'Behind the Beautiful Forevers'
By KATHERINE BOO
Reviewed by PANKAJ MISHRA
Katherine Boo's first book explores the lives of residents in a Mumbai slum.
印度基础教育拖累经济
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India’s schools fail to keep pace with growth
In a dim, windowless classroom at GMS Moradbas school in rural Haryana state in north India, 40 young girls in their dark blue uniforms crouch on the floor in four straight lines. | 在印度北部农业大邦哈里亚纳邦的GMS Moradbas学校，一间昏暗、没有窗户的教室里，40个小女孩穿着深蓝色校服，笔直得排成四排蹲在地上。 |
Each is following a monotone reading by one of their classmates from a history book about one of India’s liberation heroes. Not a computer, let alone a desk is in sight. Outside, beyond a field of yellow mustard seed and sparring goats, a new high-rise medical college rises above the mist on the edge of the town of Nuh, an hour’s drive from Gurgaon, a new city born out of India’s IT outsourcing boom. | 所有人都跟着班上一名同学那一成不变的音调，朗读一本讲述一位印度民族解放英雄的历史书。教室里看不到一台电脑，甚至连课桌都没有。教室外面，越过一片黄灿灿的芥菜籽田和一群正在顶犄角的山羊，一所崭新的高层医学院在努赫镇边界的薄雾中拔地而起。努赫距离诞生自印度IT外包热潮的新城古尔冈有一小时车程。 |
The primary school is a striking example of the struggle to prepare the young, future urban workforce for a fast-growing economy. | 眼下，印度很难让未来会成为城市劳动力的年轻人为迅速增长的经济做好准备，这所小学就是一个明证。 |
Of the 77 girls enrolled in the class only 40 are present today. And students are not the only absentees. Khurshid Ahmed, the headmaster, has just nine teachers for his 450 pupils. Three of them are missing despite a system he has introduced to dock teachers’ pay for absenteeism – a penalty of about Rs400 ($8) a day. | 这个班的花名册上共有77名女童，今天只来了40人。而学生们并非唯一的缺勤者。校长胡尔系德•艾哈迈德(Khurshid Ahmed)只为450名学生配备了9名教师。尽管校长制定了一套惩罚制度，对缺勤教师扣工资，大约每日扣400印度卢比（合8美元），但仍有3名教师旷工。 |
“The buildings are good,” he says as he surveys the school compound. “But not enough teaching goes on. There are lots of ailments and if the teachers have other work they don’t come.” | “校舍质量不错，”他在巡视校园时说。“但师资跟不上。很多人告病假，如果老师们有其它的事情，他们就不来上课。” |
India may be the world’s fastest-growing economy after China, but its primary education standards in the countryside rank alongside Papua New Guinea and crisis-torn Afghanistan and Yemen, according to some of the country’s leading development economists. | 印度一些顶尖发展经济学家表示，印度可能是全球增长第二快的经济体，仅次于中国，但该国农村地区的小学教育水平仅与巴布亚新几内亚以及饱受危机重创的阿富汗和也门相当。 |
A report released late last year showed that fast-paced economic growth had not translated into improved basic educational standards among its 1.2bn people over the past 15 years. | 去年末公布的一份报告显示，过去15年来，快速的经济增长并没有给该国12亿人口带来基础教育水平的改善。 |
While 95 per cent of Indian children were enrolled in school – something unimaginable 10 years ago – what happened at school was less impressive, according to the Public Report on Basic Education Revisited written by a group of economists. Some children were unable to read after three years of schooling across the Hindi-speaking northern belt of the country, only 66 per cent of children enrolled in primary classes showed up, teaching activity was “abysmally low” and “mindless” rote learning the norm. | 根据由一群经济学家撰写的《基础教育公开报告》(Public Report on Basic Education Revisited)，尽管印度儿童的入学率高达95%（这在10年前是不可想象的），但学校里的状况却不那么如意。在印度北部说印地语的地区，一些儿童在接受3年的学校教育后仍不具备阅读能力，在报名入学的小学生中，只有66%上课，教学水平“低得可怕”，基本上就是“不动大脑”的死记硬背。 |
The result is an underpowered education system that is struggling to supply the manpower to fulfil roles in India’s rising economy. According to experts, India produces some of the best quality minds from among its top schools and Indian institutes of technology. Those outside the chosen few, however, rank among the worst. | 其结果就是，教育体系缺乏动力，很难提供足够优秀的劳动力，满足印度不断增长的经济的需求。专家们表示，印度的顶尖学府和科技院校培养了一些最优秀的人才。而除了这些少数精英学校，其他院校却是水平最差的。 |
