Policy makers are busy only with making education equitable and accessible, which is remarkable but too little and too myopic for the changes that we need in the existing books.
KAPIL ARAMBAM
For starters, many people have always complained that Pink Floyd’s double negative in their lyrics in ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ is the exact reason why people need education in the first place. Others would argue that it was deliberate and act as an intensified negative just as it does in colloquial English in various parts of the English-speaking world. However, regardless of which side of the fence you belong to, the point is: why do we need education for?
Historically, education was fancy in the sense it was reserved only for the royals
and the aristocrats and the elites. Then
the machines arrived with the Industrial Revolution that coincided with people realising the need for doing away with child labour
and the importance of learning so that the children could become productive members
of the society. The machines also automated specialised learning among the masses and fortunately, various societies have done away with child labour. There was as well a religious twist to the needs of education. In ‘Psychology Today’, Peter Gray, the author of Free to Learn, wrote: ‘Much of the impetus for universal education came from the emerging Protestant religions. Martin Luther declared that salvation depends on each person’s own reading of the Scriptures. A corollary, not lost on Luther, was that each person must learn to read and must also learn that the Scriptures represent absolute truths and that salvation depends on understanding those truths.’
Between those days in Europe and our time in India now, we have come a long way. Then it was about the realisation of universal education and now it is about the contemporary emphasis on the requirement of job skills when you complete the so-called formal education. Of course, social observers argue that India is just taking baby steps albeit gradually in universalising education with the introduction of Right to Education Act in 2009 and in line with the United Nations Development Programme however that much needs to be done. Ground realities might also tell a sadder tale yet even for those privileged there are several issues that need to be addressed.
This brings us to one of the concepts in education: the factory model, an expression which is more common in the West in discussions on education and nonetheless relevant in the Indian context. To put it into context, in the factory model, it is the State that takes care of the education system; students are divided according to age and grades; they have standardised tests; and most notably, they are prepared rigorously so that they can work in factories, efficiently, punctually, orderly and obediently.
The general consensus is that the factory model is obsolete but no one can deny it is still considered as a necessary evil or if we want to make it worse, policy makers are busy only with making education equitable and accessible, which is remarkable but too little and too myopic for the changes that we need in the existing books.
If we assume the degrees and certificates are paramount to get a job, all the current vocational courses will suffice the need to apprentice the students and help them get a job. Common sense dictates that that’s not simply possible. The sheer objective of making a living rather than making an effort to live a meaningful life is one of the tragedies of modern life. There is an idea in education that should be made as universal as the idea of universal education. Paulo Freire, the renowned educator, had put it succinctly in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
According to Freire, ‘The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.’
Freire’s views on education are also highly political. He advocates that we must overcome the authoritarian forms of education, and more importantly through education the oppressed has the agency to facilitate the liberation of human beings in all forms. Briefly, education is a tool for liberation from oppression and a process of humanising all the people. In explaining the pedagogy, Freire also shows us that in an oppressed world, amongst many other ways, we can overcome our powerlessness by acting on our own behalf through reflection and action.
Through education we can also create our own reality but that worldview has been severely restricted by the supposed material gains, which are associated with education nowadays. The unceasing clarion call for conformity is not helping at all, but rather it is only reinforcing the old idea of the factory model of education. Functionalists would say that education always serves both the manifest (from socialisation
to social mobility) and latent (from social networking to social integration) functions,
but when the whole structure of education is condemned, the purposes are questionable.
Besides, many of these supposed functions are ‘unconscious’ that people at the helm of affairs would still take them for granted while re- emphasising on the ‘formality’ of their systems of education: ‘Comply, complete and career’. Yet, the whole argument is about how and why we have to be conscious in taking decisions about life, or in Freire’s view, how we can humanise ourselves through conscious action with the help of education.
If we have to start from the beginning, people have complained against ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ for its double negative in the chorus. In the blink of an eye, though, we have normalised the three Rs as reading, writing and arithmetic—so much so that it has become four now, with computer added into the group. ‘Writing’, ‘arithmetic’ and ‘computer’ are ‘W’, ‘A’ and ‘C’ and not Rs! Just like in the song, apparently,
the present system does not want us to have
the pudding of life if you do not eat the meat of education. Perhaps, we need a new classroom for this deliberation.
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