Major problems with the Indian education system
I am guilty.
For over a decade now I have been involved with education technology in some form — developing online courses in computer programming; making mobile apps to build learner vocabulary; and, creating YouTube videos to generate student interest in science.
While not always the case, these solutions were often trying to work out some nebulous and hastily defined problem.
So yes, I am guilty. Guilty of building education solutions without thinking deeply about the problems first. This post and the research behind it is an attempt to change that.
Below, I catalogue some research-backed problems plaguing the Indian education system. These can best be categorized by the acronym SaMaSYA (समस्या), or “problem” in Hindi.
Safety
Sexual Abuse: 1 out of 2 children between the ages of 5 and 18 in India is sexually abused. This according to a 2007 study conducted by the Government of India, which included acts like rape, sodomy, and forcible kissing in its definition of sexual abuse.
Think about it. 1 out of 2 children.
That means that if you go to a classroom in India, it is likely that half of those kids have been sexually abused; that means if you happen to arrive at a park with kids playing cricket, it is probable that fifty percent of the kids on the ground have suffered molestation; that means you and I know someone — likely many children — who is suffering.
The study — conducted with over 12,000 children in 13 states — also found that boys were more likely to endure sexual abuse than girls and that the main abuser was often a friend, a classmate, an uncle or the neighbour.
This grim state of sexual abuse is further corroborated by a report from Childline, an organization that runs a toll-free number for children in distress. The most common reason for children to call this number — 16% of the over 20 million calls received in 2015 and 2016 — was linked with abuse and violence-related issues. This category included subjects like child marriage, physical abuse and sexual abuse.
While there are many important problems facing the Indian education system — for instance students do not know how to read even after years of schooling, and I mention some of these challenges below — student safety has to be the most urgent. The emotional distress and trauma caused by child sexual abuse is bound to interfere with learning and living well, and is thus one of the most dominant problems facing our education system and country.
Student Stress and Suicide: Student stress is a regularly discussed problem in India: a blockbuster movie tackled the issue in 2009; TV news channels regularly report on the topic; and, Prime Minister Modi recently offered advice on how to counter stress in his book for children.
I witnessed the phenomenon while teaching a group of thirty stressed-out 6th graders at a school in New Delhi. Still, I could not find any nationwide research — the kind that exists for sexual abuse — which clearly established the problem. I only discovered regional research, which hinted at the issue.
For instance, a 2015 survey of 190 students in Kolkata revealed that 63% of students reported stress due to academic pressure, and 81% reported examination-related anxiety. Childline offered a larger sample set. 11% of the over 20 million calls it received in 2015–16 were categorized as education-related. “Cannot cope up with studies” was the most frequent education-related problem reported by students.
The strongest evidence for student stress, however, is hidden underneath the hurdles students have to jump to get accepted into colleges in India.
St. Stephen’s College, an arts and science institution in Delhi, receives 30,000 applications for 400 spots; JNU, another reputed university in Delhi, “receives about 100,000 applications every year and accepts about 1,500.” AIIMS, a premier medical college, accepts 672 students from a set of 250,000 applicants. If you were a student trying to get into a college in India, you would be stressed out too.
Additionally, Indian parents can make matters worse. A 2011 worldwide survey conducted by Pew research center reports that 44% parents in India put “too much pressure on children to succeed academically.”
This stress can lead to depression, anxiety, and in the worst case, suicides.
While responding to a question posed in Parliament, a government minister conceded that 9,474 students committed suicide in the country in 2016; out of this, the minister added, 2,413 students committed suicide due to failure in examination. Tragically, this number — 9,474 student suicides — has increased by 52% since 2007 and suicide is now the leading cause of death among young people aged 15–29 in India.
So even in the absence of research that works with a nationally representative sample to evaluate student stress, Indian popular culture, media and politicians have rightly picked up on a devastating problem. Schools and homes should be places where we teach emotional resilience; a skill that can prepare our students for setbacks in life. Sadly, rather than mitigate the challenge of student stress and suicide, parental pressure and the race to get into college seem to be contributing to this menace.
Bullying — In Schools & Online: “What are some problems you face in school?” I asked this question as part of a survey I conducted in my 6th grade class while teaching at a school in Delhi; nineteen students responded.
Even though this question was open-ended, enough students converged on bullying to make it the number one answer. The second most frequent response: children fighting and using abusive language.
