This is that time of
year when examinations hold centre stage in India, not only for students but
for their parents also. There are a plethora of examinations with the most
important being the school leaving and college entry ones. Primarily because
these are the ones that control the gates to a well paid career in the global
capitalist system of which India is an insignificant but gradually more
significant cog. These examinations themselves occur once at the end of the
school phase of a child on the threshold of adulthood but since they are so
important from the point of getting a decent toehold in the capitalist system, children
have to prepare for them well in advance. Indeed the whole school education
system, supplemented by the ubiquitous coaching institutes, has now become
geared to training students to crack these examinations and the content has
consequently become encyclopaedic and the learning rote. Huge amounts of
information have to be memorised and the answers to questions have to be in
pre-determined formats. The well publicised end of this education is not the
gaining of knowledge and insights per se, even though that may happen by chance
along the way, but the cracking of examinations that will ensure entry into
good colleges, which in turn will later ensure jobs that promise pelf and power
as minions of the global capitalist system. Such is the power of this system
that very few students and parents are able to ignore it and so become victims
of it, even when they crack these exams and gain entry into elite educational
institutions by losing their childhood in order to compete to get ahead of
others. Understandably, performing well in these examinations requires huge
investments in schooling and coaching and so it is mostly the rich and powerful
who are able to get their children to succeed and even after that a
considerable number from these privileged sections are left out in the cold.
Those children from the under privileged sections, who do get in to the elite
institutions as a consequence of scholarships and reservations, also become
part of the capitalist system and rarely pose a challenge to it.
Earlier, the better
educational institutions at the college level were all government ones but over
the past decade or so given the huge demand for such institutes that are
gateways to the capitalist world, many private colleges and universities have
come up, which while promising great placements to their students are prepared
to relax the entrance cutoffs for a hefty fee. This has further vitiated the
already skewed access to elite education tuned to landing plum jobs in the
capitalist system. Not surprisingly students who have slogged from an early age
to get into the capitalist system and often have to take loans to pursue higher
education, are in no position to question and rebel against this system and at
the most any student unrest that does take place these days is with regard to
getting scholarships to defray the high expenses of college education and not
about the content of this education and the fact that this education is geared
to producing meek cogs of the capitalist system. The Central Government has now
proposed that the University Grants Commission, which controls both the course
content and funding of universities both public and private in this country, is
to be discontinued and replaced by a Higher Education Commission of India. The
government funded universities and colleges are to be provided more autonomy
with regard to deciding on course content and securing funding and this has
been construed by many as an attempt by the Government to further reduce its
already meagre funding of higher education under the figleaf of allowing more
autonomy to decide on course content. Of course most univeristies are
hopelessly outdated in their course content in terms of the needs of the
capitalist system and also totally irrelevant from the point of view of the
needs of a people centred socio-economy but it is unlikely that without
Government funding they will be able to improve their capabilities and
relevance in this regard. Faculty and students of universities have already
begun protesting this move as it comes on the heels of a sharp decline in
funding of higher education both in terms of reducing faculty and research
funds and also cutting down on scholarships for students. Government funding of
school education is already pathetic and consequently most school education in
this country both public and private is in a shambles already resulting in an
elitist private education system that produces encyclopaedias but not critical
thinking individuals.
In the midst of all
this a storm has arisen with the West Bengal Government dictating that the
Jadavpur University in Kolkata, which conducts special entrance examinations
for its humanities and social sciences courses, including English Literature,
will have to discontinue these tests and instead rely on the performance of
students in the school leaving examinations to select its intake. The
university faculty and students are up in arms in Jadavpur, saying that
humanities and social sciences and especially literature, require many
subjective skills which are not tested by the school leaving examinations and
so are not taught in schools. These skills are better in those students who
disregard the school syllabi and teaching and pursue their own reading and so
do not perform as well in the school leaving examinations as those students who
study to crack these examinations and so a special test is required to identify
such true lovers of the humanities and social sciences. Whatever may be the
merit in this claim, which needs to be independently and rigorously verified before
arbitrarily ditching the current selection system as the West Bengal Government
is doing, this has made me reflect on the education system as it exists which I
have increasingly become critical of over the years.
I too was initially a
victim of this system and so studied with gusto for examinations and cracked
them to get entry into an elite institute all of four decades ago. However,
when we were in school it was still possible to read outside of the syllabus as
the competition was not as cut throat as it is now and so I did a lot of extra
curricular reading, especially of literature, humanities and social sciences
despite being formally a student of science. Moreover, in our time, college
education was very cheap and so there wasn't the kind of pressure there is
today when students have to pay in lakhs of rupees to get educated. Then in
college I began doing quizzing in which one has to know almost everything about
everything if one is to win the competitions. Consequently, I began reading
philosophy also since often questions would be asked regarding this or that
philosopher. However, on reading philosophy, both eastern and western, I became
critical of the formal education I was receiving to become an engineer. So I
began reading much more of philosophy and politics and very little of
engineering. Eventually, I did become an engineer at the end of five years of
study but by then I had become an anarchist questioning the need for huge
centralised systems controlled by capital and kept running by the products of
an education system geared to perpetuating the dominance of capitalist
industrialism to the detriment of both society and the environment.
