On the Importance of Universal Primary Education

Yesterday, 14^th April 2018, happened to be Babasaheb’s birth anniversary and coincidentally Ananya Vajpeyi, a scholar specializing in Ambedkarite thought, was in Hyderabad to deliver a talk at the invitation of Manthan which I was fortunate to attend. The focus of her talk, was the ideas and vision of Ambedkar and its relevance to present day India. She specifically stressed on the primary importance Ambedkar gave to education.

Ms. Vajpeyi’s expounded on a lot of issues in her talk, a couple of which I have been trying to logically sort out. For example, she spoke of the need of preserving space for youngsters from different sections of Indian society in terms of caste, and gender, and economic background to meet, discuss, debate, interact, and disagree and how Universities provide just that. She spoke on the threat being faced in maintaining that space, especially after the coming in power of the present political dispensation. She also stressed on the contribution our Universities and Institutions of higher learning and research make to the development of knowledge and skills. I am in complete agreement with her, but I am still troubled.

Basic economic texts describe how all societies need to prioritize their requirements. In classic text book terms, societies need to decide on the trade-off between guns and butter. One can’t have more of both on the given production possibility frontier. In our case let us consider the trade-off between primary education and higher education (including University education). Given our limited resources we obviously cannot have more of both to the extent we desire. We have to choose between the two, not wholly, but of course to a large extent. That is, what would give our society a bigger bang for the buck – institutions of higher education or primary schools?

Let us look at the spin-off benefits of both.

It is well established that better and widespread universal primary education leads to faster economic growth with equitable development. This happens, inter alia, since the quality of economic effort improves with a better educated work force. In other words, human capital developed through prioritizing primary education is essential for sustained and rapid long term growth. This is also apparent from the growth experience over the last 30-40 years of China, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, HongKong, and Singapore. All these countries invested heavily in universal primary education over the period starting from the 1950s. A similar process took place in Europe and North America from the mid 19^th century onwards.

Apart from helping achieve higher rates of economic development, universal primary education which includes female literacy helps in controlling and stabilizing population growth. In Iran following the “Islamic” revolution in 1979, a generation of girls entered the schooling system and the boom in female literacy translated in the total fertility rate coming down from a level of 6.7 in 1980 to just 2.6 in 2000. A similar negative correlation is seen between female literacy (which can only ever be part of universal primary education) and population growth rates in the States of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Himachal Pradesh.

Focus on universal primary education, apart from faster economic growth, leads to more even income and wealth distribution and consequently a more equitable society. This in turn results in lower levels of social dissatisfaction and lower crime rates.

Stress on primary education would also lead to creation of a much larger space for many more young people to meet, discuss, debate, interact, and disagree with its consequent enriching social experience than what would be provided by the universities and colleges.

On the other hand the continued excessive stress on higher education, without development of adequate economic base through universal primary education, leads to lack of sufficient amount of work opportunity which our graduates, post-graduates, and PhDs (rightly) think they are fit for and deserve. Leaving a large proportion of such educated young people (Hobson’s) choice between migrating to developed countries (effectively capital drain from India to developed countries), accepting jobs for which they are over-qualified and which does not give them either the expected levels of remuneration or satisfaction, or remaining unemployed.

Ms. Vajpeyi in stressing the importance of higher education gave the example of present day China which is making concerted efforts to attract overseas highly educated and qualified Chinese expatriates to return to teach and do research in Chinese Universities at world class salaries. But I hope that Ms. Vajpeyi recognises that to achieve this level the Chinese government and society worked over the last 50 years plus in developing their basic primary education (and health care) systems, without which they would never have been in a position to expand their institutions of higher learning.

I agree that one cannot make something strong, by making something else weak. So our focus as a society should not be to weaken the existing structure of higher education, but in terms of priority it is a “no brainer” that the main focus should be on strengthening the universal primary educational system rather than on institutions of higher learning. I think, Babasaheb would have agreed to this proposition.