The emphasis in India has been on getting children into school. This was justified on account of historically low levels of schooling and literacy. It also made measurement of performance easy — one had to monitor only one parameter. And it gave government types enormous opportunities for patronage and corruption. They could place millions of unqualified men and women on government payrolls, call them teachers, and play around with money ostensibly spent on them and on schools. So in education as in many other fields, the government spent enormous amounts of public money with little real achievement.

Not all governments work like that; there are some democratic governments which are under pressure to create productive public education. The question they face is, what is productive. The purpose of education must be to equip children to function in society, compete in the job market, and do better, materially and intellectually. It is easy to say and difficult to achieve. The way they try to achieve it is by designing curricula — that is, what must be taught when — and enforcing their application across government schools. It is said that in France at any given minute on a certain day in the year, the same lesson will be taught in every school. Not all governments are that efficient or dictatorial as the case may be, but they try.

Europeans used to be quarrelsome once; every few decades they held a violent ceremony to kill their enemies’ young men and ruin their economies. The last such ceremony, in the 1940s, was too costly. After it, they resolved not to wage war against one another, and created institutions to make war impossible. The arrangement worked well; it transferred rivalry to other fields. Education has been one of them. A number of international organizations have been comparing education across countries, for instance, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. They have found that Japan and Hong Kong spend less than 4 per cent of the gross domestic product on education, while Western nations spend 5-6 per cent of GDP. They have also shown that expenditure per student, including all from primary school to university, varies between a third and a quarter of GDP per capita in OECD countries. The achievement varies considerably across countries. Finland and Hong Kong have consistently topped in Programme for International Student Assessment comparisons, which confine themselves to mathematics, reading and science. Britain and the white Commonwealth — Canada, Australia and New Zealand — do quite well.

Finland introduced literacy as a minimum qualification for marriage in 1686. It introduced a national curriculum in 1881. Still, its educational performance was not extraordinary till the 1950s. Then it simultaneously centralized the curriculum and decentralized teaching. It introduced standard textbooks and teaching materials; at the same time, it opened more and smaller schools with small classes. Today, Finnish schools are not known for great teaching; the children have considerable freedom, and use it to do their own thing. What makes a difference is conversation at home. Parents are educated and want their children to do even better; the pressures they create contribute much to the children’s achievement. One sees this also in Indian middle-class households; families send children to expensive schools, and push them to do better.

The other factor is consequences of good or bad education. Finnish children are treated equally till the age of 16, however well or badly they do. But Finnish universities and institutions of higher education choose students entirely on merit. So if a student does not do well enough in the school-leaving examination, he will miss going to university, and be excluded from a comfortable middle-class life; he will have to go and learn some vocation. The threat of ending up as a car mechanic or a deliveryman concentrates the child’s — and the parents’ — mind and drives him or her to do better.

Incentive and punishment do not have to be provided only in school; the rest of the society is also important. The big problem in India is social inequality, which undermines incentive in the lower castes. No amount of expenditure or political privilege can incentivize a community which feels that it is condemned to low achievement irrespective of effort. If we are serious about improving our education, we should take away people’s freedom to carry caste badges, and give them all official names which reveal nothing about their origin. Our other problem is class differences in lingo and jargon. I have lived in Delhi for 40 years, but I am still at sea when I listen to a conversation between two people from Bhagalpur or Udaipur. Television has been narrowing regional variations, and introducing much English into Hindi, but not fast enough. Instead of giving poor families maunds of foodgrains, the government should give each family a radio and a television set. A TV set at home would impart far more education than schools to which children have to trek for miles; and it would educate parents together with children. I suspect that the process of standardization has proceeded further in the southern and western languages, which are spoken by fewer people over a smaller area, than in Hindi. That may be a factor in faster development of those states.

This brings me to the efforts of the education minister to standardize school-leaving tests. He ran into strong resistance from the state governments’ school boards, and had to concede defeat. On the other hand, we have had standardized entry tests for decades; both the Indian institutes of management and Indian institutes of technology have run them, and they never faced problems. If they run so well, why can we not apply the principle to all school leaving examinations?

The point is that an examination gets good acceptance — one can say popularity — if it is the entry point into a prized institution like an IIM or IIT. This is why the Finnish school-leaving examination has such influence on school kids. But even inferior institutions would have an incentive to use IIM or IIT tests because they would get better students who would be easier to teach. Instead of pushing a national school-leaving examination, the education minister should first make a large random survey of the most successful educated people in the country: where they were educated, and which educational institutions their employers prize most. Then he should create a club of the best tertiary institutions he identifies, and persuade them to set up a common entrance examination. It may start with a few subjects like English, mathematics and science and progressively cover more subjects. No doubt he would still face opposition from state governments; they will try to stop the institutions from joining his club. But then he will have the support of three lobbies — the institutions, their successful alumni, and their employers — and with their help, he may be able to divide the opposition. The smaller states like Goa, Chandigarh and Nagaland may be attracted by the idea of becoming educational hubs. If he talks less and plays his cards well, he may even get the support of Akhilesh Yadav and Nitish Kumar. It is a gamble worth trying.