The prime cause of post-colonial India’s disappointing national development effort is continuous neglect of K-12 education. Seven decades after independence and a quarter century after this publication was launched with the mission to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”, I still can’t understand why post-independence India’s omniscient central planners and panoply of acclaimed economists and intellectuals didn’t/don’t exert heavy pressure on Central and state governments to accord top priority to public primary, if not secondary, education. It’s not rocket science that a nation hosting 300 million-plus adult illiterates whose number is augmented by millions of under-schooled, unemployable youth streaming into the workforce every year, cannot possibly prosper.
Yet 75 years after independence when other formerly under-developed countries such as China, Indonesia, and South Korea have attained full literacy and developed nation status, 20 percent of India’s population is illiterate. Meanwhile, numerous solutions — including a calculus repeatedly presented by EducationWorld to mobilise Rs.8 lakh crore per year for investment in education (see https://www.educationworld.in/union-budget-2023-24-260-million-children-shortchanged-again/) — are greeted with deafening silence or indulgent condescension.
Against this backdrop of continuous ignorance about the critical importance of human resource development, we present a summary of a well-researched new report published by LoEstro Advisors, a reputable Hyderabad-based education-focused investment banking and consultancy firm. The report titled State of K-12: Resilience Amidst Uncertainties paints an optimistic picture of the future of private school education, which the authors believe is leading the modernisation and internationalisation of K-12 education in India.
The knee-jerk reaction of socialists and left-liberals who dominate the academy and media to reform initiatives flowing from private education is sceptical, if not hostile. According to them, private schools are ‘elitist’ and irrelevant for the overwhelming majority of India’s 260 million school-going children. For one, this common assumption is untrue. Almost half (48 percent) of the country’s in-school children are enrolled in private schools, and the other half would fly to private schools, if only they could afford the tuition fees.
Therefore, the obligation of government and lefties alarmed by the bright future for private schools projected by the LoEstro report, is not to devise laws, rules and regulations to drag private K-12 institutions down to government school levels, but to make sincere, dedicated effort to raise teaching-learning standards and learning outcomes in public to private school levels.
In this issue, we also present a report on the inaugural EducationWorld-BSAI Education Leadership Retreat 2024. This three-day workshop attended by 70 school leaders from across the country, is a creative response towards improving the leadership skills of school promoters, directors and principals.
