Do we hear our children weeping?

Take it from the top. Only 10% of the 3,54,421 graduates from 3,364 management schools in India last year are employable. Why so? A lot of the institutions are rubbish, run by politicians or shady business fellows, charging vast fees from students, desperate to increase their value in the extremely competitive job market. Why are our students so desperate that they and their families are willing to spend so much for dubious degrees? Because only 37% of our college graduates are employable, of whom 38% are women and 34% are men. Again reputations of different colleges vary widely and those with unwanted degrees from low grade institutions look for ways to stand out from the crowd. Social prejudices play a strong role. Every parent wants to boast that her son is a manager. It is not just that managers are paid a higher salary but the enhanced status helps in getting a pretty bride for the son, because no mother would want to give her daughter in marriage to an artisan, even if he is earning much more than someone with a desk job. Those who have rich parents can buy their way into good private colleges by paying cash under the table, called capitation fees, but those who cannot afford the millions of rupees required resort to cheating or bribery to get a piece of paper which may help them earn a living. But why do these children end up in third rate colleges? Because most of our schools, especially government ones, teach nothing. Teachers are not competent to teach even classes 1-5. According to the Annual Status of Education Report shows how badly our children are being betrayed. Only 23.2% of class 8 students know how to subtract, 74.6% can read class 2 text and 68.2% can make sense of a sentence in English. Under the Right to Education Act the Congress stopped all exams in schools, apparently to reduce stress on children. With no way of judging whether children are being taught anything at all teacher attendance in primary school, classes 1-8, has dropped from 86.4% in 2010 to 85.8% in 2014. Although salaries of teachers in government schools are higher even poor people prefer sending their children to private schools. Apparently. it will need Rs 2.32 trillion, on top of the vast sums already being spent, to bring government schools up to par with private ones. Spending on public schools is higher in every state, varying from 8.1 times that on private schools in Goa to 0.9 times higher in Bihar. And yet private schools far outperform in results. The only solution is to pay private school boards to run public schools but there will be tremendous resistance, even violence, from the teachers who know they are useless but want to protect their earnings. So our children have no future to look forward to. Do we hear our children weeping?