Letting the Pandemic Educate Us

 

This is a slightly edited version of an earlier post.

 

In terms of the disruption to social and economic structures that COVID-19 has caused, it is probably the most consequential event in the life of the 70-year old Indian Republic. While we wait for its full impact to become clearer, it unfortunately appears from their pronouncements that most people, including political leaders and policy makers, are simply waiting for “when this is over”. That may be short-sighted, a misunderstanding of what “being over” might really mean.

That is because COVID-19 has brought lessons in its wake that we will ignore at our peril. In a societal sense, the pandemic has laid bare the fragile and counter-productive assumptions that underpin the way we have organised ourselves. In particular, education, as the primary mechanism that drives long-term change in a society, must respond to protect and strengthen children today and the nation tomorrow.

Three important mechanisms of social organisation that have been taken for granted in education during recent decades are institutionalisation, urbanisation and globalisation. If COVID-19 is not a one-off event, and there is no reason to assume that it is given how exploitative our engagement with our environment continues to be, each one of them must be reassessed for worth, especially for how they affect the future of our children.

Institutionalisation of Education

Institutionalisation has promoted the idea that the only learning worth our children’s time and our money is the one that is provided in schools, colleges and universities. Across most of the world, this has made learning information-centric and uncritical. It has packed children into rows and columns in classrooms and made them unfamiliar with their surroundings. It has taken them away from productive use of their hands and bodies and valorised “brain work”, creating an artificial crisis of periodic unemployment (even before the unimaginable destruction of employment caused by COVID-19). It has snapped their connections with their land, their environment, their culture and their communities, replacing them with words in ink on paper or, more recently, typeface on a computer screen. In India, a mindless pedagogy has further ensured that institutionalisation fails even in its own objectives, as student achievement on its “learning metrics”, mainly focussed on literacy, numeracy and irrelevant information, has kept falling.

By shutting down its pre-school centres, COVID-19 brings India’s attention squarely to the role of parents in the holistic development of their young children. (We started Sajag, a programme for coaching caregivers in nurturing care in April 2020. It now reaches over 1.5 million families and is set to expand further. Many others have started similar programmes.) By forcing the closure of schools and colleges, COVID-19 presents us with the opportunity to explore what exactly is being lost when schools close. It also creates the possibility that we will discover how much there is to learn in communities, on land, in relationship, and in discovery and invention, even when schools are closed. It has the promise of suggesting a radical overhaul of what we value in school education.

Urbanisation of Communities

Urbanisation has caused us to believe that ghettoization of people in cities is inevitable as we “develop”. With economic and social policies in most countries oriented towards this shibboleth, we have seen unhygienic living grow exponentially in the cities, even as rural communities have been devastated by loss of populations. Mental health challenges in urban communities have become alarming, accentuated simply by the inhuman stresses that accompany urban living. For our young, it has meant few physical spaces for wholesome growth and play, little opportunity for meaningful community engagement and a social landscape tragically barren of nurturing experiences.

By attacking densely-packed urban communities disproportionately, COVID-19 has laid bare the fallacy of organising ourselves solely for economic efficiency. It asks us to reconsider how physical communities should be laid out, how large they should be, how they should harmonise into the surrounding landscape and how their cultural, economic and political sinews should function.

Globalisation of Society

We have also been fed the inevitability of globalisation, almost as a primal force. It is true that it promises economic efficiency, but we have, in the process, lost much. Diversity is the essence of risk reduction and long-term survival and thriving, whether at the level of an organisation, a community, a nation, or indeed, evolution of life itself. In a few short decades, blinded by the promise of economic efficiency, we have traded diversity away for massive inequality and loss of local skills, trades, crafts, self-reliance, agency and autonomy. Our text books, the only source of information promoted by our policies, have consistently failed to ignite an examination of the underlying assumptions and their all-too-visible outcomes among our children.

The globalising impulse has led to entire education systems being un-moored in authentic experience and unresponsive to local needs. As a result, it has fostered and valorised the creation of an alienating and alienated elite. The reaction to that is a distressing level of anti-intellectualism throughout the world. That, of course, creates the fodder for the assembly line that is perhaps the holy grail of the globalising philosophy in the first place, but it also creates a dangerous level of instability and irrationality in society that can eventually only tear everything apart. This is not just a possibility. It is happening now, around the world.

COVID-19 has alerted us to the downsides of these Faustian bargains. Its dramatic spread is certainly a result, with air travel having been the primary vector. The heart-breaking spectacle of tens of millions of migrant workers walking hundreds of kilometres and sleeping on asphalt roads in India’s scorching summer, is another. They discovered that they had no means of support, no community, no fall-back when their employment away from home ceased. COVID-19 has also awakened us rudely to the reality that having the world’s fastest GDP growth rate is no protection against ending up with the world’s steepest fall in GDP and widespread misery.

To the extent that we continue to regard globalising as self-evidently good, we create the potential of damaging our children, inhibiting their learning and creating a world that is less fit for them. Time has come to drop the fiction that local wisdom is somehow inferior and to engage in a meaningful dialogue that hasn’t foreclosed on the alternatives.

