[Dec 2007, Volume 4 Quarterly Issue] Pdf File size - The IIPM Think ...

James Tooley,
President,
The Education Fund,
Orient Global,Singapore
Why Poor Parents Are Choosing ‘More Market, Less
Government’ In Education And What We Should Do About It?
"Freedom necessarily means
that many things will be done
which we do not like. Our
faith in freedom does not rest
on the foreseeable results in
particular circumstances but
in the belief that it will, on
balance, release more forces
for the good than the bad."
-Friedrich Hayek
I’ve moved to India because something
extraordinary is happening
in education, and I want to be a
part of it. Most excitingly, it concerns
the education of the less well-off in society,
rather than the rich. The accepted
wisdom says that the poor need
governments to provide their education
– in most developing countries,
governments supplemented by hefty
international aid. But government
education for the poor in India isn’t
working well. Visiting a government
school for the poor here is not an edifying
experience. Where there should
be ten teachers, you’ll often only find
two or three present. They won’t all be
teaching either. Children– bright-eyed,
eager young children – will often be
seating on the floor, doing nothing.
Nor will there be sanitation facilities
in many schools. I know one government
school in the slums behind the
Charminar in Hyderabad where the
children have an arrangement to use a
neighbour’s toilet, and avail themselves
of drinking water from him too. In another,
they have to wait until they get
home (which sometimes stops them
coming to school altogether). In a
third, a well-known foundation has
provided computers and a television to
transform teaching. The television is
in the headteacher’s office, still in its
box; the computers are in a locked
room. Reason: the school has no electricity.
This too is commonplace. I’m
not the only one to feel that the poor
deserve much more than what government
education apparently has to offer.
It would all be deeply depressing if it
wasn’t for the fact that the poor, in
huge numbers, are already embracing
an alternative. Private schools are blossoming
in the slums and low-income
areas of urban India, and in rural India
too. These low-cost private schools are
run by entrepreneurs from the communities.
Perhaps a woman has started a
nursery, then been persuaded to extend
it further when parents report
that their children are happy with her.
80 THE IIPM THINK TANK