Not
only do vast numbers of young Indians face a dearth of decent jobs, it
now turns out that many of them are unemployable too.
That’s the stark
message from the Annual Status of Education Report (Aser) published last
week.
Here are some highlights: after eight years of schooling,
only 43% of 14-18-year-olds could do simple division; slightly less than
half couldn’t add weights in kilograms; more than 40% couldn’t tell
hours and minutes from a clock; 46% didn’t know which city was the
capital of India.
We’ve been so busy congratulating ourselves for
herding these kids into school that we’ve forgotten to teach them
anything
This is not the first time Aser has pointed to the dismal state of
the education system in India, nor is it the only survey to have done
so. In December 2017, a working paper from Research on Improving Systems
of Education (RISE) had this damning assessment of Indian board
examination papers: “In India and Pakistan, higher-order skills were
almost entirely lacking and the focus was very much on recall of very
specific rote-learnt knowledge.” They said our examination systems were
worse than those of Nigeria and Uganda.
The World Bank says the same thing. In its latest
World Development Report,
it says the percentage of grade 2 kids who could not read a single word
of a short text or perform a 2-digit subtraction is higher in India
than in Uganda and Ghana.
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