I knew bullying was a problem but didn’t make much of it as my survey sample size was too small; and since it is often hard to distinguish bullying from banter, I ignored the challenge. But there is enough evidence to suggest that bullying is perilous problem, which for its victims is impossible to ignore.
“Every third child in school is bullied,” claimed a 2016 survey conducted by ParentCircle, an online magazine that offers advice on parenting. The survey involved 2,700 respondents, which included parents and students from across the country.
Additionally, in a 2012 survey conducted by Microsoft, 53% of respondents, children between the age 8–17, said that they had been bullied online. Bullying in this study was defined as negative experiences like being called mean names, and being made fun of or teased.
In the same study, 54% of children reported that they were also bullied offline.
I was bullied in 11th grade. A classmate and I fell in love with each other but a jealous, secret admirer of my then girlfriend did not enjoy our courtship. I got a knee to the groin from a bully and was subjected to repeated threats like, “It wouldn’t be nice if someone slashed your arm with a knife.” All of this resulted in me navigating suicidal and homicidal thoughts in high school. Needless to say, learning wasn’t always on my mind.
In India we have succeeded in solving some massive education challenges: for instance, enrollment issues until eighth grade have evaporated; more on this later. And I now sense a yearning to solve learning- and mastery-related issues from teachers, education entrepreneurs and even the government. But as we mobilize to solve the next big pedagogical predicament, we should remember that safety-related issues are still important for many students across the country: sexual abuse, suicide and bullying are at the core of that.
Mastery
Students Unable To Read Or Do Basic Math: What is 63–44? About half of 5th graders in India cannot solve this problem.
Fire; lock; water; old. 19% of 5th graders cannot read these words in their local language.
“Nagma was a smart girl. But her younger brother Aman was very naughty.” 52% of 5th graders cannot read these sentences in their local language; sentences like these were supposed to be mastered in 2nd grade.
Way too many students cannot read or do basic math at grade level even after years of schooling. This according to a 2016 nationwide survey called ASER, which reached over 500,000 students in over 17,000 villages in India.
Similar evidence comes from the National Achievement Survey — a test conducted in 15 regional languages by the government of India in 2014 with over 1.2 million fifth graders. Here are some questions from that test:
You are given 3 digits: 7,5 and 8. Create the largest number from them. 55% of fifth graders could not answer the question correctly.
What is 8501–7510? 53% of students got the answer wrong.
How much greater is 555 than 198? 55% of students could not answer this question. What’s worse? When the same question was presented a year later as a part of the 2015 National Achievement Survey, 60% of students could not answer this question correctly.
Imagine you are in 5th grade and are unable to read basic words or perform elementary math. Imagine how lost you would feel and how wasteful school would seem when the teacher moves on to concepts that build on the basics you don’t know.
This situation does not automatically resolve itself as students move to high school.
In 2017, ASER conducted a survey in over 1,600 villages with 30,000 students in the 14–18 high school age group. They found that 25% still cannot read grade 2 level text. They also discovered that more than half of students could not divide 591 with 4.
I searched for reasons for why students were failing to understand basic reading and math even after years of school. The best analysis I came across was offered by Dr. Rukmini Banerjee, CEO of Pratham. She says:
“The root causes of this shortfall in learning are embedded in families as well as schools. About 50 percent of rural school-going children in India have mothers with no or very little education, who can provide little active support for learning at home. Further, parents with a low educational level may not be able to see when a child is not progressing, and may lack confidence to communicate with teachers about this. They often assume that schooling will automatically lead to learning, without realising that extra effort may be needed. The rigid structure of India’s schools allows children to fall behind — teachers are expected to stick to the curricula and textbooks for each grade, and cannot spare much time to help children who are below that level.”
Students Find School Boring: While teaching middle school science in New Delhi, I regularly lamented about how the science textbook was boring and how it wanted to prioritize categorization over curiosity.
So, full disclosure, I really wanted the “students find school boring” idea to be true. I was certainly buoyed when I heard Prof. Rao — a preeminent Indian scientist and Bharat Ratna recipient — describe science education in schools as “most boring.”
But after studying this subject, I concluded that more research was needed to boldly state that students do not find schools interesting. Nonetheless, I decided to include this idea in the list of major problems plaguing the Indian education system for two reasons: I wanted to rely on what I observed to be true in my experience as a middle school teacher; and data from the 2017 ASER survey connected boredom with school dropouts.
According to the survey, 34% of boys who dropout from school list “lack of interest” as the main reason for discontinuing their education. This number is around 19% for girls.
