“This year also the percentage of girls passed is more than the boys”. As the newsreader said this there was a beaming look in the women’s wing of the house and a couple of very elderly among them spoke of the higher discipline they are capable of. The sum total of the expression in their face suggested that they are a superior breed to the other variety of humans sitting in the same house. As I introspected I remembered schools that put up advertisement in newspapers about cent percent pass for eighth year in succession. As one dwelt more in the subject some contentious issues come out.

• The pass percentage is centum since at entry to the school the minimum percentage fixed is seventy or thereabout.
• As the board exam nears ‘the bad and doubtful’ among the students are ‘somehow’ prevented from appearing in board exams by applying suitable filtering strategy.
• It is more meritorious to teachers to improve a passing student to get first class than to make a first class student to get distinction.
• Girls being girls are withdrawn from schools if education is not their cup of tea especially in rural areas while the boys being boys are forced to go up to matriculation level even if they stay a couple of years in each class after eighth standard.

But there was a school where the Principal was asking one by one to a group of about fifty students, how many subjects you would pass? Science maths and English were the subjects majority of students mentioned they would not pass. It was a school where students who mostly belonged to the family of policemen in CRPF and had ambition to join the same force after successfully failing in SSLC which was the prescribed qualification then were studying. It was geography teacher who doubled as maths teacher ensuring that majority fail in that subject while students like me who intended to study more preferred private tuition which was otherwise ignominious those days. The PT master was taking care of English subject well enough to ensure that I am not driven for private tuition.

The students with little control at home were more busy playing volleyball and football and if none available displayed their physical prowess in dismantling the wooden desk with one hand. With teachers preferred for other government work, off periods were periodical and the lone teacher in the school would combine subjects and classes to complete the portion. There was no homework and when rarely given none to check whether it was done, if so correctly.

Such was the status of the government school that graduated from hutment roofing to asbestos with lot of fanfare a decade ago. The pass percentage too showed marginal improvement like its physical appearance. But the quality in teaching graduated better and it was a graduate in science who taught physics and a post graduate in maths who replaced the drawing master fiddling with algebra. As the name of the school figured in the newspaper recently I remembered the question the Principal asked me- Would you get 75%? It was a very respectful question compared to how many subjects you would pass and I proudly said ‘yes’.

The school was in the news recently as 76% of the students had passed and almost ten percent of them with 90%, a far cry in my days when my getting 76% fetched first rank in the school with two out of 52 coming out successful. Incidentally we two were the students having literate parents while most others were children from families whose parents apart from CRPF were working as watchmen, coolies and the like.

It is this school and their teachers I respect more than the ones who beam in the TV when their wards fetch rank may be deservingly.

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