{"id":2996,"date":"2008-04-23T11:25:38","date_gmt":"2008-04-23T05:55:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200804\/in-which-i-avoid-a-trap-set-by-nilu\/"},"modified":"2008-04-23T11:50:33","modified_gmt":"2008-04-23T06:20:33","slug":"in-which-i-avoid-a-trap-set-by-nilu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200804\/in-which-i-avoid-a-trap-set-by-nilu\/","title":{"rendered":"In Which I Avoid a Trap Set By Nilu"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nilu <a href=\"http:\/\/themaanga.com\/2008\/04\/22\/iskool\/\">says<\/a>\u00a0that I <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200804\/the-real-lesson-of-kendriya-vidyalayas\/#comments\">do not <\/a>address a certain argument in favour of government schools. The argument has something to do with poor people having the vote. If that is supposed to mean that the poor can vote themselves better schools, Nilu should know that it is nonsense. One vote every five years is simply inadequate as an attention-getting tactic, when citizens have a hundred issues on which to draw their rulers&#8217; attention. Presumably Nilu does know that, so he modifies the argument with something else that is still nonsensical.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I think that he is saying that the rich will improve their own schools, and the poor will use the vote to ensure that the fruits of the school improvement\u00a0are passed on to them.\u00a0 Now, education is not a manufactured commodity, but a service. It is much tougher to ensure consistent quality in a service. Improvement in quality of a school in an IAS officers&#8217; colony will do little to improve the quality of the school in a village 100 km from the district headquarters. This is more so because India&#8217;s rich, when they need better government services, do not go about fighting for structural improvements in them. They make phone calls and use their influence with the appropriate minister. Or they create separate institutions like KVs and IITs which are insulated from the representatives of the poor[1].\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d have thought that these things were obvious or could have been easily gleaned from what I wrote. If I had explained all this, it would have been long and painful and would have severely dented my reputation for concise writing. I suspect Nilu was leading me on to a trap so that he can grant me one of those bad writing awards.<\/p>\n<p>[1] Note that I am not blaming them for this. \u00a0We know what happens when the representatives of the poor grab those institutions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nilu says\u00a0that I do not address a certain argument in favour of government schools. The argument has something to do with poor people having the vote. If that is supposed to mean that the poor can vote themselves better schools, Nilu should know that it is nonsense. One vote every five years is simply inadequate [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[122,404,42,121,13,123],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2996"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2996\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}