In Defense of a Public School System

I attended a fund-raiser for an Indian charity organization today, and heard two shocking statistics:

• 19% of all children in India work as domestic help.
• Somewhere between 17 million and 100 million children in India work for a living (depending on whose statistics you believe)

There's something drastically wrong in a society which denies so many children a chance for an education, refusing them a chance of upward mobility. How do we fix this?

In India, children are preferred as domestic help. Since domestic help often lives in the employer's household around the clock, children are preferred because they are less likely to commit crime, and it's safer to employ them. I know many people in India who employ children as domestic help - and they indeed treat them well. They argue that they're giving a child a better life - the child would have possibly starved otherwise, or turned towards more dangerous ways of earning a living. Even the parents of the children would agree with this assessment.

But there's a vicious circle at work here. By denying that child an education, this child will grow up with limited earning potential, at the bottom rung of society. When that child ends up having children of his own - he will be faced with the same cruel choice - to force his children to work so that they can survive.

I see this as a failure of the state to provide a low-cost, high-quality education system. This was not always so. India had a decent government school system a few decades back. But then, there was an explosion of private schools (possibly because the government did not expand the number of public schools fast enough to cope with increased demand). Students from middle-class and affluent families who could afford these schools moved to the private schools. Since these were also the students who did well - the pool of students in government schools detiorated - and that led to a flight of good teachers from government schools.

India still has a government-run school system - but no one cares about it anymore. The middle-class sends its children to the private schools. The poor cannot afford these private schools - and yet, the government schools do not prepare their children to move up in the world. The government in turn, does not have the will to fix the crumbling infrastructure and lack of resources in public schools - after all, a significant portion of the voting public doesn't even care about these schools.

And that's one reason why the poor are stuck in a vicious circle, generation after generation.

The US public school system seems to be a better model. There are many problems with it, and I'll address them in subsequent blog entries - but completely deregulating the education sector is not the answer.