Friday, April 02, 2010

Universal Education in India

A great piece of gruntled news is that India has passed a law offering free education for all children. 70 million children who effectively had not schooling will now be educated. Millions of Dalit (untouchable) children, who India previously did not even pretend to educate, will be included.

India is so enormous that it already has almost as many college graduates as the United States has people. Nonetheless, the bottom of the Indian educational system - that is, those left out of the "system" altogether - were very very badly off indeed.

The main thrust of this law has been to educate all of the poor. One side effect will be that girls of all classes will more reliably be educated.

9 comments:

Kerri said...

Toward the end of the article it mentions the (in general) poor quality of public schools in India. This is something I have heard before--that even the poorest families will scrape together what they can to send children to private schools (some of which would seem unbelievably cheap by US standards) because it's perceived that going to public school is almost not even worth the trouble.

Still, even if this bill doesn't address that problem and is only creating more of the same, I suppose something is better than nothing. For now, I hope.

Black Sea said...

It will be interesting to see how comprehensively this law will be enforced in a country where, for many families, the education of girls is a low priority, and where child labor is sometimes necessary simply to attain the most basic survival necessities (if that).

gill said...

A small point that many centrist and all liberals usually miss is that no service from the government is free. Someone wil pay for it by force of law.

Sorry to burst you bubble.

Gruntled said...

Free to the poor people who will receive it; a good investment for the whole nation.

gill said...

grrh!

gill said...

Individual iberty would be a better investment for the whole country. Really.

Anonymous said...

Says the guy whom we can assume lives in a country that has benefited immensely from universal education.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
gill said...

Which guy would that be anonymous?