Excerpts from Lant Pritchett interview with Shruti Rajagopalan-2

 The later parts of the Lant Pritchett are about RCT and indian educational system. Here are a couple of quotes :

”Like I said, other places that were equally weak can do it. Then the only way I disagree with your characterization of the Indian schooling is that you, in your description, said people were assuming there was learning, and then there was selection. I think it was worse than that. I think teachers went into it assuming that only certain kinds of kids could learn.”

About the other places, he said earlier:

”Then, in other countries, municipalities in Brazil, large-scale things in Africa have done this, where they’ve just said, “We have completely lost our way. We need to reconfigure the curriculum, reconfigure the attitudes, reconfigure what the goals are.””

Caste system seems to come in a part of the selection process:

”Even though the massive expansion in public government has allowed the Dalits into school, they still see the teacher as being not an instrument of their liberation, but as an instrument of social selection. ”

More from Lant Ptritchett about writing a paper with Chandra Bhan Prasad:

”We wrote a paper together about the change in status and life well-being of Dalits over the reform period, which, if I had to name my most under-cited paper, I think it’s this paper. Because it’s very important, but most people don’t want to hear it. Anyway, but we went to visit his village. We’re walking around the village with a Dalit. We’re sitting around with a group of maybe 16 men, and we’re talking to somebody who is a Dalit that had been a public schoolteacher—a very respected guy, obviously, in his community and the broader community.

We’re sitting around, and he tells this joke. The joke he tells is, “You’re walking through the forest, and you come across a snake and a teacher. What do you do?” He says, “Oh, you pick up a stick and you beat the teacher.” Everyone just rolling on the ground laughing, and I’m like, “What in the—?” I’ve clearly got this mystified look on my face, and he says, “Oh.” He looks at me, he says, “Because the snake, it’s just a brute; it doesn’t know what it does. But the teacher should know better.” Again, I’m not saying that’s a huge sample, but that is, in some sense, the social reality.”