Changing Educational Scenario and the Status of Humanities
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Changing Educational Scenario and the Status of Humanities .................................................................................................................................... Prof. B. Surendra Rao Professor, Emeritus Department of History Mangalore University .................................................................................................................................... That our education system needs change is a refrain we hear with sickening frequency. It comes from all the stakeholders of education (sorry to be using a phrase borrowed from the exulting commercial world!) or those who claim to be one, - students, teachers, parents, educationists, journalists, social workers, politicians and the know-alls who volunteer to ladle out their wisdom, - although there are few agreements as to what direction the change should take and for what reason. But two things are invariably spoken about, with passion and anger. One is about a 'Paradise Lost', that is, about the wonderful, idyllic 'Gurukula system' which had once affectionately and efficiently taken care of our education, spirituality and culture, but now, sadly extinct, and in the list of fond memories or imagined glories of the past. The other is about 'Macaulay's Curse' of English education and Western knowledge Pertinent Probes / 1 obdurately colonizing the country and sending deep, accursed roots there, to produce a cultural amnesia and render the free Indians mentally un-free. Whether the teacher-centred system Gurukula was really as wonderful as it has been made out to be, or if indeed it was, would it meaningfully fit into the present project of 'education for all' are questions which have not been asked and honestly answered. Sometimes we are too dazzled by the fond images we install in the past to ask any critical questions about them. And often we do not pause to consider if a system which apparently worked in the past would work in the changed scenario of the present. If a system is valid for all times to come, there is something wrong with our notion of that system. For, any system should be able to accommodate changes taking place in society. If we yet cling to the notion that we had once perfected a system, we should assume a picture of a retarded society where such a system still proclaims its efficacy. The champions of change, who hark back to a glorious system we had erected in the past, then are merely talking about progress in reverse gear. If our nostalgia for the 'Paradise Lost' is passionately, if uncritically, expressed, our anger against 'Macaulay's Curse' is announced no less vehemently and uncritically. The most frequently hurled abuse against it is that it was designed to produce so many clerks to serve the colonial masters. The phrase is a thrilling imprecation, and using it we still get a kick out of it, of yet participating in the anti-colonial struggle. However, we do not have to seek the thrill of reinventing the wheel. Colonialism was not meant to be a wonderful system for the colonised. In it the masters always designed things to serve their own interests, although in the process if it served the larger interests of the colonised they did not quite mind. In fact, they used such situations to advertise their nobility and humanity and as defence against their carping critics. Pertinent Probes / 2 But to say that the education system the British set up in the country produced only clerks is a travesty of facts. It produced clerks but not only clerks. In the long story of our nationalist movement and freedom struggle, we meet an array of brilliant leaders and reformers, whose education was largely drawn from the system which colonialism had installed in country. Many of them had indeed asked for more and travelled to England to get it. The colonial education, if it produced quill- driving clerks, had also produced an array of Indian intellectuals who could see through the system in operation, critique it, defy it and undermine it. The whole ideology of anti-colonialism, nationalism that visualised what India should be developed in the context of the British rule and largely by those who sought modern education. It is far too easy and naive to say the British education system produced clerks; but we should acknowledge that it also taught the Indians question and reject the colonial rule. The educational projects and institutions of colonialism had their limitations, but they produced significant and sometimes unintended results. They cannot be lost sight of. This is not a plea for clinging on to what the British had left behind. Free India has the freedom to move ahead. Independence and the freedom it had brought were supposed to impact education in two ways: At its most urgent and fundamental level, it was meant to be an instrument to ensure literacy for all, which would render democracy meaningful, both ideally and operationally. At the higher level, it was to be the source of higher knowledge and its application. Its awareness should be Indian but it should become global. We cannot be free within our own narrow mental confines. At this stage of noble enthusiasm the state had taken up the responsibility of monitoring education at both these levels. The phrase may sound anachronistic, less appropriate to Pertinent Probes / 3 democracy and freedom than to some totalitarian idea and practice. But ideally monitoring education was meant to make it an instrument of welfare and social transformation. But the project was marred by inefficiency and poor results. Universal literacy has not been achieved as yet. It has been a case of 'slow and un/steady' not winning the race. But we have not lacked in ingenuity to harness statistics to conjure up a picture of success more spectacular than it actually is. Full literacy is more easily achieved through proclamations than through actual achievement. But the more galling fact about this success story is the wretched quality of lower levels of education, which, in some cases, does not guarantee literacy even to class VII students. This and its guaranteed deleterious impact on subsequent stages of education are sought to be covered up by inflating marks and grades to announce that all is well with our education. Now in many states passing the examination has become less the responsibility of the student than of the teacher. For, it is far too easy to blame the teacher for the poor performance of the students. It is also an ingenious way of redefining the teacher as the “moulder of the future of the country!” This celebration of mediocrity in which all the givers and receivers of education participate with clear conscience has given rise to two grades of educational institutions. One, state sponsored, subsidised education, and the other, unsubsidised, privately sponsored, elite education institutions which the government recognises for the purpose of legitimacy but allows freedom to grow largely on their own terms. The society too has come to acknowledge the difference between the two. The subsidised, and hence less expensive education is considered poor education while the more expensive ones the better ones and hence more desirable. 'Giffon's Paradox' has not been demonstrated more convincingly. The next and the more recent change in the educational Pertinent Probes / 4 scenario is the result of the state retreating from the vast and expanding terrain of higher education and surrendering the space to private entrepreneurships. This is done within the honourable framework of public-private partnership, although the kind of partnership at work resembles the one in the parable of an agricultural venture agreed upon between the bear and the jackal, which invariably ensured gain for the latter. In fact, in these partnerships the share of the private players is so disproportionately high that it is a travesty to call them partnerships. This progressive displacement of the state by the private players, facilitated by the state itself, fitted squarely with the larger and dazzling scenario of overall assertion and take- over by the market forces. Education has become one of the more attractive terrains of operation for private players and of late we have been watching with interest and dread all assortments of people claiming the status and honour of being called educationists-businessmen, politicians, goons, bootleggers, timber tycoons, god-men/women, -the good, the bad and the ugly, and all. Those who had an honourable tradition of promoting education honourably too have succumbed to the new ethos of market and profit. Money, as they say, makes many things. The two areas which have been handed over to the private players are health and education. They were once spoken of as service sectors not in the sense in which the economists see the word, but as an area in which the benevolent state would be an instrument of people's welfare. Profit was not to be its driving force. But today such notion is clearly dismissed as unrealistic. The best health services are available only in the best equipped private or corporate hospitals, which necessarily carry huge price tags. The quality of services offered in government hospitals also serves as the best advertisement to private entrepreneurship in health services. Pertinent Probes / 5 Scandalously high cost of and investment in medical education ensure that the spectacular progress made in medical sciences is available only to those who can pay for it. Here the two areas of health and education have established a symbiotic relation with market, with open connivance of the state. These changes have clearly skewed the purpose and content of education. Although we continue to parrot the inspiring ideals of education such as 'man-making' or 'realization of perfection that is already in man', the operational forces that move today's education are what are spewed out by the market. Or, to put it differently, education is hypothecated to the market.