The Right To be Ignorant

I have not seen any serious talk against RTE. Anybody who challenges it is immediately branded an “elitist”!! We certainly need to educate everyone, but RTE, in the typical bureaucratic way, gets it ass backwards. Bear with me, while I explain.

Firstly, any sort of government control (without addressing the supply issue) leads to scarcity – we have seen this most recently from Zimbabwe to Greece. Zimbabwe has hyper-inflation from the endless money printing by the government. But the government mandated a “price control” on food. The result? Empty shelves in supermarkets.

Greece, reeling under deficits, set a price cap for how much it will pay for drugs under its nationalized healthcare. Result? Drug scarcity.

“The reasons for the shortages are complex. One major cause is the Greek government, set prices for medicines. As part of an effort to cut its own costs, Greece has mandated lower drug prices in the past year. That has fed a secondary market, drug manufacturers contend, as wholesalers sell their shipments outside the country at higher prices than they can get within Greece.”

The obvious next step for the government would be to ban exports. This would bankrupt the companies and completely close off the drug supply.

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Coming back to RTE, I see it as GOI’s way of abdicating its own responsibility and covering its abysmal failure. Whatever happens to the 3% education cess being charged?

Everyone knows that a significant percentage of teachers in government schools are under-qualified and way overpaid. Local governments just treat them as large vote banks. RTE was the easier alternative for GOI than to try and fix this real problem.

The right way to do this would have been to use the tax wisely, clean up the government schools and make them compete with the private schools in terms of quality. So much so, that the Great Indian Middle class would want to send their wards to the government schools (aka. Public Schools in USA). The private schools would then need to find a niche, innovate to stay ahead or go out of business. (If the education cess is not sufficient for this, one can always ask the benevolent new members of the parliamentary committee to provide aid!!)

And oh, if you thought it’s a pipe dream, you would be mistaken! My attention was  recently drawn to one such government school in small town India. The nearby “private school” had very few children, while the government school was full. When asked, one parent remarked “why would I want to pay when I get better education, free books & free uniforms next door?”

While giving us the Right To Education our political powers firmly retained the Right To be Ignorant.