Dr. Wadhwa, who manages the ASER survey, offers the following reason for lack of student interest: “Learning deficits are observed across all grades and accumulate with each grade. How is a child who is unable to read and do simple arithmetic supposed to traverse the curriculum of Std VIII that includes algebra, science, and geography?”
It makes intuitive sense. School is not interesting because many students do not understand the basics that are essential for continuous learning.
Additionally, the Pearson Voice of Teacher Survey conducted in 2016 offers some extra insight. Over 6,000 teachers in urban schools were asked the following question: “According to you what % of students in your class are engaged in learning?” 45% of teachers said that their students were not actively engaged in learning.
I admit we we have to consider this result cautiously, as this self-reporting survey style can be prone to error, especially when the entity conducting the survey has a product to sell in schools. Thus, more direct research is needed to decipher if students are bored with school.
Nonetheless, when I consider the ASER data on dropouts, and my own experience of student disillusionment with the textbooks, I feel this issue deserves a spot in this report.
Teacher Shortage, Truancy, and Training: Three quick teacher-related challenges in India: there are over 1 million vacant teaching positions in India; an unacceptably large proportion of employed teachers is absent from their classrooms; and, the training offered to many teachers in India is often dubious.
Let’s think about these one at a time.
About 1 million teaching positions in government schools in India are vacant. The education minister revealed this information in late 2016 while responding to a question in parliament. But wait, it gets worse! According to the UN, India will need another 3 million teachers by 2030.
For teaching positions that have been filled, truancy is a serious problem.
According to a World Bank study conducted in 2004, “25% of teachers were absent from school, and only about half were teaching, during unannounced visits to a nationally representative sample of government primary schools in India.”
These numbers were corroborated by reports published in the Economist in 2017 and a study conducted by University of California, San Diego and University of Michigan professors in 2016. Furthermore, the New York Times authored a juicy story on how one government official in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh is fighting the teacher truancy problem with surprise visits, a stick and a gun.
Now I should mention that these numbers were contradicted by the nationally representative 2016 ASER report, which suggests that 85% of teachers were present in schools on the day of visit. So in the best case, 15% of teachers are missing from school, and in the worst case, 25% are absent. Either way, this is a big problem.
Another major problem that prevents India from reaching its learning goals is inadequate teacher training.
The central government in India administers an annual exam called the Teacher Eligibility Test. Only teachers who possess a diploma or a bachelor’s degree in elementary education are allowed to participate in this test. Applicants who muster a score of at least 60% on this exam can be considered for any teaching vacancies in government schools across the country.
Here’s the rub: In 2012, over 700,000 teachers took this test, and 93% of them failed; in 2016 86% of teachers failed the test.
We can attribute this result to one of two things.
First, maybe the test is too hard. That doesn’t seem very likely, as this exam contains multiple choice questions like the following:
To be an effective teacher it is important to:
- Emphasize dictating answer from the book
- Focus on individual learning rather than group activity
- Avoid disruption caused by questioning of students
- Be in touch with each and every child
To be fair, however, some of the questions on the test are more challenging than this shrewdly selected sample. For example, some questions test the applicants on Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories of learning. But those questions are few and far in between.
If we assume that the test is well designed, then that leads us to the second possibility: the teacher training institutes in India — which offer diplomas and bachelor’s degrees in elementary teaching — are failing to prepare our teachers to teach.
This argument is further bolstered by a World Bank report that cites a 2010 study conducted in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, two states with a total of 300 million residents. It says: “Teachers in both Bihar and Uttar Pradesh on average scored only 47.2 percent correctly on math tests and 64.9 percent correctly on language tests based on the primary curriculum they are supposed to teach.”
The data are clear about these three things: there are not enough teachers in India, many teachers are often not present in their classrooms, and teacher training in India is often inadequate.
Memorization Over Making: Much like student stress, Indian curriculum’s unhealthy fixation with memorization of facts, or rote learning as we call it, is well documented. Quora threads where students lament about education-related problems feature memorization regularly; news programs that invite disgruntled student voices during exam season also illuminate the issue; and, a song from a popular Hindi movie implores students to “ratta mar” or memorize without thinking.
As a middle school science teacher I observed how exams drove this behaviour. Assessments in my school relied mostly on recall-based questions, with little emphasis on application of knowledge. And the textbook unapologetically featured a section titled “things to recall” towards the end of every chapter. The message to me and my students was clear: memorize.
Research conducted within the last decade corroborate this observation.
