw an article by an Indian “economist” who said, “If the government gave more funding to education, we wouldn’t even need these private schools.” It’s, of course, some sort of necessary evil to them that other parties are doing their bit to educate people at all.
Now, all the private education boards and councils, like the ICSE and a few others, are being told they can go to hell, and the country would benefit more from having a single homogenous education system with private and public schools all following the state system. The state education system, of course, prepares a propogandist syllabi where schoolchildren are shown maps of their country with all the disputed territory of other nations shown as a part of their country, and all the wars started and aggravated by their own country to have supposedly been fought in “self-defense from an external invasion”.
It also interestingly coincides with the fact that recently, the government declared education a “fundamental right”, which means that it is every poor child’s fundamental right to be forcefully put into government schools so they can spend their time learning all the state approved history and force them into the standards of educated people - even though the most brilliant thinkers and innovators of this nation were uneducated and without schooling. As if somehow, a person is worth something only if he is given the same homogenous upbringing that the state provides for him.
It’s times like these when opposition to statist control is more than just an ideology or a matter of proving academic facts - it’s a matter that brings genuine anger and resentment in me.