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?

At Harvard

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.