The Need for Dialogue

Pandemics have ravaged humanity fairly regularly, but the last decade and a half has seen a large number of concerned voices talk about the urgent need to reassess the social, economic and environmental systems we have created. They have warned about the high likelihood of their causing “zoonotic health threats”, diseases that migrate from animals to humans, exactly as happened with COVID-19. As long as they were just scientific papers or rarefied symposia, the common man paid no heed. Today, we know better.

We know, in particular, that none of these questions is trivial, yet none has an obvious answer, either. There are good reasons why these systems have taken such a hold in our collective psyche. These should be the subject of widespread dialogue including, perhaps especially, in our schools and colleges. The sensibilities that arise from such deliberations must inform our liberal education as well as the conduct of professions such as engineering, town planning, medicine, economics, sociology and, indeed, education. As of now, there seems no evidence that any of that is likely, or India wouldn’t have had a National Education Policy, passed in the middle of the pandemic, with exactly three sentences referring to it.

Crises are opportunities. Our response to this one may be the difference between thriving and perishing. COID-19 has much to teach us, but education must be paid for with the currency of attention. Will we pay heed?

Proselytisation Posing as Policy

This is the note I wrote for the 2015-16 Annual Report of Centre for Learning Resources as its Director. I hope you will find it interesting. (To see the full Annual Report, please click here).

The big education policy event of 2016 in India is the making of … well, the National Education Policy, 2016 (NEP). Or is it?

Governments the world over have sought to control what passes for education in schools. Many have called schools an institution for brain-washing young minds so that they subscribe to some particular idea of a nation. Others, more charitably, call it an exercise in nation-building, especially necessary for “young” nations to help build a sense of togetherness. They usually mean the same thing.

One wouldn’t think that India, the land with a civilizational footprint millennia long, would need to invent the idea of its nationhood afresh. One would imagine that the rich cultural, spiritual and intellectual legacy of this land would provide a sufficiently nuanced and complex bed in which to seed a variety of ideas and positions without anyone feeling threatened. One would believe that the dominant sentiment that would arise in this country would be: “I contain multitudes”.

However, the on-going debates around NEP suggest that one would be wrong.

Most of the voices, on either side of the debate, have tended to operate from the “how to convert them young through education policy” paradigm. Like their predecessors over decades, the protagonists mistakenly believe that they will transform a whole generation or more of citizens if they can only grab control of the school curriculum.

After independence, this was perhaps inevitable as we chose the unfamiliar motif of a written constitution to be the new object of our allegiance. Insecurity around the success of that project, especially given the horrific violence that accompanied freedom, would have been enough for a determined proselytisation effort. Unfortunately, as it became the default, unquestioned objective, each successive generation of education policy makers has sought to find ways in which to imprint their particular notion of India on the young minds.

Such fond wishing flies in the face of much evidence to the contrary. The truth is that children’s attitudes and beliefs are moulded by a lot of different environmental factors. The preachy way in which schooling tries to do so is among the least effective of them all.

Regardless, the “catch them young” approach continues to be replicated in the current formulation of, and debate around, NEP. Over the years, that obsession has created an education system that specialises in preaching and shoving information down the throats of the children. It gives little regard to whether what they are taught integrates with their lived experiences, little regard to whether it builds skills that might be useful to live a full life, little regard to creating attitudes for living peacefully together. Most damagingly, it ensures that children never learn the art of questioning the stories they are told, of enquiring into the true nature of things, of challenging prejudices constructively and doing so with consideration, respect and the need to understand. So even though few today buy into the notion that big dams are the temples of modern India, they lack the resources or the skills to meaningfully enquire into what might be actually worthy of such an appellation. And India’s anointment as a plastic surgery pioneer may draw sniggers or applause, depending upon the prejudice, but rarely a deeper look into the ontology of such claims.

As the ability to discern, to parse, to evaluate disappears from the classrooms, it is possible to tell the young any story, true, false or slanted, without fear of challenge. Those who seek to plasticise the young minds in hopes of leaving them with their own imprints forget, and are often dismayed to discover, that such minds are putty-like in face of competing ideologies as well.

It takes only a little thought to draw the line from poor development of these faculties to the pervasive fracturing of our society today, the entrenched injustice and oppression, the ease with which narratives of violence take hold and the lack of meaning our young struggle with. A generation schooled to not use reason in day to day engagements will not use reason when faced with serious challenges of life. A school day that doesn’t help children learn respect through experiencing it (as opposed to being preached at) will create individuals who have trouble respecting others. If schooling prepares children primarily to serve as foot soldiers in the cause of advancing technology, as the draft NEP seems weighed down by, they will fail to recognise, and act from, their value to their communities when they grow up.

The current debates on the NEP have largely failed to challenge it on the basis of how we really need to change our education system. Today, we need a dialogue that rejects both the tendency to dwell a thousand years in the past on the one hand and to craft an unmoored identity by denying our traditions on the other. We need a policy that privileges a curriculum fostering deep enquiry, creativity, engagement and respect. However, this can only happen if we step back from the fruitless attempts of trying to mould our children in our images.

Of course, we can just go on doing what we have for the last 70 years and make the NEP a non-event. Unfortunately, we probably will.