Bihar Board Exam: The story the media missed

There is a renewed excitement about Bihar in the media. It has caught Bihar on the wrong foot again. Again, the topper of the intermediate examinations has been found to be a fraud. He had to be arrested after the media exposed him. The principal and her husband have also been arrested for helping him fudge his age and take the examination. More than that, the news of 65 per cent students failing the class 12 examination presents a scene of massive disaster.

What makes it worse is that students who are said to have cleared the entrance tests of the IITs and other technical institutions have not been able to pass their intermediate examination. How is that a student who is so brilliant that he cracks a difficult test as the IIT entrance, fails his Bihar board examinations, a poor cousin of the prestigious test!

The media should have paused here to reconsider what it was doing: looking at the school in the light of professional education, be it engineering or medicine. Here schools become secondary. They are judged by their ability to respond to the demands and expectations of professional education. Schools lose their autonomous nature, now all they have to do is to prepare the youth for these technical or professional educational institutions. But this is something which requires a longer discussion as it is not limited to the state of Bihar. Let us not deviate from Bihar.

The government of Bihar treats it as a PR disaster. It says that media and opposition are creating undue hype about the whole thing; it smells in it, like any good governing party, a conspiracy against the state with an intention to malign its image. In this scheme, anything critical of the government becomes anti-state or anti-nation.

Opposition, on the other hand, has found the results to be yet another evidence of misrule in Bihar, resulting out of Nitish Kumar’s decision to associate with Lalu Prasad Yadav. Though, it does not tell us how the two things are related.

Disinterested intellectuals, sitting away from the scene, are bewildered by the results: shocking they are. Could it be possible that this time the answer scripts were checked more strictly and if this were to be done in other states, results would be the same there too? There is some lead in this enquiry.

Even if the media can be forgiven for its inconsistent interest in education, waking up only at the time of results and admissions, but what about the policy makers and educators themselves?

Behind this accident, there is a callous and criminal neglect of the schools in Bihar. There was no protest when the government of Bihar abolished the post of assistant teacher. Bihar became the second state after Madhya Pradesh to do away with the post of regular teacher. Replacing them with para teachers is a pan-India story. The appointment of more than 1.5 lakh para teachers on fixed pay in different slabs was seen as an innovation in governance by the Bihar government. Those were the rosy days of the Nitish Kumar government and he was beyond criticism. The BJP was part of that government then. Naturally, it did not see it as a problem. Educationists too, barring a few, did not raise alarm.

It was a populist move for which the students in Bihar’s government schools were to pay a price in the coming years. Apart from the absence of regular teachers, the schools of Bihar lack funds for laboratories and libraries. You would hear from the teachers that work culture suffers as two types of teachers, one regular and the other, para, are in constant tussle with each other. Two salaries for the same work create tension in the school, which remains invisible to the outsiders and policy makers.

The institution of the teacher has been eroded in the last decades in all the states and Bihar is no exception. They are treated as government workers who can be used for any job for which it does not want to spend money. The teachers lack self-esteem and are ready to bribe officers to be posted in the offices of the education department at various levels than to remain in schools to teach.

Schools, themselves have lost out to coaching institutes. Wandering on the streets of Patna, I saw banners saying that Patna has to be turned into Kota! A city like Patna aspires to be the hub of coaching institutes. In such circumstances, who, then, would lament the downfall of the school system?

The only positive educational story the media manages to get from Bihar is the success of the “Super Thirty”. It has never bothered to examine this so-called success story.

Is this a malady afflicting only Bihar? We know it well that in class 11 when students decide about their streams, they choose either medical or engineering and not Biology or Mathematics. It is also a common knowledge that students when in class 11 leave those very prestigious schools their parents had toiled hard to get them into at the nursery level for schools which are liberal in terms of attendance in order to be able to spend their days in coaching centres. It is very clear then that the school has lost its primacy to the coaching institutes.

We also need to talk about the sad story of teacher education. Many teachers, who would be held responsible for the tragedy in Bihar, may have secured their Bachelors in Education from spurious teacher education institutes thriving in Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and other states. Who would hold them accountable?

Abdication of responsibility by the governments in the field of education, policies leading to more privatisation, existence of the “elite” CBSE-affiliated schools and the poor state board-affiliated schools and other layers of schools has created a situation where is no commonness in aspiration in the same state. The agony and pain and humiliation of the lakhs of students fail to touch other thousands and lakhs of youth who live in the same state and share the same roads and the same air.

If we do not move away from the excitement of the moment and do not give a long look at the dull, dreary background that is called schooling, we would be destined to repeat this annual ritual year after year. Ignoring the fact that the youth of Bihar don’t deserve this humiliation.

This article was first published by TribuneIndia.com.

[opiniontab]