The first question
that I asked myself was the relevance of most of what I had been formally taught
in school and college to promoting a more sustainable and equitable social and
economic system in the country. Throughout my formal education I had never once
been prompted to critically review the received wisdom even though this is a
basic desideratum of both natural and social science. All the great
philosophies, regardless of whether they are western or eastern, are
circumspect about knowledge and stress the importance of critical review. Yet
throughout my school and college education I had never been taught to be
critical of what I was being taught. This has become even more so these days
when students have to score 100 out of 100 in their school leaving examinations
and crack arcane and extremely difficult math and science questions in two
minutes to get into elite engineering and medicine colleges. When in life one
continually faces intractable problems which force one to be critical and spend
hours and days to solve them, what is the point of wasting years together
studying how not to be critical and to solve problems in two minutes flat.
Thus, it is not surprising that humanity as a whole and we Indians in
particular are beset with insurmountable problems that we are not being able to
solve and are instead serving out time as lackeys of a global capitalism that
is running singlemindedly towards an ecological apocalypse.
So anything of value
that I have learnt in life, primarily after college, is from critically reading
content required to solve problems that I have encountered in pursuit of my
goal of establishing a sustainable and equitable human system. I have also learned how to live minimally from the Bhil Adivasis with whom I have spent the most part of my life. I was surprised
to find after this reading that despite Gandhi being eulogised as the Father of
the Nation and being accorded the status of a saint for advocating ascetic
village centred development, there was neither an attempt to place him in the
context of both ancient Indian and modern Western anarchism from which he had
borrowed considerably nor a critical review of the obstacles that capitalism
places in the path of anarchism and had in Gandhi's. There is a near complete
silence about the fact that Gandhi was heavily funded by Indian capitalists and
so the policies that were eventually followed by the Indian National Congress
both before and after independence were such as to favour the growth of these
capitalists at the expense of the rural masses for whom Gandhi shed so many
tears and advocated the revolutionary oceanic circle anarchist development
paradigm. Even though I believe that a more equitable and sustainable civilisation
must be an anarchist and so decentralised one I nevertheless realise that given
the industrial development that has taken place it is difficult to go back to a
less industrial system which involves more physical labour and lesser
extraction of resources. This is the biggest challenge of our times - to bring
about a sustainable and equitable development system but the education system
is not addressing this challenge at all.
The major problem is
that even if one rejects the formal education system it is difficult to
sideline it. Simply because it is next to impossible to raise resources in the
capitalist system without a certificate of
having completed such an education. Such is the devastation wrought
among the masses by the capitalist system that it is difficult to pursue
anarchist goals through voluntary contributions from them. A classical Catch 22
situation where one must reject the capitalist education system to be able to
build up a challenge to it but if one does so then one is left without
resources to mount this challenge!! Throughout my activist career I have had to
source funds from the capitalist system and I have done so by flaunting my
degree in engineering from an elite institute. Later, to enhance my earning
capabilities I did a Phd too. Initially, I did not get entry into any
university because they insisted that I would have to do course work for two
years before I could start my research. My plea that I had already done
considerable research and published it in reputed journals and so did not need any further training, which is another
cooked up criteria to perpetuate capitalist control of education, fell on deaf
ears. Anyway I finally managed to wiggle in to a new Phd programme started by a
private university but even there I finally had to write my thesis in a
pre-determined format even though I found it to be very restrictive. The only
advantage is that I can now more forcefully present my anti-capitalist and
anti-statist views because of the fact that I am a Phd!!
Coming back to
philosophy which is what started my own true and joyous educational journey, all the great
philosophers were free thinkers totally unshackled by the kind of regimented
learning that takes place in schools and colleges these days. The university
system of the twentieth century onwards has not produced a single philosopher
of any weight as compared to those of the ancient and medieval times. What the
philosophers of our times do, is just chew the cud of what has gone before!!! Even celebrated ones like Russel, Sartre and Camus. Though there is something to be said for the critical theorists, especially Marcuse, Marxism generally has degenerated into a farce!! Therefore,
there is an urgent need to free education from the straight jacket that it has
been transformed into. Instead of wasting time learning tons of subjects which
people rarely use in life later on, we have to let children learn what they want within a broad framework of sustainability and equity.
Unfortunately, unless children and their parents can throw off the yoke of
capitalist job seeking, this will not be possible. One has to take the risk and
do one's own thing. Especially since these days with the internet one does not have to rely on formal enrollment in a brick and mortar college anymore. I don't see many young people doing
this even though I did it in college at a time when the opportunities for such educational moonshining were limited, mainly because of the kind of regimented schooling that they have received and also because of the huge expenditure of higher education which forces them to think of earning money after graduation instead of doing something worthwhile. I have offered many young people the opportunity to work at the
grassroots and live minimally while trying to learn about the problems there and
finding solutions for them. Till date not a single one has taken up this offer.
The lust for joyous and free learning seems to have been killed by capitalist gate keeping.
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