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An Educational Defeat to Knowledge, Wisdom and Modern Values

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Superior intelligence is the only human ability that enables us to dominate the world. We use our intelligence to gain knowledge of all the living and non-living things in the world around us. As we gain more knowledge we also develop wisdom that guides us to carefully use the power that comes with knowledge. These are the only traits that set humans apart from all the other living beings and allow us to tame the most ferocious beasts and make medicines from snake venom. A very important advantage we humans have is the capability of beliefs and opinions, animals are only capable of emotions and intuitions. As we acquire wisdom, we understand that our lives are temporary and everything changes with time. Our health and abilities, possessions and power will cease to exist sooner or later. Governments, cultures and civilizations will rise and fall over time just as the great civilizations of Indus and Nile have long disappeared. But the only thing that continues to flourish and pass from one generation to other, from one civilization to other is knowledge. For example, the people who first invented the wheel are now in complete oblivion, but wheels are used every day in bullock carts, the smallest toys as well as the largest power stations.

Knowledge, unlike myths, cannot be fabricated but only acquired after careful study. Since the dawn of civilization, humans have tried to organize and acquire more knowledge and impart it with discipline. The ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia had scribal schools about 5,000 years back which trained children during the day. Education is perhaps the greatest utility in history that mankind has been developing continuously. Peaceful societies cannot exist without good education and a country that patronises scholars and reformers will eventually reach its zenith. The Supreme Court of India had observed in September 2012 that democracy, though cannot be flawless, depends for its very life on a high standard of general, vocational and professional education. “Dissemination of learning with search for new knowledge with discipline must be maintained at all costs”, said the apex bench.

After fighting two devastating world wars, the great powers of the world realised that mere political and economic agreements are not enough to build a lasting peace. Peace must be established on the basis of humanity’s moral and intellectual solidarity. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) was thus created in 1945, to build networks among nations that mobilize education, build intercultural understanding, pursue scientific cooperation and protect freedom of expression.

Good quality education, however, has mostly remained a privilege of the well-off classes, since it requires well qualified and methodically trained teachers. It is therefore the greatest necessity of mankind to educate the coming generations and foster such moral values and intellectual growth in society that will enable better access to good education. The most important uses of education are building a sound intellectual environment, fostering social and cultural values and equipping youngsters with disciplined knowledge to achieve a just and sustainable development for the society.

Education in schools and colleges is not for memorising certain disjoined pieces of information, concepts and methods. Education is to unleash the best intellect and aptitudes in humans and train those abilities in a manner that can be best utilised for the welfare of society simultaneously giving a wholesome satisfaction to the individual. The success of education lies in its ethical energy to coordinate all aspects of human life, instead of compartmentalizing them, and in the integration and uplift of all sections of the society. Education would remain only an administrative or economic tool if remains a prerogative of the mainstream and well-off classes.

Education in India

Education in the sense of learning is undoubtedly a life-long process, both individually and collectively. Both formal and cultural education in India still have a long way to go. While it’s a well known fact that no Indian citizen has won a Nobel prize in science or literature after 1930, other indicators are quite depressing. The reader might be surprised to learn some bleak realities of education in India. The following passage can be potentially disturbing, reader’s discretion is advised.

  • The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) publishes rankings of countries based on an indicator called Human Development Index (HDI). It’s a summary measure of three key aspects of human development: a long and healthy life, being knowledgeable and having a decent standard of living. Unfortunately in this arena, India is behind some countries struck by civil wars like Iraq, Palestine, Libya, Sri Lanka and Lebanon. India is a member country of international associations like G20 and BRICS. All developing members of the two associations except India like China, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Argentina, Turkey and Indonesia belong to a different league of High Human Development. India is slightly ahead of Pakistan and Bangladesh, the three neighbours have Medium Human Development.
  • The Times Higher Education Rankings are published every year by an independent audit, in which Indian universities show abysmal performance. In the 2016-17 rankings, 19 out of top 20 universities are British or American. There are 2 Chinese universities in top 35 and 3 from Hong Kong in top 80 (Hong Kong is a Chinese province). But there is not a single Indian university in top 200 ranks. Indian media however projected it as some kind of a victory deserving praise.

Domestic statistics perhaps give some insights to understand the cause of such an abysmal situation.

  • Due to the ever increasing costs of academic education, less than 12% Indians have completed matriculation and about 5.6% have completed
  • In September 2015, over 23 lakh candidates, including 2.22 lakh engineers and 255 Ph.D. holders besides thousands of M.Com., M.Sc. and M.A. holders had applied for 368 peon positions in the Uttar Pradesh State Secretariat.
  • This is in sharp contrast with the fact that the Uttar Pradesh Secondary Education Council had invited applications to recruit 6,645 Assistant Teachers a year before. Over 10 lakh posts of teachers are lying vacant in India today.
  • About one-third of faculty positions in central universities are lying vacant. More than 53% positions of associate professors are vacant and most universities are relying on ad-hoc, contractual and guest faculty.
  • Only 20% of all the engineering graduates in India are employable.
  • Over 4,400 students had dropped out of the prestigious IITs and NITs between 2012 and 2015.
  • IIT Bombay, Delhi and Kharagpur have over 33% shortage of staff.
  • India registered 8,048 student suicides across the country in 2014, with highest cases in Maharashtra which also has a lead in farmers’ suicide and wine production.

The purpose of this assessment is not to express a cynical feeling towards the educational system and policy makers but to take an un-romanticised account of it and contemplate some holistic solutions and reforms.