The result, analysts for Grant Thornton, the auditor, wrote in a recent report was that India still lagged “far behind the developed economies and many other emerging economies in terms of education and training”. | 审计机构均富(Grant Thornton)的分析师在最近一份报告中写道，这种状况的结果就是，“在教育和培训方面”，印度仍“远远落后于发达经济体和其它很多新兴经济体”。 |
The gaps within India are also extreme, says Manish Sabharwal, chairman of Bangalore-based Team Lease, India’s largest recruitment agency. His research into labour trends shows huge disparities in employment, skills development and incomes between India’s 28 states. Those with the greatest concentration of people, such as Uttar Pradesh or Bihar, offer the least opportunity, and some of the worst schooling. | 印度最大的招聘公司、总部位于班加罗尔的Team Lease董事长曼尼什•萨巴瓦尔(Manish Sabharwal)表示，印度国内的差距也是极其严重。他对劳动力趋势的研究显示，印度28个邦在就业、技能发展和收入之间存在巨大差异。那些人口密度最大的地区（例如北方邦或比哈尔邦）提供的机会最少，也是教育水平最差的一些地区。 |
Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate, identifies education, alongside health, as a key area where India needs to close the gap with neighbouring China in terms of development progress. “The gap between the two countries is growing – rather than diminishing – in terms of values of most social indicators of living standards, such as life expectancy, infant mortality rate, mean years of schooling and the coverage of immunisation.” | 诺贝尔经济学奖得主阿玛蒂亚•森(Amartya Sen)把教育与医疗一道列为印度亟需大力发展的关键领域，以缩小与邻国中国在这两个领域发展进程方面的差距。“在多数衡量生活水平的社会指标方面，例如寿命、婴儿死亡率、受教育平均年限和免疫接种率，两国的差距正在拉大，而非缩小。” |
Indians receive on average 4.4 years of schooling. The ratio of students to teachers in Indian primary schools is three times higher than in China. A class in Bihar, one of the poorest states, can have as many as 92 pupils. | 印度人的平均受教育年限为4.4年。印度小学的学生与教师比是中国的3倍。在印度最贫穷的比哈尔邦，一个班可能有多达92名学生。 |
Parents are turning to alternatives whether they are private schools of varying quality or charitable interventions. | 父母们正转向其它选择，不是质量不等的私立学校，就是慈善学校。 |
Across the road from GMS Moradbas is a learning centre run by a charity called Iimpact that provides 17,000 girls between six and 14 with support across northern India. | 在GMS Moradbas学校的路对面，是一个由一家名为Iimpact的慈善机构经营的学习中心。该机构为印度北部1.7万名6至14岁的女学生提供帮助。 |
The girls there are dropouts from state schools, or come from conservative families uncomfortable with their daughters being in coeducational, mainstream education. | 那里的女学生都是从公立学校退学的，或是来自于那些受不了让他们的女儿接受男女混校的主流教育的保守家庭。 |
Some of the older pupils in the Nuh learning centre are clear why the government schools let them down. | 努赫这所学习中心的一些年龄较大的学生清楚，公立学校为何让他们失望。 |
“I didn’t like the government school because there were no seats,” says Tasleema Begum, a fourth-grade student there. | 四年级学生Tasleema Begum说：“我不喜欢公立学校，因为那里没有座位。” |
But Urvashi Nair, one of the charity’s founders, says the obstacles to learning lie as much outside the classroom, in communities where, she says, literacy levels are as low as 13 per cent. | 但该慈善机构创始人之一乌尔瓦什•奈尔(Urvashi Nair)表示，课堂外的学习障碍也不小，在一些社区，识字率只有13%。 |
“Many of the local people didn't like the idea of giving girls opportunity. They felt threatened. They didn’t want girls going out of the house. They thought that we were there to corrupt them . . . We always think that these [obstacles] are exaggerated but they are not.” | “很多当地人不喜欢让女孩获得机会。他们觉得这很危险。他们不希望女孩走出家门。他们认为，我们会让她们走向堕落……我们一直认为，这些（障碍）有些夸大其词，但其实并没有。” |
译者/梁艳裳 |
領航印度月刊 ( 2007/8/2 ) |
 領航印度月刊第一期.pdf |
| 資料來源：台灣印度協會 |
領航印度第3期10月號 ( 2007/10/5 ) | |
| |
 領航印度月刊第三期.pdf | |
| 資料來源：貿易局 |
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