A high-level meeting chaired by the minister for education and attended by the secretary of the education ministry and the chairmen of all secondary education boards decided in principle on Sunday that from now an SSC examinations would be held only at the thana headquarters. If the number of examinees cannot be accommodated in a single centre, more schools would be pressed into service in the thana headquarters.

This is a good decision coming in response to a demand made for the same in the press. We welcome this example of responsiveness to media suggestions. The decision, however, is an open admission of failure to cope with the problem of copying which is universal in the village schools.

The idea behind the decision apparently is that the centres now can be better supervised and controlled. In the interiors there are cases where the authorities, in charge of the exam centre, work as accomplices helping the pupil to copy. With the guardians mobbing the centres there remains no way to prevent copying. This has been so for pretty long. And schools and even colleges doing better with copying facilities used to draw a spate of examinees just before the exams. Such spurious transfers nave been stopped but copying goes on as Infamously as ever.

The first challenge to this state of affairs came when young magistrates and police officers, yet to be inured to the warped ways of the world, resisted. And expulsions grew in number in geometric progression. So increased the frequency of clashes — the young officers alone in the fray with guardians, their hirelings and the school goons all ranged against them. Retreat was the best thing to save the situation from further deterioration. A retreat to the thana headquarters is what the decision signifies.

Can this retreat, with better supervised exams now, prove good for education? It can be very helpful for the exams, and not education. The two are not the same thing. The schools that helped the copyist institutionally will continue to be there — doing what? And the parents and the well-wishers of the copyists would send in their wards to the thana HQ and bide an idle time in their village backwards? Those bent on beating the exams will always go for oneupmanship successfully. As long as questions continue to invite copying, that is.

When will the day come when no one would need either to memorise or to copy? They will learn from teachers who will teach and not slavedrive them or write copious notes for them to be copied. It is the schools and teachers who are primarily responsible for the pupil's recourse to copying. When will the education managers and policy-makers, besides making things tough for the copyist, give their energy to improving school education? With about nil monitoring of the schools, you cannot hope to do that, ever.