AS it has happened all these years, secondary schools located in rural areas, this year too, failed even to come near their urban counterparts, according to the results of the Secondary School Certification examinations that were published on Saturday. Only five rural schools have earned places in the list of top 80 secondary schools, prepared taking 10 of the best schools from each of the eight general education boards. 77 per cent of the country’s secondary schools are located in rural areas.
Disparities in education in the rural-urban context exist in almost every country in the world — including in our illustrious neighbours India and China — its known as structural inequality. In China for example, the ratio of urban to rural residents who are graduates is almost thirty to one – in other words for every graduate who lives in a village almost thirty live in cities .It can safely be said that no country has anything close to a reasonably perfect education system — including the US, where, while 99 percent of the population is considered to have functional literacy, only 21 percent have skills beyond Level 3 — which means that only one out of every five people in the USA — the world’s most advanced nation, have the capability to get good passes at the Advanced Level Examinations.
However, just because every country has these problems does not mean that we should not try to solve our own. The real reason while students do poorly in the rural is because of simple economics — there are few good quality and dedicated teachers in the rural areas because its easier to earn much in the cities. At the same time, most parents feel that it’s a waste of time for their kids to progress to higher levels of education -as evinced by the fact that the SSC exams are given by almost 15 lakh students but the number who go on to do their HSCs is barely five lakhs. In other words, almost two thirds of the students who do their SSCs don’t do their HSCs.
So its not just economics but societal attitudes which also have to change — parents giving priority to their sons instead of daughters, or worrying that an over educated child would not get jobs and thus become depressed, all of these societal attitudes work in conjunction with economic reality to ensure that our children don’t go for higher studies. Also the fact that enough places at higher education levels don’t exist for our HSC graduates is yet another factor behind the inequality. While we spend only 2.5 percent of our GDP on education — it’s not too far behind India and Pakistan, our neighbours. Education is a sector where simply spending huge amounts is unlikely to get higher returns-one can’t buy energy, dedication, or creativity.
