Destiny of a Nation Is Shaped in Its Classrooms

The report of the Education Commission of 1964 to 1966, chaired by D. S. Kothari, begins with a sentence that has been quoted by Indian educators ever since. The destiny of India, it says, is now being shaped in her classrooms. The commission went on to recommend that spending on education be raised to six per cent of national income, and proposed a common school system, the teaching of science and work experience. The sentence proved to be more durable than the recommendations. It states a belief that has, across history, been proved correct many times, that the future of a country depends on what happens in its schools.

The strongest evidence comes from nations that rose through education. In 1872, four years after the Meiji restoration, Japan promulgated a code that made schooling compulsory for all children, boys and girls, and within a generation literacy was nearly universal. The country went from a feudal society to an industrial power by the early twentieth century. South Korea had a literacy rate below thirty per cent in 1945, and by building schools and rewarding teachers it created a workforce that carried its industrial growth from the 1960s. Finland reformed its school system in the 1970s with comprehensive schools and a highly trained teaching profession, and began to top international rankings from 2000.

The economic mechanism is plain. Educated workers are more productive and adaptable, and can use machines and ideas that illiterate ones cannot. The economist Amartya Sen has argued that China and India started their reforms in the late 1970s and 1991 with different levels of schooling, and that China's higher literacy helped it to take advantage of markets faster. Research finds that the quality of learning, as measured by test scores, predicts a country's long run growth better than the number of years spent in school. A nation of children who can read, reason and calculate is a nation that can innovate. The advantage compounds with each cohort that passes through.

Classrooms shape values as well as skills. They are where children first learn to live with others who are not their relatives, to wait their turn, to obey rules and to question them. Schools can teach equality or prejudice, tolerance or contempt. The Indian freedom movement attached great importance to national education, and Gandhi's Nai Talim and Tagore's Santiniketan were attempts to build schools that nurtured independent citizens. In the opposite direction, totalitarian regimes have known the importance of classrooms. The Hitler Youth and Soviet pioneers show how schools can be used to mould children into obedient servants of the state.

The Hitler Youth and Soviet pioneers show how schools can be used to mould children into obedient servants of the state.

The classroom is also the place where social mobility is made or denied. A child of a landless labourer who learns to read and calculate can enter a profession and change her family's fate. The first generation of Dalit graduates owes much to Dr Ambedkar's conviction that education is the weapon to break the chains of caste. The reservation of seats in schools and colleges, the Right to Education Act of 2009 and the mid day meal scheme are attempts to bring the poorest children into classrooms. Where such efforts have succeeded, they have changed the social structure of villages.

India's classrooms give cause for hope and alarm. Enrolment in primary schools has become almost universal, an achievement of the past two decades. But the Annual Status of Education Report for 2016 found that fewer than half of rural children in the fifth grade could read a text meant for the second grade. Teachers are absent or untrained, classrooms are overcrowded, and the curriculum emphasises rote memorisation. Public spending on education has stayed at about three to four per cent of national income. If the destiny of the nation is being shaped in its classrooms, it is being shaped unevenly, and many children are in rooms where little is learnt.

India's own experiments show what classrooms can do. In Kerala, a state with a long tradition of mass schooling, the literacy campaign of 1989 to 1991 mobilised hundreds of thousands of volunteers, and Ernakulam became the first district declared fully literate in 1990. The state later led the country in health and social indicators. In Himachal Pradesh, early investment in girls' schooling is credited with some of the best learning outcomes among large states. The destiny of a place is also shaped by what its children are taught to ask.

The sentence also needs a qualification. It would be a mistake to suppose that schools alone determine a nation's future. Children arrive at school already shaped by the home, by nutrition and by the neighbourhood, and research consistently finds that family background explains more of a child's achievement than the school does. A malnourished child cannot learn well, and a country with a weak economy may educate its young people only to see them emigrate or remain unemployed. Education is necessary, but without jobs, health and justice it is not sufficient.

Education can also entrench inequality. Where the rich send their children to expensive private schools and the poor depend on weak government ones, the classroom reproduces the class structure. Curricula that exclude the histories and languages of minorities can deepen exclusion. Examination systems that reward coaching favour the families that can pay. The destiny that classrooms shape is not necessarily a good one, and the quality, equity and purpose of schooling determine whether it promotes a fair society or a stratified one.

The central figure in the classroom is the teacher. Studies from Finland to Singapore find that countries with the best outcomes recruit their teachers from among their best graduates, train them well, pay them respectably and give them professional freedom. In India teaching is often a job of last resort, and the best minds seek other careers. A nation that wants a different destiny will have to change the standing of those who stand before the blackboard. The classroom is where the future is made, and the people who make it are in practice among the least regarded in the country.