A 2008 study analyses how teachers in three large states in the country — Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh — spend their time inside the classroom. The result suggests that only about 20% of teacher time in classrooms is spent on activities that stimulate higher order skills such as “active learning, discussion, projects/creative activity and remedial teaching.” The remaining time is spent on tasks like reading aloud, seat work, rote learning or copying from blackboard or from a book, and on off-task activities.
School principals have also registered their dislike for rote learning. Over 80% of respondents in a 2012 survey of over 2,500 principals blamed “rote learning for the poor standards of learning” in our schools.
Look, asking students to remember things isn’t inappropriate; consider how useful it is for students to learn new words and remember their meaning. In fact, one definition of learning can be a student’s ability to recall. But how we encourage students to encode information (i.e. store details in their brain so they can recall it later) is also important.
The techniques we currently use to design our exams and the distribution of teacher time on different classroom tasks encourage students to memorize facts through repetition without much emphasis on actually doing something with that knowledge.
If our goal is to help students remember new things, then that can be better met by encouraging learners to use new information to solve problems, connect new data to what they already know and ask tough questions about the new material.
Survival
Students Are Stunted: This composition is about identifying problems within the Indian education system. But I will take a brief detour from that spirit and talk about the best learning intervention I have ever seen.
No, it’s not a mobile app or an adaptive learning platform or the latest add-your-buzzword unicorn startup aiming to disrupt education.
It is food.
The government of India sponsors a mid-day meal scheme through which a free lunch is served to all school students from grades 1 to 8 on every school day. That is over 120 million school children! Rice, roti and lentils often feature in this hot meal.
Other than attempting to allay hunger, this intervention has been credited with an increase in “attendance and enrollment of children, particularly girls.” And a large percentage of government schools are actually implementing this policy; the 2016 ASER report suggests that these lunches were being served in 87% of schools visited.
But even with this success, not all nutrition-related needs of our students are being met.
According to a 2013 World Bank report, about 50% of all children under 5 years of age in India are underweight. The report goes on to say that “about 45% are stunted.” That means the kids are too short for their age. This form of stunted growth, especially in the first 1000 days of a child’s life, is associated with, “impaired cognitive ability and reduced school and work performance.”
Malnutrition, which causes stunted growth, is an epidemic that can be detected in a staggering majority of of school age children in India. About 85% of children between the ages of 7 to 12 are deficient in iron, folic acid, and Vitamin A. These deficiencies “impair cognitive development, impair concentration, [and] cause school absenteeism.”
The cliché often used for India is that it is a land of contradictions. In this instance, the banality holds true. Our country has the best school lunch program in the world, and yet, the kids in India are malnourished and thus unprepared for learning in school.
H2No and Noilet: Remember the last time you really had to use the toilet but could not find one? Remember crossing your legs, adjusting your junk (if you are male), and the singular desire to urinate that was pervasive in all corners of your brain? What if I asked, neigh forced, you to practice some long division problems at that time? You’d probably strangle me.
Well, this is the reality for way too many students, particularly girls, in our schools.
Now, to be fair, the percentage of schools with toilets in India has jumped from 82% in 2013 to 97% in 2016. But the story gets more complicated if we consider questions like, are toilets locked? Are they useable? Is there a separate toilet for girls?
In 2016, 27% of Indian schools had unusable toilets; I shudder to even think about the reasons why they were unusable.
And 38% of schools in India did not have a separate, unlocked, functioning toilet for girls. Holding one’s bladder for the entire school day causes detrimental long term effects on girls’ well being and reproductive health, and ultimately contributes to them missing or dropping out from school.
Oh and another survival-related idea in schools, in addition to lack of usable toilets, is lack of drinking water (geez, I haven’t even gotten to lack of books and computers and electricity yet).
According to the 2016 ASER report, 26% schools in India do not have access to clean drinking water. And unlike the improvement in availability of toilets, this situation hasn’t changed much since 2010.
Years After 8th Grade
Student Enrollments Drop Steeply: My formative years were spent in middle and high schools in India in the 90s. I remember this one image from that period of a popular Hindi movie star rolling down the hill in slow motion to express his newfound love.
Now when I think of that image, I can’t help but replace the movie star with the statistic of student enrollments — it’s a stretch, I know, sorry — that barrels down the hill with express velocity.
The enrollment story starts well. According to the government of India 100% of students that are supposed to be in Class 1 through 5 are enrolled in school. Two small caveats here: Pratham reports this number to be 96.9% (but that is within the ballpark); and a reminder that enrollment means students who are registered to attend school and not students actually attending school.
