We don't need no ejukayshun

Oliver Goldsmith, the poet chap
Wrote this poem about the village schoolmaster
And all of us kids in middle school had to mug it up …
There was something about the people in the village wondering how such a small head could carry all he knew.

The village schoolmasters in Bihar [and also in some other states of the country I believe] have the people in the villages wondering whether they exist at all!!

As late as the 1960s, the village education system in Bihar was pretty good, because the schools were managed by a committee of villagers. Okay, there may not have been as many school sites [notice I have not said school buildings] as there are there today, and it may be that there was no great inclination to cram every child into the classroom, but teaching actually took place because the teacher was accountable to the village headman or the family who donated the school house or whoever.

Then the Government stepped in and ownership was taken away from the village or the Panchayat and the government began appointing teachers, transferring them around at will, and generally made them accountable to the State education department.
The ‘free’ education and ‘free’ service on the one hand, and the fact that the teacher was no longer accountable to the villagers , but to a ‘higher’ power made them snooty. Education was no longer a service but a ‘privilege’, a ‘free gift’ a ‘hand-out’ and since neither the parents nor the village authorities had any jurisdiction over the non-resident town based teacher, very soon teaching and learning activity dwindled….

In the 1990’s the Bihar Education Project, prodded by the Unicef and funded from various foreign governments came up with the ‘education for all’ slogan and tried to get the schools back in the hands of the villagers….

However, fifteen years later … there’s still a long way to go…