The great Indian middle class seems unmindful that government regulation of fees of private independent schools — the sole bright spot of a crumbling education system — could be the first step towards levelling them down to the pathetic condition of government schools defined by ramshackle buildings, multi-grade classrooms, unusable toilets, and abysmal learning outcomes – Dilip Thakore A virulent fever with symptoms of irrational behaviour and myopia seems to be spreading through India’s 300 million-strong middle class. Across the country, middle class households who have opted to enroll their children in private unaided (i.e. financially independent) K-12 schools — and wouldn’t dream of enrolling their precious offspring in the country’s 1.5 million non-performing government schools — are clamouring for government ‘regulation’ of tuition fees levied by India’s estimated 320,000 recognised private schools. Evidently their collective judgement is impaired by this fever because they seem unmindful that government intervention and diminution of the autonomy of private schools — the sole bright spot of a dysfunctional education system — could be the first step towards levelling them down to the pathetic condition of government primary-secondaries defined by crumbling buildings, multi-grade classrooms, unusable toilets, mass teacher absenteeism and abysmal learning outcomes. “This is a very disturbing development. Parents should be aware that promoters invest huge sums of money to establish globally comparable schools and therefore they are entitled to reasonable returns on their investment. If tuition fees are controlled by governments which apply uniform ceilings on fees, education quality will suffer, with supplementary co-curricular and sports education the first casualty. Government interference with the tuition fees of private schools will gradually lead to incremental official interference in other administrative matters. There’s a real danger of India’s private schools suffering the same fate as India’s universities ruined by government over-regulation,” warns Shomie Das, a graduate of Presidency College, Kolkata and Cambridge University (UK) who began his academic career as a physics teacher in the Gordonstoun School (UK), returned to India to teach at the Doon School, Dehradun and served long terms as principal of the top-ranked Lawrence School, Sanawar and Mayo College, Ajmer. However, it’s unsurprising that calls for government intervention to control of tuition fees of private, independent schools are being made by the country’s middle class, despite it enjoying unprecedented prosperity. Since the nation attained freedom from foreign rule seven decades ago, the bourgeois middle class has cornered all the limited gains of unimpressive development. Completely ignoring the five millennia tradition of private enterprise and commerce of the subcontinent, India’s post-independence establishment led by its Harrow and Cambridge-educated first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru established a leviathan socialist state which sucked up the meagre savings of rural and nascent urban India to promote massive Soviet-style capital-intensive public sector enterprises (PSEs). Inevitably, the country’s 361 Central government PSEs plus an unknown number of state government PSEs, (mis)managed by business illiterate clerks and bureaucrats, never managed to generate the promised surpluses that would be invested in education and health, leaving the majority of the population…