Ok, as we move from Class 6 to 8 — otherwise known as upper primary school in India — 91% of students are enrolled. That’s still pretty good, but beyond 8th grade, the enrollment number drops drastically.
In class 9 and 10 this number is at 78%. And in class 11 and 12 this number drops to 54%.
Percentages often don’t make the same visceral impact as absolute numbers do in India, so here is another way to look at the same data.
There are supposed to be about 22 million students entering Class 1 each year. In 2012, 19 million students were enrolled in 8th grade. By the time this cohort got to 12th grade four years later, 7 million additional students had dropped out of school.
Why are so many students dropping out after 8th grade?
One reason is food, or lack thereof. The mid-day meal program runs from class 1 to 8. No free lunch is served in subsequent grades, and thus a major incentive to come to school vanishes.
Distance to school also contributes to students, especially girls, dropping out. Primary schools in the country are less than a kilometer away for most rural and urban students in the country. But as a student moves from primary (class 1 to 5) to upper primary (class 6 to 8) and then to secondary school (class 9 and 10), they have to travel longer distances to get to school. The 2017 ASER survey interviewed girls who had dropped out of school to discover their family’s “worries about distance and security” as a prominent reason for them unenrolling from school.
Additionally, boys dropout to make money for their family and girls dropout to help with household chores. This according to a nationwide survey conducted in 2014. It seems if school is not perceived to be useful by parents — which it shouldn’t be as their kids can’t read at grade level — then it may make sense for resource-starved families to ask their kids to be productive elsewhere by making money or rotis.
And finally, school affordability forces students to dropout. Only “5 out of every 100 primary schools” (those are from class 1 to 5) are private. The remaining are funded by the government, and thus free. But schools that offer classes 9 to 12 present a different story; 40% of such schools are private. According to the 2017 ASER survey, 1 in 4 youth said they had to “discontinue their studies because of financial reasons”.
As a country we have done well to enroll students in primary schools. But after 8th grade, the student enrollment number declines in a hurry, leaving millions of kids out of school.
What You Study Depends On Your Score: When one writes a really long composition like this one, can one be forgiven for quoting themself from earlier in the piece? (And also be forgiven for referring to oneself in the third person.)
Previously, we saw that getting into a college in India is incredibly tough. “St. Stephen’s College, an arts and science institution in Delhi, receives 30,000 applications for 400 spots; JNU, another reputed university in Delhi, ‘receives about 100,000 applications every year and accepts about 1,500.’”
For a lot of students in India, the scores from a single set of high-stakes exams at the end of 12th grade determine where they end up going to college, and which subjects they end up studying. Well, actually, the story begins two years prior to that event, with the annual 10th grade exams.
From class 1 to 10, students don’t really have a choice in what they get to study in school as most students have similar subjects. Everybody gets to study one or two languages, a bit of mathematics and science, and perhaps some civics and social studies. But after 10th grade students can choose from one of three streams: science (which includes subjects like physics, chemistry, and biology), commerce (where you can enroll in subjects like accounting, and economics) and humanities (which leads to an exploration of language, history etc.)
What a student ends up studying in 11th and 12th grade often depends on their scores in the 10th grade exams. For instance, schools are unlikely to let a student enroll in science subjects if they performed poorly in their class 10 test.
And then, two years later, an assessment at the end of 12th grade determines which college the student ends up attending. During this admissions process, many universities — including the prestigious University of Delhi — penalize applicants who want to change their stream. If a student studied science in high school but wants to study commerce in college then the University of Delhi docks 5% off the student’s 12th grade score, thus reducing their chances of getting accepted.
So what a student studies in 11th and 12th grade often depends on the results of their 10th class examinations. And where the student enrolls in a university (including which subjects they end up studying) depends on their 12th class results.
If somewhere along the way the student has a change of heart and wants to study something different, at that point it may be easier for the student to go overseas to pursue higher education than to fight the rigid Indian university admissions process.
My goal with this composition was to think deeply about education-related problems before attempting to build products that might offer a solution. In closing, I will concede that this essay is not a comprehensive list of all important challenges that plague the Indian education system. Here are two problems I think I missed: graduates of Indian colleges are not job ready; the emphasis on science, maths and english in school leaves little time for art, music and recreation.
What else do you think I missed? What other major problems afflict the Indian education system? I look forward to hearing from you.
