This April Fool's Day, The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act came into effect in a (first ever) Prime Ministerial address to the nation

Time for a lesson

This April Fool's Day, The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act came into effect in a (first ever) Prime Ministerial address to the nation. Those of us who had paid insufficient attention in civics class might have been a bit puzzled: wasn't this already the law? In fact, it was a directive principle, it was compulsory in spirit, but not in action -- the government could not be held accountable for it.

It was of course, moving to hear: "Today, our government comes before you to redeem the pledge of giving all our children the right to elementary education." Who is not a sucker for a pledge redeemed or a tryst with destiny kept? But it's also heartbreaking to hear that it was a 100 years ago that Gopal Krishna Gokhale first urged the Imperial Legislative Assembly to confer this right on the Indian people. It took 100 years, 63 of them independent -- for this to happen?

We needn't wait a 100 years to ask -- what sort of free education is this going to be? Will its coy target be only schools with roofs and toilets (aims of Operation Blackboard) -- a step up, but not exactly a giant leap?

How are teachers going to be trained and motivated? If it's a poor job, as in municipal schools today, how will that diminish the stratification of the publicly and privately educated? Will it just increase the exodus towards private schools? What regulations apply to private foreign educational institutions being welcomed by other new legislations? These are not cynical questions but quite the opposite -- idealistic questions that stem from the awareness that ours is a deeply hierarchical society that regularly stalls attempts to reassign privilege.

Vision statements and advisory documents exist for what they are worth -- the National Curriculum Framework of 2005, for instance. The NCERT's website features a statement for Girls' Education, Peace Education and Environmental Education. Conspicuous by its absence from the poorest to the poshest schools is Arts Education of any significant kind (which the NCF does note.)

This is a telling absence. I'm not talking here of the use of arts and crafts in precious new-age schools, but serious education about the arts as another form of literacy and a space for the incubation of ideas. To our privileging of science, vocational skills and so on, over an equal consideration of arts education, we owe the mediocrity and tackiness of our popular culture, our lack of a vibrant independent space in which philosophical and political ideas circulate with fluidity and complexity -- eventually leading to a public discourse that is comfortable with ambiguity and able to comprehend difference without alarm.

Instead of integrating disciplines into a god of learning with many hands, education parts our brain, favouring factuality, disregarding the intuitive -- which is the analytical, so we come out with half an understanding of the world -- to which we owe our excessive touchiness as a people and our difficulty in engaging in layered debates or coping with difference.

Last week, Kapil Sibal suggested we have more sports facilities in schools. We should. But his reason? India can excel at international competitions. Just like we should have more schools so it's "knowledge hub" today, world domination tomorrow. The aims of our education reflect our dream of the world. Perhaps they should have less to do with targets and conquest, more with ambitions of creating healthier, fuller beings. Eventually, we hope education brings not just equality and justice but also maturity and sophistication in our culture so that we can co-exist without behaving like petulant, selfish children; without that we cannot hope for a greater degree of altruism, dynamism and change in society.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer, teacher and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevi.com