16 hours ago
Free education is mere jugglery of words. A hangover of anti-rational pre-Partition days
Thank God, ten years' experience in Free India has taught them that we cannot get 'something out of nothing.' There are no shortcuts in the scheme of nature. We can deceive ourselves into the belief that in a free country, we can get amenities without having to pay anything in return, but we cannot deceive nature. Most people have been disillusioned by now, and no longer labour under the myth that they can freely help themselves with a rosagulla at the confectioner's shop, and nobody would bother them about the price.
Ours is a land, where people seem to believe in all seriousness that Aladin's Lamp is still preserved in the Moghal Fort at Delhi and Herculean tasks like the manufacture of penicillin, construction of moon-rockets and installation of thermo-nuclear plants can be accomplished without entailing any cost to ourselves. When, for our defence, we can confidently depend upon the arrival of the Lord Himself with His Sudarshana Chakra, and consider all military preparations unnecessary, is there any wonder if we also genuinely believe that some superman race of teachers will some day descend on earth—in this part of it—and convert, by a magic touch, all students into engineers, doctors and lawyers, without demanding a penny by way of remuneration?
There used to be a wide-spread belief among the illiterate masses before Partition that in Free India, milk and ghee would be supplied free to every child; all sorts of medicines would be available in the hospitals without any cost; customers would get provisions and sweet-meats in the market without having to pay any price. And in the same train of ideas came the fanciful notion that education up to the highest degree would be free.
Provisions, medicines and other necessaries have to be paid for even in Free India; and if someone is getting them free, rest assured, someone else, not always in sight, is paying the price. Whenever we get comfort and have not paid for it, we must realise clearly that we are enjoying it at somebody else's cost.
Free education—a mere jugglery of words
The day-dream of a free-education scheme is a hangover of the anti-rational mental attitudes of pre-Partition days. The talk of 'free-education' appears very fashionable at the first sight, and, as the fallacy involved in it is not so easy to detect, it proves a handy tool in the hands of crafty political demagogues at the time of elections. Educational procedure involves labour—of the teacher—which must be paid for. The question is: who should pay for it? If education is not 'free' the scholars pay for it in the form of tuition fees.
And if it is imparted 'free', the teaching staff has still to be remunerated, but now the money comes in the form of taxes, or special levies from those, who may not be directly concerned in the matter. The description 'free education' thus burns out, in the ultimate analysis, to be a clever device for confusing the public mind and to keep them well-fed on glittering slogans. There is nothing 'free' about it, for what is rejected as tuition fee, is accepted in another form-as 'educational cess' or as a 'special levy'.
This jugglery with words can effectively hoodwink masses in lands of befogged intelligence only, where people are unable to detect, by analysis, the subtle fallacies inherent in the arguments of state bureaucrats and professional politicians. Any decision by a government to make education 'free' or even 'cheap', must be taken by the people as a warning to be prepared for increased taxation; and the step would not be in any way different from a decision to abolish postal charges and quietly to double railway freights!
In a rational financial system, the expenditure on a public utility department, should, at least in part, be met by revenue accruing from the same. And when viewed against this background, the realisation of reasonable tuition fees from the scholars, especially from those in the higher classes, does not seem to be as baneful a practice as it is made out to be and need not be done away with. This, in fact, appears to be the only sound method to finance the education department. Extra taxes should only supplement income from tuition fees.
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Death warrant against private institutions
The point we have developed brings out the unnatural nature of the decision of the Punjab Government to impart free education in state-controlled junior schools. From where will the money come for the salary bills of the teachers? No matter, how cleverly they put it, it has to come from the public; and the procedure they have adopted means only one thing, if it means anything. It means that money spent on Tom should not come from Tom—that is a cruelty. Money spent on the education of Tom should come from the pocket of Dick!
Let us look at the scheme from another angle. The number of scholars actually studying in government institutions is much smaller than of those attending private ones. In the very nature of things, these privately-managed institutions cannot give education gratis, unless the salary bill of the staff is paid from the state exchequer.
All other philanthropic sources—capitalists, landlords, Rajas and religious endowments—whence money could go to finance private enterprise in education—in the past have virtually dried up thanks to the much advertised Socialist and Secular pattern of society. If the state bureaucrats were really interested in popularising education, they should have concurrently accepted the moral responsibility of meeting the annual budget of private institutions from the state revenues.
The decision to remit fees in government schools, without any substantial aim to the privately-managed ones, is in effect a death warrant against them. And if some of them manage to survive, they will survive, not because of the 'benign' government, but in spite of it. If out of chagrin, the managements of private institutions decide to withdraw from this unpleasant competition with the all-powerful government and suspend their activities, the education of over seventy per cent of the children, now at school, will come to a stop.
It is a strange way of promoting child-welfare to provide free educational facilities to a privileged few, and leave the vast majority to rot by the roadside! And that will be the result if some privately-managed institutions are forced to close down, being unable to compete with those financed by government from out of the state funds.
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Concrete suggestions
To sum up, we must recognise that:
a) There is no such thing as 'free-education'. Money paid to the teachers comes ultimately from the people, as taxes if not as tuition fees. b) The talk of 'free-education' is tendencious. It is a clever device by which political leaders are trying to confuse the public. c) If the Government seeks to collect funds for purposes of education, not by raising tuition fees, but by enhanced taxes, the benefit of 'free' studentship must accrue to all pupils, who belong to the school-going age, and not to a favoured few only. The Government must forthwith ban imposition of tuition fees on pupils in all the schools and remunerate the teachers, engaged in approved institutions, from the government treasury. d) If the Government cannot bear the burden of imparting 'free-education' to all the scholars, it should desist from creating difficulties in the way of those private agencies, which are sharing this burden with it. This means, that while all persons deriving the benefit of educational facilities must be required to pay the prescribed fees, whether in a government school or in a private one, the grant-in-aid rules should be so liberalised that the private institutions do not have to look to philanthropic people for help, but their deficit should be wholly met by the government.
In the end, I should like to submit that, in my opinion, the educational institutions should be maintained neither exclusively on special taxes, nor exclusively on tuition fees, but on both. The fees should be rated low enough to locate a deficit of about 25% at the school stage and about 50% at the College and University stages.
The deficit should be paid from the state treasury to the private institutions as well as to those under the direct control of the government. After all, the private agencies are promoting the same cause, for which the government stands, and are drawing money from the public—money in the form of fees—by using their own influence on people, where the government may have to resort to more coercive methods—taxation and compulsory levy—for achieving the same end.
All talk of 'free-education' must end once for all, because it is deceptive.
This essay is part of a series from the Indian Liberals archive, a project of the Centre for Civil Society. This essay first appeared in the Indian Libertarian magazine on 1 January 1959. The original version can be accessed on this link.
