Now that school examinations all over Manipur are over and its results announced, with parents getting ready for new admission of their wards in the schools, the debate over education grows more heated for scores of reason.

Regularly, reports are with us showing that the academic abilities of students of Manipur (both of hills and valley) who are in Govt. schools will continue to fall below standards when compared to those in private English schools.

Till 1985 or so, Govt. Schools did fairly well in the number of young adults who had high school diplomas for college degrees. Today, they rank the lowest when its students are below average in applying Mathematics, English, History, Geography and Science skills to real life tasks.

The state has 1738 government schools of different tiers excluding schools under hill district autonomous councils, but in terms of relative effectiveness of its education system, knowledge in grammar and easy arithmetic are all in decline in terms of academic understanding and achievement.

To solve the crisis, community leaders and the education community preach the mantra. And, students fail, they tell us, because expectations haven’t been set high enough.

Every educationist and nearly every politician presents the same view to the education crisis: more money and better pay for teachers for accountability.

In fact, teachers’ salaries are not that low in comparison with that of those in other states in the north-east. We are building more and more schools as per records. Still, the mantra doesn’t work for government schools.

There are now a hundred dozen English schools in our state, and the state is a leader in having so many schools of that kind in the north east region of India, rendering the existence of government schools virtually non-essential. Yet, the slide continues in the elite schools too.

We are doing everything experts in the education department tell us to do, but only failure hails us around. The general perception of teachers is that the education minister’s utmost job must be to get more money into the education department, and more pay for its teachers.

Most students can’t read or work math problems without a calculator. They can’t spell or find their own state on a map. In the finding of parents, even tenth standard students cannot read and write, even after getting good grades in the annual tests conducted by the state board and rural boards of examination.

Because so much emphasis is placed on passing the test that teachers have begun to teach to the test, even months before test days, pressuring the students to be ready for the examinations.

Thus, class room time is spent practicing for the test rather than just focusing on well-rounded academic curriculum. Rarely do classes branch off into anything that’s not on the test. The children become just plain dumb.

Clearly, the state’s education system is not teaching the students. Now, some Govt. Hr. Sec. Schools have ultra high-tech and school buildings with computers and television sets. But do we have education programmes of new ideas, new methods, and new directions?

To put it bluntly, we cannot set regional standards. With new recruits, a fair chunk of them from private English schools joining govt. schools, we can only hope for improvement, especially in English and Math teaching for the benefit of children of rural masses.

More precisely, it is the state government and the education bureaucracy constituted by lower ranks to higher ones that run the system.

It is simply a fact that over the past 25 years, curriculum and syllabus, the major component of the system here has been restructured time and again, only to move away from teaching basic academics to a system that focuses on little more than training students for menial jobs.

To coin a word, it is the failed idea, stupid. The fact is, the restructured education system has been designed to dumb-down the children, with numerous errors in text-books.

The exercise is not worth the candle. And in the backdrop of regional assertion in education---be it curriculum or medium, the tribal students (who constitute about half of the total number of students of Manipur) are in favour of syllabus and curriculum that match up with national standard.

With it, they believe, they would be able to compete with those in the mainland in this fast changing high-tech world. The state is in panic. The teachers continue to offer old solution of more money, almost stamping their feet: demanding that their service conditions be raised to a modest status when our students have fallen further behind in various traits, and dead last in English, with all the programmes of the state on education.

Programmes should be proposed that call for teacher testing to hold them accountable for producing educated children. More programmes should be launched to find out if teachers have actually taught anything or not.

But none of these hysterical responses will improve education in Manipur—because none of them addresses the very root of the problems. The truth is, none of the problems will disappear: nor will children learn until both parents and politicians stop neglecting the education establishment and halt ridding the system of its failed ideas and programmes.

Driving long 50 kilometers downward to the extreme south-east of Imphal on a private mission in November, the writer saw a dozen of decaying middle class and high schools of similar sizes of Imphal area, overshadowed by a blooming English school at Thoubal Bazaar, signaling the sign of the death-knell of government schools in that part of Manipur, while school buildings of hill villages which he has seen over the years are at its worst, awaiting immediate repairs or complete dismantling for fear of strong wind.

In modern style of schooling, white-washed School buildings with fresh coat of paints given to its doors and windows on yearly basis largely attract students and their guardians.

To be truthful, modern day’s students don’t feel like spending much of their time in the schools which were shapelessly built without the help of blue-prints during the territorial regime in Manipur, and they certainly feel allergic to enter classrooms which are filled with full of dust, cob-webs, flies, lizards, cockroaches, white ants and many more with broken and loose furniture, the few that are available in the schools.

In the situation, can we dream of quality education, the burning slogan of many a learned man at the head of all? This calls for construction of all new school buildings wherever these are needed under a Master Plan by discontinuing the present practice of construction of school buildings by selection.

Therefore, the task ahead is for a complete reform of the scam-ridden department for a face-lift. As was done some years ago, we need one more legislative hearing for a thorough investigation into the school education department and its policies, its waste, and its fraud on the department’s money.

Perhaps then, if the facts are exposed under the hot lights of a legislative hearing, the people of Manipur will begin to understand that the problem with education in the state isn’t low-paid teachers, but rather, is the result of an administrative inefficiency.

Based upon endless reading, investigation and observation on the present state of affairs in the school education department for over a decade---one has a hundred other tales, but this one has factual legs: In Manipur, clumsy politics run the educational world, with constant interference in the establishment.

It is a different world where govt. schools are prone to further deterioration and degradation. No party that formed government in the state had ever thought of inventing a mechanism to stop “politicking” in the department.

When private English schools are fast progressing, it will be all impossible for the department to revive its fallen schools unless “meddling” ceases. It is also highly doubtful that the state government will ever initiate measures to correct the natural perception of negligence and incompetencies.

This is the concern we have for the fate of government schools in Manipur.