Education to serve our people

Sanjeeb Mukherjee

Education has always been used to cater to the economic and ideological needs of dominant social forces. Today, education is increasingly geared to the requirements of global capitalism; instead of meeting people’s needs our education system acts as a gigantic sieve, which continuously eliminates students who do not meet the needs of global capital. The others find places in subaltern layers of the economy or administration. As a result, the education system involves waste and incompetence on a colossal scale. The other obscene feature of this system is that the doors of education are permanently closed to a huge number of children. The idols of our education today, are the Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management – providing technological and managerial skills to service global capital. The emancipatory possibilities of education have been transformed into world-class technical skills and services, subsidised by the Indian state, needed by global capital.

If education has to serve our people and our community from the lowest level, we need to make major changes in the goals, content and structure of education. The education system produces and reproduces knowledge, skills and different cultural practices, like art and music. The education system in India is split into two compartments, with internal hierarchies in each. The first is the formal or official system and the other is traditional. We are more familiar with the formal system of schools and colleges, but there is a large pool of knowledge, skills and cultural practices, which are produced and reproduced within traditional society, sometimes formally, more often informally. Agriculture, traditional industries and crafts, traditional medicine, folk arts and our whole repertoire of music and dance, both folk and classical forms continue to flourish by this informal system of education, which is often local and regional. In fact, the most important contribution of India to world knowledge and culture is in the field of Indian philosophy and music, and traditional institutions, both formal and informal, largely sustain both of them.

A large part of the modern system is marked by massive waste, redundancy and parasitism; whereas, because of want of proper institutional support many traditional knowledge systems and skills are simply becoming extinct. The crucial question is what role could these systems of knowledge play in building a just, good and beautiful society?

In the sphere of education, the district should be the key unit of operation to cater to the diversity of culture, knowledge, skills and needs. It follows that every district must contain the key institutions of education, namely, schools, colleges, including technical and professional colleges, and a university. These institutions, instead of being pale and emaciated copies of global institutions, must have a distinct character and function of their own. They would be expected to perform the following roles: first, they would primarily serve the knowledge based needs, both theoretical and practical, of the people of the district; secondly, they would bridge the divide between the modern and the traditional systems of knowledge by opening up to the other and by mutual respect and learning; finally, no society or institution can flourish if it is closed, hence, district universities particularly, should be open to the outside world.

This plan at first sight, appears formidable in terms of resources – where are the trained people and the money? Since the plan is based on the politics of here and now, rather than wait for the revolution or for the mega funds to set up fancy institutions, we need to spell out an action plan with existing resources. Almost all districts have colleges and hospitals, but people running them are either poorly trained or are under utilised, especially in colleges. To start with, a leading college could be awarded autonomous status and deserving teachers could be brought there from the district or even from outside and gradually it could be further upgraded into a postgraduate college or university. District level hospitals could be used for medical education, at least at the diploma, if not graduate level; the non-clinical subjects could be taught at the district university or any college and some advance part of the medical education could be conducted at other state level medical colleges. So without much extra expenditure a university or a medical college could be set up. Engineering colleges are already coming up. What is more important and challenging is reorienting university and technological and medical education by integrating with traditional knowledge systems and addressing the needs of the district.

There are not only two systems of knowledge, but two systems of needs as well. Modern needs, like building a concrete house is addressed by the modern knowledge system, but traditional needs, like improving the quality of a mud house, is left unaddressed. And most people like in mud houses or in shacks and slums. This is where the two systems of knowledge and skills must integrate, learning from each other. The best example of such an enterprise is the work of Laurie Baker in Kerala

On a much larger scale the two systems of knowledge and needs must meet and interact at the school level. Our modern method and content of schooling is essentially a device to colonise the minds of our people, first by the British and now by their Indian disciples.

Our schools have to undergo three kinds of transformation, first, schooling must liberate us, emancipate us; for that it should be a place for creativity, critical thinking and play. Secondly, it should be related to the life experiences of the students and their community; and finally, the content of education should be based on both modern and traditional systems of knowledge and needs. To start with this requires that students in schools study, in addition to science and maths, agriculture and local art and crafts. This means there would be an additional lot of teachers, who would be the local peasant, the potter, the weaver, the blacksmith, the folk singer or the cook. The school would be the meeting ground for interaction and learning and improvement of new and old knowledge and needs. Institutionalised support for research and critical thinking and interaction with modern sciences could overcome the ossification, which has come about over several centuries, in most traditional knowledge systems and practices. This again can be done now and here. The other imperative is to universalise school education, which in turn, would considerably solve the problem of unemployed graduates.

From: "The Left Front Government’s Development Strategy: A Critique and Notes Towards an Alternative Imaginary", Nov 2007.