India’s big daddy of online coaching classes, Byju's, is not only in deep financial trouble, but its clients – basically desperate parents of harried students – are so disgusted with the constant financial demands from the edu-tech giant that they now want their money back.

That is easier said than done. Parents who enrolled their wards with other edu-tech companies, such as Unacademy, Vedantu, Whitehat Jr. (also owned by Byju’s), etc. are as disturbed and under extreme financial strain.

There was a time when it was being said that this was the new horizon of education, that formal schools were passé, and that erudition can permeate through the internet, directly into a child’s prefrontal cortex. The physically restrictive Covid-19 pandemic had only fanned these idea-embers into a conflagration. Many wasted millions and multiple heartbreaks later that obvious fiction has been proven to be, well, fiction.

Schools of conscience

Schools have come up through centuries of trial and error, by people who understood the importance of social conscience above lucre and their curricula have been tailored by minds smarter and wiser than anything that edu-tech companies can conceive. Schools are and will remain the building blocks of society.

How, then, did the coaching classes come to be? Coaching has been there for as long as one can remember. When I was young, I earned my pocket money by teaching students younger than I, and that was called ‘home tuition’, simply an adjunct to school tuition. When my student topped the class, I was as proud as the student and as proud as the parents of the kid. And though I was paid, the sense of accomplishment emanated not from the money, but from the better report card that kid brought home.

When I was younger, still, my weak maths skills were given some booster dose by my own home tutor, a teacher whose integrity preceded his noisy scooter. I have not regretted that.

Big tutorial classes and courses preceded the germination of these massive edu-tech companies. These tutorial classes were geared towards preparing students for upcoming competitive exams, such as the Joint Entrance Exams for regular engineering colleges and technical institutions, for the IIT entrance tests, and to medical colleges. After graduation, you might have wanted to sit for the administrative exams, those that make you an Indian Administrative Service officer, or for the Indian Revenue Service exam, as well as the Indian Police Service exam. The coaching centers prepared you for those exams as well.

These were courses that schools and colleges did not teach. Coaching classes for those, thus, made sense. That was how a city called Kota in Rajasthan made a name for itself as the ‘tuition capital’ of the country. And it is delivered, regularly. That aura of near invincibility has now vanished into thin air, as students crumble under stress, many losing out to suicides.

This is the flip side of the coin. What remains inexplicable is the gradual decline in the standards of our schools. If edu-tech companies ought to take over what should have been taught in our schools in the first place, what does happen in the schools? This remains perplexing, till you realise that the changing operational protocol of our schools leaves the gates wide open for the entry of these outside influences.

The general belief is that either the schools are at fault or the curricula are. However, the fast-decomposing value system in society and the unbridled ambition of parents have contributed in equal measure. Today, teachers in private schools are worked to the bone, even as parents, unlike before, have a bigger say in almost every aspect of school administration. They obviously would, and this is the schools’ fault because tuition fees have shot through the roof – fees were not reduced in many cases even during the pandemic lockdown days when most classes went online, till the government interfered – and the pounds of flesh came due to the guardians.

Post Covid, it was reported that schools across the board hiked their already high fees by 10-15%. Ancillaries, such as school bus fees and private tuition fees also ballooned. The rise in the cost of living has kept abreast, of uniforms, shoes, bags, notebooks, and everything costlier. Parents can barely come up for air.

The damn lies

This has happened in all private schools, while the condition of government schools remained so pathetic that no sane tax-paying citizen would want to destroy his wards’ future within those campuses. That the government’s primary education initiative acquires enrollment data through mid-day meals is old news; education has been virtually delinked with literacy and enrollment rates in the country’s education system. The have-nots are driving their bullock carts up a blind alley.

For the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2020 (Wave 1), the data collection drive was affected due to the pandemic. ASER itself admits that the “ASER 2020 survey was adapted to a phone survey format”, which, expectedly, would be full of holes. And there were some very strange data put forth (See chart 1). Within the pandemic, ASER found over 60% of the enrollment of children of different age groups in government schools in rural India. The corresponding private school figure isn’t of any value. It is the assumption by the government that over 60% stayed enrolled through the pandemic which is a myth.

