This is an edited and somewhat expanded version of my comments in the education panel of Harvard India Conference 2012. The topic of discussion was "Education in India - Opportunities and Challenges in the Next Decade".
We are
considering what challenges and opportunities in education await us in India
over the next decade. I would like to share with you three lenses I look at the
question through — from the perspectives of the individual, the community and
technology.
For me, the
highest purpose of education for the individual is simply this: to cultivate
attention, the state of being where one can engage with the question at hand
with clarity, care and affection, bringing all one’s resources, physical,
intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual, to bear. Only then does the
individual begin to approach that holy grail of education, being a self-learner,
who can allow the scaffolds of school, teacher, books and accumulated wisdom to
fall away without undermining their importance in bringing him where he is.
How do
education, and educators, meet that challenge? It seems clear that as long as
indoctrination, as opposed to creative inquiry, remains the goal of organised
education, we have a task at hand. That task is both discovering how that
higher purpose is to be approached, and how to engage with the sensibilities
that do not lay the same emphasis on it. We are not very good at it, having pursued
rather vigorously the other kind of education for several centuries, first in
the service of a colonial master and then in the cause of nation-building. To
move away will require a patient but persistent dialogue with various parts of
the society as well as actual demonstrations of what such an education can mean
for the individual.
One
interesting example of this problem, though by no means the only one, is the
increasing vocationalisation of education. It is hard to find anyone at all, at
even the highest policy-making levels in India, who does not act as if the only goal
of education is to produce a well-adjusted work-force for the industry.
That is a worthy goal, but scarcely enough by itself for any of us to flourish.
My
dialogues in villages and towns with parents and other community members often
involve people discovering that they want their sons and daughters not only to
become good doctors or engineers, but also good husbands and friends and
neighbours; they want them to be not just good workers, but good co-workers.
They do want them to be people who have an eye for beauty, a capacity to engage
with the unknown, a sense of their connection with the larger world. But it
needs drawing out, simply because we have for too long believed that education
needn’t concern itself with those aspects.
At the level
of the society, two key issues occupy my mind. India has seen dramatic changes
in the way the society is organised over the last few decades. Nuclear families
in India today account for over 70% of all families, compared to just over a
half just a generation ago. This is a seismic change, which has imposed
extraordinary stresses on the way the community educates its young. The family
support systems are less in evidence, the parents are less able to spend time
with their children, and a huge loss of institutional and cultural memory is
occurring every day.
This is
problematic from the educator’s point of view, but it is especially troublesome
for the less affluent, the less privileged and the less well-connected. That,
unfortunately, is about 70%-80% of the children in the country. As a result,
the education system has turned into a giant engine for what Anthony Carnvale
of Georgetown University calls, in the US context, the intergenerational
reproduction of privilege, scholar-speak for “the mighty get mightier, the poor
poorer.” It is even truer for India, where the application of both public and
private resources is highly skewed in favour of the more privileged.
The
inequality does not only create social stresses and potential violence, issues
that should rightly concern any educator. They also impose a large cost in
terms of the society’s creativity, productivity and its capacity for joy. While
perfect equality is dysfunctional utopia, gross inequality is an invitation for
a community to disintegrate.
The other
challenge that concerns me is the lack of involvement of communities in the
education of their children As we stand today, organised education, whether
public or private, pays practically no attention to contextualising education,
respecting local traditions or inviting the community into the classroom. For a
country with the diversity of India, this is extremely problematic.
The Right
to Education Act of 2010, with all the noble intentions which marked its
conception, is a huge step backward on the path of empowering communities to
become a part of the education of the young. It implicitly vests, in the state,
all authority and wisdom about what is worth learning, how and where it should
be learnt and who should teach it. As a result, a large number of innovative
education practices that have flourished in quiet nooks and under village trees
are threatened with closure.
The
challenge for educators here is to discover ways in which feedback from communities
about what is valued and relevant to them gets incorporated into the curriculum
as well as the teacher-student relationship. This involves the educators
acknowledging both the limitations of the models under which they operate, and
the value of the wisdom of the community. The makers of the constitution,
mindful of this, made education a state, rather than a union, subject but even
that is not enough. In my work, we come across cases daily where a state
capital-mandated educational practice is grossly inadequate for, even unfair
to, the children being subjected to it.
And
finally, I want to talk about two challenges of incorporating technology into
education. The first is comparatively straightforward. Most technology
initiatives, at least at the school level, at the moment seem to be a set of
recipes, either as delivery mechanisms for existing content or for new
tech-related content. We see little anchoring of it in genuine enquiry, or a
framework of meaning-making. Without an embedded organising principle, it is
hard to see such technology making more of learners than technicians.
And yet,
technology has an enormous potential for enhancing the skills of enquiry and
deeper reflection. It can dramatically reduce the repetitive drudgery in a
number of tasks and free the mind to focus on the creative tasks. The challenge
for the educators is to use technology so that it harnesses this creative
energy.
The other
challenge is somewhat subtler. Technology has been hailed as the educator’s
panacea, helping solve the problems of access for the poor, uneven teacher
quality, and lack of interesting learning materials in the classrooms. In reality,
available data suggests that we must be very mindful of the inequality
enhancing effects of technology.
By its
nature, technology serves to improve the output-input ratio of existing
production processes. The wheel made it possible to haul a larger load over
larger distances using the same effort. A networked computer gives the one who
knows it access to a much larger volume of information compared to one who
doesn’t.
This, of
course, enhances the overall welfare of the community using the technology.
However, as it does so, it inherently also amplifies the existing processes for
manufacturing inequality in a society. We don’t know if there was a name for
some people not having access to the wheel. We do have one for uneven access to
the computer network. It is called digital divide and it is something that
rightly concerns educators and leaders around the world.
We can
point to a lot of cases where use of technology seems to have evened out
existing inequalities. However, we discover, mostly, that new technology has
simply created a new set of winners who are now on the way to becoming more
than equal. The identity of those who are unequal changes, the fact of
inequality doesn’t.
This is not
to say, at all, that technology should, therefore, be shunned. The challenge
for us is to be aware of the many ways in which use of technology might
exacerbate inequalities and, as a society, take steps to mitigate it.
Challenges,
as the Chinese say, are opportunities. The ones we see around us today are,
potentially, a ladder upwards.
