Making Govt schools mandatory : Heart ruling over the head
- The Sangai Express Editorial :: June 13, 2012 -

Education Minister M Oken
Pix - TSE

It is not only premature but also immature, extremely so.

Education Minister M Oken seems to have his heart in the right place but ultimately in dispensing his duty as a leader of the people and in holding a portfolio as important as Education, it is important that the heart is not allowed to rule over the head.

If the report that the young Minister has plans to make it mandatory for all Government employees to send their children to Government schools comes anywhere near the truth then nothing can be more myopic than this.

This myopia can also effectively kill all competitive spirit. That there is a growing need to revive the Government schools is a truism that needs no second opinion.

However in trying to revive these schools, care should be taken to ensure that the effort does not border on some quixotic measure.

And making it compulsory for Government employees to send their children to Government schools is nothing short of Talibanesque.

The last word is yet to be said and no official order to this effect has been issued as yet, but this does not negate the possibility of the Minister harbouring such measures in his mind.

The push factor of all Government schools is powerfully immense. All, without any exception, private schools have sprung up across the nook and corner of the State to fill up the void created by the Government in dispensing good education to the young students.

It has never been the Government but Christian Missionaries who took the call of providing good education to the far flung and remote areas of the State, particularly in the hill districts.

Following the Missionaries were a handful of private individuals who came together or who went it alone in establishing their own schools and in the process make it all that more harder for the Government schools to attract the needed number of students to qualify as centres of institutions imparting good education to the students.

Reversing this trend is going to take much more than some ideas harboured by the men and women helming the affairs of education in the State and the big question is whether the people in positions of power and responsibility are ready to don their role effectively or not.

Deliver or perish is the call that fuels performance and in a world that is intensely getting more and more competitive, narrowing down the arena of competition would amount to killing the spirit of competition.

And any idea to make Government schools compulsory for a section of the people would effectively blunt healthy competition. A thorough overhauling of the mindset is required.

Compulsion or diktats can only come from an entity that is drunk on its own sense of power and influence and never from a mind that is steeped in the ethos of democracy and rationality.

This is all that more so when it comes to education, which in its barest understanding should be about giving ample space to everyone to develop their mental faculty.

A caged mentality is anathema to development and if education is not about development then what is ?

The young Education Minister certainly appears to have set his priorities right, but in executing the process to realise the goal and aspiration it is equally important to keep in mind that no type of regressive methods are adopted.

Start the spadework for the Government schools to enter the arena of competition. Once this is realised then there will be no dearth of students lining up for these institutions.

A good school, whether it is private or Government will automatically attract students. The key word here is ‘Good School’ and certainly making Government schools mandatory for Government employees will not make the schools any better.