Context can change behaviour

The people who haggle for each penny with shopkeepers in an open marketplace exhibit a sophisticated behavioural and attitudinal change when they visit a state-of-the-art shopping mall. Carefully curated aesthetics, glitzy floors and ambient lighting of the mall elicit reserved and self-conscious attitude from the visitors. The context can change human behaviour.

The customer-friendly infrastructure and customer-care staff of shopping malls exude respect for the visitors. The ambience puts customers in impulsive shopping mode. The customers' dressing and decorum morphose in accordance with the decor of the place and time. Contrarily, in a market, we usually chat, joke and laugh at higher decibels. Our body language is in consonance with the chaos of the bazaar.

The ill repute clung to the public schools owes to the poor infrastructure and lack of care for students. If the infrastructure of these schools is revamped according to the upscale sheen of the elite schools, a positive behavioural and attitudinal change, says the study of ergonomics, is expected in students, teachers and parents, leading to students' higher academic achievements. The transition from market to mall reflects the adaptability of human behaviour to different social contexts.

A study of 409 classrooms in Idaho and Washington in 2004 (Shendell et al. 2004) reveals that student absenteeism jumped by 10–20 per cent in rooms with poor ventilation. Admitted that the quality of education comes first than the availability of infrastructure, but in this age of marketing, the way a commodity or service is showcased cannot be ignored. Unesco's Target 4a of Sustainable Development Goal 4 specifically stresses the importance of building and upgrading "effective learning environments for all".

Evans and Stecker, educational researchers studying the impact of environmental stressors on children, cautioned that "suboptimal environmental conditions may harm individuals without causing negative subjective awareness". Glen Earthman, one of the most prolific and quoted authors on the link between basic school conditions and student achievement, found that students in poor buildings scored in academic tests between 5 and 10 percentile rank points lower than students in functional buildings.

The inevitability of quality infrastructure has challenged the status of education as an equaliser. The boundary walls, marbled floors, hygienic washrooms, potable water, fully furnished classroom and non-stop availability of electricity can surely bring about a turnaround in the reputation of public schools. It may sound utopian given the paltry allocation of 1.9% of GDP to education sector against the global 4%.

Before the advent of private schools, the infrastructure was not accorded much importance in disseminating education. With the modernisation creeping into education, the private institutions were established capitalising on the insufficient facilities at public institutions. In a way, the renaissance of educational institutions had started. Elite private schools lured parents with full provision of basic facilities to their children. That is the point where the state apathy towards its institutions delayed the revival spirit, and public institutions failed to catch up with the modernist zeitgeist.

The wave of privatisation of education caused the mushroom appearance of private institutions at every nook and cranny. However, these schools, despite their limited infrastructure and amateur teachers, outdid public institutions in showing care and concern for their students.

When students and parents embraced the new style of private education, the state schools lost their status and appeal for man in the street. Over time, when private schools started raising fees and miscellaneous expenses on their whims, parents could neither afford such a costly education nor send their children to the hostile premises of public institutions. The access to quality education has now become a prerogative of the haves and have-mores.

Research done in Latin America in 2011 (Duarte et al. 2011) pointed out that investments in school infrastructure and the physical conditions for learning are not a luxury but a need.