Education Preserving Elitism ?

Delhi’s (and India's) public schools are actually private schools. Getting access there is no less a achievement than tackling the IIT’s JEE. Perhaps no where is this more true than in the Nation's capital , where even getting your child into a kindergarten class is so nightmarish that they are governed by court directives and the admissions process is monitored by the Delhi High Court. We have none of the elite schools like Doon , Scindia and Mayo and their kind. The public schools here at best can boast of a modest pedigree. Although some schools are better known than others, the history of most of the other "public schools" in the National Capital dates back to no more than a few decades. This means that most of these are institutions of the post independence era and could be reasonably expected to be shaped by the egalitarian edge that gilded the first decades of independence India.

Such sadly is not the case. While the truly elitist institutions have literally priced themselves out of the common man's reach including perhaps some chunk of India's burgeoning middle class and the nouveau rich , the wanna be institutions in the city , money making institutions as they largely are or have become , can not afford to be too pricey. Bu they can afford and do afford the luxury of being choosy with in the basket of choices they are provided with, thereby fostering a false elitism.

In Delhi, we have a plethora of schools by the name of "Model Senior Secondary School", Happy….. School. St. …. Academy, ….. Convent School and others like them. They are the local neighborhood schools , from whom perhaps , no one has too many expectations. But then there are other schools with some kind of bloodline and ideology from whom one does have expectations. Often all these schools are supposedly charitable institutions and have been allotted land at confessional rates for the “public good”. But public schools almost invariably – be they meritorious or mediocre, practice inbreeding by restricting the crop of students they will admit. For instance, last year a daughter of a police constable was denied admission to a school in its higher classes simply because the girl's English wasn't good enough. This school and its many siblings are known not just for its glamour but also its ideology and one would have thought that it would open its doors to those hitherto deprived of a good English language education but earnestly striving for one.

While following guidelines of the High Court Ganguly Committee, the schools have a discretionary twenty points. This combined with other factors like marks allotted for siblings already studying and for parents who are already alumni of the schools in question and the neighborhood system wherein residents of geographical areas in proximity to the school alone are given preference , all add up to preserve the status quo of the privileged as usually the best schools are usually located in a particular part of town. These are again the areas where typically the influential and the advantaged live. By default then , although the Delhi High Court’s intentions might be noble in not wanting the children to be stressed out through interviews and the like, our school managements will always find a way to defeat the fundamental purpose of education by enabling mediocre schools to provide mediocre education to the vast majority while the favored few enjoy the spoils of a vastly superior education.