Running The School Gauntlet

School seems part of the stuff of our settled personal identity. In that sense it appears unrelated to everyday political or economic battles, which we project onto an external public sphere. Yet 13-year-old Rouvanjit Rawla's suicide after school principal Sunirmal Chakravarthy broke a cane upon his back raises uncomfortable questions. It holds up a mirror to society, in ways that are difficult to brush under the carpet.
I received my schooling at a place that was a competitor as well as close compatriot to Rouvanjit's institution, La Martiniere. It had, at the time, a reputation for corporal punishment that was even more ferocious than La Marts, with a martinet-like Jesuit priest enforcing discipline and teachers who were freely allowed to wield the cane. It was also a place which bred many members of Kolkata's patrician elite, including communist leaders such as Jyoti Basu. Perhaps the latter had their first inklings of rebellion from the suffocating discipline imposed by the school (my early identification with communism was largely because they spoke badly of it at my school). That's not to say that communists did much to break up old-boy networks or the patrician system when they came to power in West Bengal. Which is why principal Chakravarthy will probably go scot-free, despite having broken the law on corporal punishment.
During my schooling there was no law against corporal punishment. Neither was there much moral outrage around the issue. The mimicking of late 19th century English public schools seemed natural in a society founded on hierarchy, dominance and submission rather than voluntary contract and choice. There was a parallel with the pre-modern penal regimes depicted by French thinker Michel Foucault. Disobedience to the monarch would be punished with the spectacle of great violence visited on the body of the offender. But just as the punished body of the criminal often attracted the sympathy of the subaltern, those boys on whose backs canes would be broken became heroes in the eyes of the rest of us.
It's likely that none of them would have, in their day, considered suicide. Today's generation may lack coping strategies and interiorise the humiliation, leading to thoughts of suicide. That's because the principles of choice and consent have made their way into the rest of society much more, even though school and the education sector continue to resist it. The old patrician order is breaking down elsewhere, but remains intact in schools.
Limited choice remains the bane of the school system today. I cannot deny that despite all the disciplinarian mayhem my school inflicted it did stimulate interest in and give a certain rigorous grounding in science, math and languages, of a sort not widely available in Kolkata. Likewise, parents of students in La Marts face a dilemma if they want to shift their children elsewhere in response to successive scandals that have hit the school today. There's no guarantee that other schools offer much improvement. Better, then, to bring out the old school spirit and pretend that not much is wrong.
Neither is the situation better in other parts of the country. School admissions in Delhi, for example, have become a bureaucratic nightmare after the introduction of the points system. Those who have run the gauntlet can attest that getting a kid admitted into nursery in Delhi these days is almost as difficult as bagging a berth in the Indian Administrative Services.
That the school system is broken is attested by the remarkable suicide rate for students across the country, which beats the number of farmers' suicides even though (or perhaps precisely because) student suicides have less political salience. It's difficult to get accurate statistics on this itself an indication of how neglected the issue is but the health ministry documents 16,000 student suicides between 2004 and 2006. The real number is likely to be far higher. Police say thousands of suicides go unreported, because traumatised parents don't want to disclose the cause of death. But even going by the conservative health ministry number, that's already higher than the number of deaths (15,000) attributed to the Bhopal gas leak, the world's worst industrial disaster. In other words, we do a Bhopal once every three years with our student population, erring on the side of underestimation. Yet few take notice, perhaps because the villains in this case don't conform to type.
Student suicides also point to a larger problem: the lack of educational opportunity in the country, where demand far outstrips supply. And it's going to hobble Indian competitiveness turning its demographic dividend into a liability unless we're willing to radically reform the education sector. Corporal punishment by schools is inhumane, and ought to be abolished. But that's only a part of the bigger problem of student alienation. This won't be addressed unless we undertake supply-side reforms which expand both the quality and quantity of available education. HRD minister Kapil Sibal may have made a beginning after years of neglect. But it's going to remain an urgent issue for at least the next two decades. BLURB Corporal punishment ought to be abolished. But the bigger problem of student alienation won't be addressed unless we undertake supply-side reforms which expand quality and quantity of available education.