We all are aware of the fact that India is all geared up to educate its citizens by all means. But how many of you agree with this? How many of us are really benefitted by this? What is the meaning of education to the Government? How is the Government going to see to it that the education system is democratic? Democratic, by the word, I mean education that not reserved based on caste. Let’s tackle this issue one by one.
Firstly, the Government, IMHO, is thinking that, if everyone knows to read/write and sign their name, then country is literate. With this intention, we aren’t going to reach great heights. I’ve points to justify. Firstly, people should be educated to know that, “Known is a drop, unknown is an ocean”. The education mission launched by Government is more like, Ok, if you know to sign your name, we agree that you are literate. The mentality of people after attending a few, probably night classes becomes that, Yes, I’ve reached the pinnacle, now what? taunt others…(those who are still illiterate) Due to their shallow knowledge, they are still not capable of understanding some of the realities.
Take for example, the bandth and bus burning activities, that happens during any riot. If people are educated, they will realize that, Oh, it’s our bus, we should not spoil it. People understand that vandalizing a public property is as good as vandalizing our own property. Next comes cleanliness. Have you ever come across, a software engineer (so-called… I’ll, may be explained why I used this word “so-called” later in another blog…), or any professional, urinating in public? Or involving in vandalism or bus burning activities? There have been ample number of blogs that claim that, we Indians throw the litter in garbage bins when we are elsewhere in any country, but when we are back in India, we start littering the streets. Do you believe this? Atleast, I don’t… Not even to the faintest extent... Some people claim it’s the lack of garbage bins. Though it’s true to one extent, I would say that it’s the education that plays a very important role here.
I’ve not seen a software company in India that is so badly littered like one of the few roads in Bangalore. It’s not because, we Indians start looking at garbage cans when we are inside office. It’s not that they consciously search for a garbage bin to throw their cigarette butt. It’s not because the whole environment is clean and they don’t like polluting it. It’s not that because the company has lot of money to appoint some maid to clean up the environment. It’s because, a vast majority of people using those environment are educated, matured and cultured. They have learnt the effect of pollution some day in the past and somehow sub consciously knows that it’s not wise to throw a cigarette butt on the road, not to urinate anywhere they like. With all these, I would assert that, If the Government give us neat roads like those inside the software companies, and educate all Indians, we’ll all naturally keep them clean and green. Now don’t tell me we are the part of Government. It doesn’t always happen that way. We vote and nearly everyone is corrupt. Why? Every country which is developed now had suffered from corruption in the past. It again can be eradicated only through good education. Previously, may be in our parent’s generation, when you go to a bank for taking a loan, the officers do every job and wait for you to give “something” to move the final paper and sanction the loan. Is it happening that way now in, say HDFC or HSBC or ICICI? Definitely not. Why? It’s all nothing but maturity of the people. The managers sitting there feel ashamed of getting bribe. They consider it equivalent to begging. What changed these people’s minds? It’s nothing but good education. Good education is the only way to improve the quality of life of an Indian.
But is that education section in India well set to change our next generation Indians? I fear not. The education system is severely biased based on caste and as a result, democracy and secularism is rendered meaningless here. If the real intention of the Government is to help the needy, allocate funds for them right from the foundation. Let all the needy (not the low caste people, but the poor and below poverty line people), be granted free education to any school of his/her choice. When a lot of people (atleast in the professional/educated circle) have forgotten the word caste, why bring it up again through this way? Or even if the Government wants to uplift the deprived sect of people, let it give scholarships to them. Something like, from now on, every OBC, will be offered 75% of scholarship if he gets admitted into a B-School. That’ll, in fact, motivate everyone to compete for a seat. Reservations on the other hand lets people take things for granted. They start feeling blasé that, “Hmm anyway, I’ll get a seat even if I get low marks… Why should I toil all day long?” May be this could happen when all the politicians are educated.L Atleast in our next generation, everyone should be well educated, not just educated. Just education, doesn’t seem to work… Let’s hope for a change
The education system is embedded in the bigger socio-political order of the economy. To a large degree, the larger system dictates the characteristics of its subsystems. In the broadest terms, the government of India is an extractive and exploitative system created specifically for that purpose during the nearly one hundred years of its existence as a British colony before India became politically independent. The British, as a colonial power, created a system designed to control every aspect of the economy to maximize extraction. The challenge of administering such a large population required a certain small percentage of the native population to be educated in a very specific way. Therefore the total and absolute control of the education system was a necessity.
Even after British left, the structures they had created for controlling the economy in general, and the educational system more specifically, remained intact. The new political leaders saw it was beneficial for them not to deviate from the old colonial goal of imposing an extractive and exploitative government on the people. By continuing to control the education system, they were able to impose a degree of control over the population that would be unthinkable in a free society.
Universal primary education was especially neglected because it would have given rise to universal literacy. Universal literacy is not a good thing if the status quo is to be maintained in a regime which allows freedom of the press. It is safe to allow a free press if two out of three people cannot read. Freedom of the press is not meaningful — and is not a threat to the power structure — in a society of illiterates. We should note in passing that whether literate or not, people can hear and speak. So while the press was allowed freedom in a largely illiterate society, radio was absolutely government controlled, consistent with the aim of an exploitative and extractive system.
To be perfectly clear, whether a system is judged to be a failure or not depends on the objective that the system was created to serve. The Indian education system is definitely successful because it does meet the objectives that the British created it for, and which the successive Indian governments have implicitly endorsed: control the supply of education and dictate to the finest detail the nature of the education provided and to whom. Universal primary education, or even universal literacy, was never its goal. To fault the current educational system on its inability to meet the needs of a developing society is to miss the point that it was meant as an instrument for extractive purposes.
If the preceding picture painted hastily with broad brush strokes is reasonably accurate, then it implies that for the education system to serve the needs of a developing nation, the objectives of the system will have to change. Since the same structure cannot serve an orthogonal set of objectives, the whole system will have to be redesigned. If there is one thing I would like to convey in this brief series, it is this: change the system radically if it has to serve a different objective. It should be evident that anything less than a radical re-thinking of the system would be a pointless waste of time.
The current educational system has an objective dictated by the British and which the governments of independent India inherited: To choose from within the huge population a small subset and educate them so that they will serve the needs of the government. That objective should have been replaced with something like this: To develop the human potential of every citizen in the broadest sense, so that the individual is best able to serve his own interests and the interests of the world he lives in. In other words, the citizens are not seen as serving the interests of the government but instead the government’s objective is to serve the people.
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