As pointed out earlier, the attendance and enrollment figures that the government rolls out are based on initial enrollment figures. There are two critical angles to this. As long as midday meals are provided, children in rural India ‘attend’ school, return home with food and some rations. That is ‘attendance’. The fact that most of these schools are without basic amenities (such as toilets for girls or even a roof above their heads) and that teachers are barely in attendance isn’t a matter to be seriously considered.

Secondly, when a child ‘enrolls, he/she remains ‘enrolled’ till he/she is absent for a prolonged period of time or his/her guardians actively ‘de-roster’ him/her.

The table in Chart 1, apart from having been compiled on the basis of odd telephone ‘interviews’, re-narrates the accepted administrative myth.

The alternative

For the initiated, expensive private schooling remains the only alternative. When the parents are spending king’s bounties for their child’s education, the child, as he/she grows, is bent double trying to pay back through high grades and admissions to high-profile institutions. The guardians want their wards to be Satya Nadellas or Indra Nooyis, as well as Virat Kohli or PV Sindhus.

As the pressure mounts, insecurities creep into the parents and the children. Insecurities are a by-product of the ambition-achievement gap. Giant edu-tech companies, such as Byju’s used this by-product to great advantage, leveraging them to sell obscenely priced educational tools that did not even work. That is why parents are up in arms against these institutions today. The parents are caught between a rock and a hard place, paying high tuition fees at schools, as well as paying EMIs for these wild education concepts, generated by edu-tech companies such as Bujy’s.

In the mix enter private financiers. Private financial institutions securitize these insecurities, offering loans with apparently easy Equated Monthly Instalments (EMI).

Think about it: For these financial institutions, your insecurities are categorized as an asset class.

The marketing cycle is complete, and so is the business cycle. Deliverables never enter the picture.

A broken educational system

That murdered the entire education system as we have known and respected. That has rung the death knell of the entire Indian education.

According to some studies, there are a few indicators that address the decline of the school system.

They are as follows:

• Grades: The child’s special abilities and talent mean little today in the race for grades. You are average if you haven’t earned 90% marks. Go back in history, and you will find Nobel laureates who were poor in studies in school.

• Lack of application: As the world changes outside, courses in classrooms have barely adjusted. No practical applications are taught about what one learns from the books. This keeps studies at school, mostly at a very theoretical level.

• Lack of creativity: In the pursuit of grades, creativity in the child suffers. There was a time when a child, through his/her association with the school and his/her teachers for 10-12 years, could give vent to his/her creative side and used to be appreciated by teachers who would have known their wards well. That is no more the case.

• Lack of outdoor activity: Even as private schools today create situations for outdoor activity and sports, most schools do not even have the basic space to install sporting infrastructure. Excursions to interesting activities and historical places have gone down.

During my association with schoolchildren I remember taking kids on camping outings. Through feedbacks I directly received from the children, they “learned more from a few days of camping than in a month’s intense classes.” I arranged village visits for these children – mostly from privileged families – and they admitted how their India finally opened up for them. This was an eye opener for me. School excursions were commonplace during our school days.

• Disregard for the humanities: Art and craft may not yield a decent job today, but a proficiency in them would surely provide career enhancement. That needs to be drilled into school administrations, teachers and parents.

• No individuality: That, naturally, leads to a crowd mentality, striving only towards grades and more grades. There is a structured approach that somebody said was good and all should follow. That is a mentality that would make a good manager, but not a good leader.

There are more essentials in a school that were there once, but have been done away with today.

The solution

Is there a solution? Logically, if there is a problem, there also has to be a solution associated with it. However, there needs to be a concerted effort towards finding this and implementing it. It is essential to fix and recreate our schools and the rest will fall into place. The unnecessary marketing behemoths will fall by the wayside and disappear.

It cannot be left just to the government to initiate change. We, the people, have to be proactive, demand change from within schools. The entire future of the nation grows on the palms of our schools. Better pupils and better teachers will make a better India.

Let us go back to our schools, revisit our conscience and rebuild our future. There will be profit, but the biggest profit will be for humanity, for our children, for our tomorrows.

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