All children need equal opportunityShukla Bose”Art for art‚s sake” and “education for life and not a living” are lofty pronouncements that most of us have heard as we grew up. But sadly, we represent only 20 percent of the population of this potentially great nation. For the rest of the population, education is just a gateway into the jobs market. My real brush with this reality began when a few class X students of some Bangalore Municipal Corporation schools where we run classes, told me that they would prefer to write the school-leaving SSLC exam and fail ‚ rather than pass ‚ which was an endeavour that our non-government organisation Parikrma, had embarked upon with great energy and passion. The reason: passing SSLC actually disqualified them from getting a factory job! And they couldn‚t dream beyond a factory job‚¦I am not a specialist in academics nor a trained social worker. My only claim to experience is several years of running organisations and making them viable and profitable. So when I decided to quit corporate life while I still considered myself young and energetic, it was with great trepidation that I approached educationists for advice on how to start up a school for abandoned, neglected street and slum children in the garden city of Bangalore. What I received was a volley of negatives ‚ what could not be done and what was not possible. My response was that if educationists themselves believed that the education system devised by them could not equip students from marginalised sections of society to break out of their poverty cycle, then why the elaborate farce of getting them to school? What appalled me was that I encountered so many doyens of education who seemed to believe that providing minimal, rock-bottom quality education to the children of the poor was more than enough because they had never had it before. My argument to them was ‚ and still is ‚ precisely for this reason, deprived children should be given much more attention in terms of inputs to enable them to catch up with mainstream children. This provokes the counter-argument of scalability behind which many specialists and for that matter, the government, hide to justify lack of quality in public education. Yet the moot point is, should we scale down inputs to broaden reach or scale up quality to guarantee impact and create a snowball effect? Anyone who says that both are possible, needs to do a reality check and question why it hasn‚t happened for half a century. The more I spoke to specialists the more determined I became to do it differently. It was this shared passion of a few believers to deliver comparable quality education to the children of the poor and disadvantaged that prompted the promotion of Parikrma Humanity Foundation 18 months ago. Currently the foundation runs three schools in Bangalore with an aggregate enrollment of 480 slum and orphaned children. These are English medium ICSE affiliated schools for children who about a year ago were on the streets and had never heard of the alphabet. Today we have 98 percent attendance, a dropout rate of less than 1 percent, and an amazing 90 percent attendance at PTA (Parent Teacher Association) meetings. Our children are already excelling in inter-school competitions. All this is because of the pursuit of a single objective: to provide comparable quality English medium education to the children of the poor. Parents of our students now entertain the hope that their children can get equal or near-equal opportunity in the employment marketplace. This enthusiasm of students and parents is driven by the comparable quality education we provide in the English medium.The ground zero level reality which educationists as much as politicians and society generally refuse to acknowledge, is that the economically marginalised value high quality English medium education as much as the nation‚s upwardly mobile subsidies-grabbing middle class. They are perfectly aware that if children from the streets and slums have to crash the glass ceiling, they must have equal education. Therefore my resolute conviction that education in primary and secondary schools for the poor should compare with the best private sector school education irrespective of their economic backgrounds. The assumption that economically deprived or ‚Ëœunder-served‚ children don‚t have the capability to get through regular exams is unjustified and erroneous. It is obviously true that some children will need higher voltage inputs to catch up with the rest, but their capabilities are not economically determined. As long as we continue to countenance special board exams for children of the elite and ‚Ëœsubstandard board‚ exams for poor children in government schools, the socio-economic divide between the privileged few and the many poor will persist. I am not arguing that all children are equal, what I am saying is that all children need equal opportunity. Only when a level playing field is provided to all children will success in life be determined by capability, competence and attitude rather than birth and economics.Educationists, socio-anthropologists and economists should know that there is a great danger in imposing artificial caps on human potential because one day those who are unjustly denied equal opportunity will invade the lives of the privileged, most likely in an unsavoury manner. They ‚ indeed all citizens ‚ should ponder novelist Victor Hugo‚s observation that “With every school door we open, we shut a prison door”.(Shukla Bose was managing director of RCI, India and is currently founder director of the Parikrma Humanity Foundation, Bangalore)