Perhaps one of the reasons for such abysmal education standards in India is the budget that the governments allot for the education of its people. India is among the few countries that dedicate less than 4% of its GDP to education. Again, India spends the least fraction among G20 and BRICS countries on education. Brazil and South Africa, despite lesser populations and smaller economies than India, spend more than 5.5% of their GDP on education. Scandinavian countries, known for their excellent education and HDI, spend more than 7% GDP on education.

Eventually, academic education remains substandard in India and youngsters are left unemployable. The problems of education are endemic and are entrenched in our socio-economic system. Dr. Craig Jeffrey, a former Professor at Oxford University is the Director of the Australia India Institute, Melbourne, Australia. In his book titled Time pass: Youth, Class and the Politics of Waiting in India, he calls Indian education as a ‘time pass’ for the idle middle class youth who are unable to get a decent job on the basis of their degrees. They take admission in a variety of courses for ‘killing time’ and look for a jugaad to get a government job.img-20161231-wa0001

In a society where teachers, parents and media perpetuate a notion that possessions and influence precede happiness, the primary purpose of the education system seems contradictory. Instead of sensitising virtues, cultivating intelligence and wisdom, the agenda of education becomes the creation of know-how workers for a ‘service system’ and a citizenry that is socially passive and intellectually mediocre. In this frame, the pedagogic enterprise is to prepare human capital for the labour market and the central thrust of educational policy is to supply labour forces in the market for industrial development.

As a result of this approach to education, hundreds of private schools and colleges have cropped up in the past 15 years which provide better education at exorbitant prices. Education is becoming privatised which is just the educational aspect of an increasing socio-economic segregation in India. It’s a part of an entire privatisation system which includes housing, healthcare, security, electricity and an ever narrowing journalism.

The neoliberal lobbies propose better quality of education through free marketing policies. They promote corporatisation to evolve elite institutions that mostly serve the upper class. They foster competition amongst students and between institutions. Neoconservative policies, as if to complement these efforts, attempt to shape the personality of students and teachers so that they become susceptible to the propaganda of the dominant social classes. The result is that mass education is turned into a commodity akin to fixed deposit or insurance policies, whereby lower classes receive humble packages of education and upper classes receive premium deals. Education now serves as a sophisticated pernicious tool to perpetuate social and economic stratification.

No wonder, even with all these educational problems prevailing, privileged Indian candidates do exceptionally well in Ivy League universities and multi-national corporations. The present education system, thus promotes a self-perpetuating class system where the children of the rich mostly go on to rule over the children of the poor. Education thus defeats its very purpose of fostering social mobility and justice and goes into maintaining inequality in the society.

This is the failure of an education system. The success of education does not consist in the acquisition of a great amount of material knowledge to be used for a life-exhausting career or amassing wealth through complex schemes of consumerism, exploitation and expansionism. Nor does it consist in the enthusiasts’ indulging in arts, aesthetics and addictions or the elites spending their wealth on luxurious mansions and aesthetical decorations, even as the living conditions of the public are deteriorating and man-made floods and droughts are on the rise.

A great problem of some education systems is that they tend to fit the world to their skewed perceptions based on limited knowledge, instead of being open to new perceptions and understand the stupendous world better. As the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant said, “It seems surprising at first, but is nonetheless certain, that our reason does not draw its conclusions from nature, but prescribes them to it.”

The problems of education seem similar in developed countries, and sooner or later will also affect the privileged classes. Robert Putnam, a Harvard Professor of Public Policy, published a book titled Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis in March 2015. The book is a groundbreaking research on the decline of social mobility in the United States over the past 50 years. Putnam finds an alarming “opportunity gap” in the American education system and warns that the United States could soon cease to be a “land of opportunities”. Independent incidences have also revealed a racial bias in the curricula and examinations of America’s most prestigious schools. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), a commonly used exam for college admissions in USA and many other countries, tends to be biased against Black and Hispanic candidates while most universities in USA clearly show racial and economic marginalisation. John Goldthorpe, an eminent sociologist in the United Kingdom, warns of a new situation emerging in Britain. He says young people entering the labour market today are far unlikely to move up economically than their parents did. He appeals to radical changes in educational policy besides a whole range of economic and social policies.

The first step towards solving a crucial problem is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the problem and its various facets. The union government has taken many initiatives like National Curriculum Frameworks by NCERT, National Policy on Education (1986), Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (2000), Midday Meal Scheme, Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE), 2009 and many others by state governments. The syllabi of National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) books are also designed in order to discourage rote learning or confining studies to the prescribed textbook, erasing compartmentalisation of subjects, and encourage children to reflect on their own learning. There are a few “islands of excellence” where some schools and educational societies are making certain genuine efforts.

All the above efforts, though encouraging, lack a proper implementation with a wholesome approach. The Indian Republic is still far from achieving the Directive Principles of State Policy under the Constitution, like

  • “to provide, within a period of ten years from the commencement of this Constitution, for free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen years.” (Article 45)
  • “the operation of the economic system does not result in the concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment” (Article 39(c))
  • “promote with special care the educational and economic interests of the weaker sections of the people, and, in particular, of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, and shall protect them from social injustice and all forms of exploitation.” (Article 46)

Good education and opportunity to undergraduate courses is still a privilege of less than 5.6% Indians. It is therefore indispensably urgent to rethink education and revive the system with a comprehensive outlook.

The purpose of this writing is to contribute to the ongoing thought-process and discussion on the general, technical and vocational education. A sequel to this essay presents some fundamental, pedagogic and infrastructural reforms based on universal ideas envisioned by influential reformers and laid down by the Indian Constitution and UNESCO. Ideas that have since long been understood but seldom implemented.

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