Social scientists classify Indian society in many different ways to analyse how it responds to the forces of modernisation. The emphasis on caste and class categories and the rural-urban distinction often blinds us to the sharp divisions inherent in the education system, otherwise supposed to act as an egalitarian force. Our education system has many kinds of schools and universities. A few occupy national space while others function as provincial institutions. The former carry the label ‘central’; the latter are associated with specific states. The difference between the two is stark, both financially and in terms of functional standards. It would be strange if the differential treatment they receive did not have significant social outcomes.

   Each state has a few hundred schools affiliated to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), but the majority is affiliated to a state board. On the face of it, both follow the usual procedures for conducting public examinations, and the marks they allot students have pan-Indian validity. From a purely administrative point of view, it would seem that schools being divided between CBSE and state boards is merely a matter of managing education in a huge country like India. The real story is different. The two systems represent two Indias that live together yet separately. It would be simplistic to say they represent the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres of educational governance since both spheres can be found in either.
   We can begin to understand the difference between India No. 1 and 2 by looking at this year’s class X results announced recently by the Madhya Pradesh Board. The total number of schools under this board, both government and private, is 4,800. CBSE schools in MP number 432, or less than 10 per cent of the state board schools. This year only 35 per cent of the children who appeared in the state board exam for class X managed to ‘pass’. The pass percentage is still lower in the SC/ST categories. No wonder the announcement of results cast a pall of gloom across the state. Five children committed suicide on the first day itself. As more reports came in, the government reacted by promising to probe the reasons for the poor pass percentage and mulled over the usual remedy of expanding the ‘compartment’ category.

   The contrast between MP board schools and CBSE schools is not merely in their exam results and functioning. It has socio-economic dimensions as well. The state board caters to children of the poorer strata. In most states,  non-CBSE schools have a chronic shortage of teachers and poor infrastructure. In MP, supply of teachers suffered a policy disaster during the 1990s; the state has not yet recovered from it. The state opted for para-teachers as a solution to the larger problem of the fiscal deficit. Many other states used this option, but MP’s case was unique in that it declared fullsalary teachers a ‘dying cadre’, which meant no further recruitment of career teachers in government schools. When the term ‘para-teachers’ became politically unpopular, the government went for other labels, attempting to conceal its decision to dismantle school teaching as a professional activity.

   The difference between state board and CBSE schools is endemic to our education system and common across India. Quite a few states have sought to overcome it by prescribing the CBSE syllabus – which means the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) syllabus and textbooks – in state-run schools. This remedy is convenient but it can provide only symptomatic relief. The deeper problem lies in our examination system which CBSE schools are better equipped to tackle.

   The National Curriculum Framework (NCF, 2005) identifies the problem in terms of the ideology of Social Darwinism and the use of exams as its instrument. This ideology promotes the view that only a few children are capable of success; the rest must fail. NCF suggests many ways to reform the examination system, starting with creating more opportunities for students to appear in examinations, change in the typology of question papers and a balance between internally and externally examinable knowledge and intellectual skills. Many states have adopted the new syllabi and textbooks prepared by NCERT on the basis of NCF, but few have initiated the serious examrelated reforms recommended by it. The CBSE has taken note of these reforms, but progress in implementation has been hesitant.

   NCF points out that every child is talented in some way. The job of education is to spot and enhance that talent. When we assign an aggregate ‘failure’ to children, we not only stigmatise them, we also perpetuate a cycle of waste in our education system. For every child who ‘fails’ a public exam, India loses precious resources invested in that child’s upbringing at home and education at school. In order to reform the system in light of this perspective, governments and schools need to alter their view of children and learning. Instead of pushing them harder in the race for marks, schools and governments need to focus on the haphazard processes of teacher recruitment and deployment, and the sad state of teacher education in both the private and the public sector.