Navigating knowledge meaningfully

PROFILING TERROR has made everybody a little edgy. You are neither aggressor nor pacifist. You are by default the target. A worst scene and a real one at that. Do we talk about these apprehensions to our children, our adolescents, and our young adults? May we use the classroom to tackle common demons? Do we have ground rules? Do we have elegant frameworks that will respect simplicity? Do we have the assurance that our education system respects common humanity and will respond with truth? Do we trust the other? I'm not so sure anymore.

The old-fashioned question remains. What must we get out of an education? The choices are legion: experience, knowledge, information, values, life principles... How must we impart education? The methodology is lacking. The distance grows between classroom and learner, and between learning and meaning. There seems to be little interrelation between classroom and vocation and between information transfer and profession. Education becomes one more activity. Some of us perform exceedingly well and some of us not so well. At the same time information/information transfer/ appropriation of information remain grids in navigating knowledge.

The UGC, NAAC, and other such bureaucratic offices invest in evaluation systems so that we may identify learner positions in these grids, and measure well. Tangible exercises no doubt, but they remain exercises that discount the human being. The emphasis is on grade point average, number of credits and a million other mindless intricacies that constitute the struggle to keep fashionably abreast of strides in the first world academia, at least in semblance. We experiment with syllabus and structure, sometimes well, sometimes with no validity whatsoever. What seems to be consistently sidestepped however is the investment in equity and the critical consciousness that we are third world Indians for whom starvation, poverty, disease and illiteracy are realities and not theoretical discourses; that because we are a nation whose immune system accommodates corruption, feudalism and bureaucracy, we self destruct our best intentions. Without equity knowledge may never become a life science. We need purpose and we require seriousness. Our education must impart these.

It is time to explode the romantic myth that college years are the best because you can abandon yourself to the wind. Students really are the new entrants in a globalised world, signing contracts in contexts of hatred and violence. We no longer have the power to choose what to keep out or what to keep in. But we still retain the God-given ability to look around and choose to see things for what they are. No matter the century, no matter the advances in fields of education, the Orwell syndrome persists; that on Animal Farm where all pigs are equal, some pigs are more equal than others. We need to teach students skills in decoding. If we can't teach them, encourage them to pick up these skills. Treat them as adults responsible for their choices, and treat them as learners to scrutinise the ethics and logic of their choices. No matter how old or how young, they need to learn to resist. For without resistance they will never recognise disenfranchisement. For they need to understand their basic subject positions from which they will views both the world and the self and learn to identify fundamental rights, gauge access to opportunity and privilege, and perceive lobbies that thwart these.

All education institutions witness the practice of reservation. In perspective the logic makes sense; in practice it is often skewed. We are advocating to our young the concept of minority/majority within parameters of exclusion/inclusion. Most Indians recognise multiplicity and difference as natural to India. Most of us recognise multiple habitats as normal. Most of us lead quiet ordinary lives. We really do not get into discourses on tolerance or fundamentalism or secularism, because it has simply not struck us that some of us have more right to life than some others. Yet in our day-to-day teaching we ensure that these differences are engrained, and sufficiently so. Some of us have seats reserved for us; some of us don't. Some of us have jobs kept for us; some of us don't. With time learners identify points of difference as what essentially constitute identity, learn to pit one difference against another, and in time, make evaluations, specifically so in terms of Indian/ more- Indian-than-thou/ spiritually-better-Indian-than-thou.

Minority colleges cater to minority students. Majority colleges cater to majority students. Both minority and majority colleges in their generosity include factions that are not really theirs. All the while we are speaking of the Indian people, who have the promise of an absolutely magnificent constitution that guarantees the fundamental right to life. All the while we are engaging in the creation of an Indian that will suffer difference and condescendingly call it tolerance. We are ensuring riot-prone patterns. We seal these untoward practices with noble gestures known as restraint. We even superimpose an aura of respectability with labels that read religious tolerance, class tolerance, and caste tolerance. What a way to privilege the communalisation of education. What a way to erase ordinariness.

To invest education with meaning requires no financial support. We merely have to choose priorities. Choices can be made easily, without denying life its mysteries and complexities. Education is not a commodity for buying and selling. There is no patent on any one formula. We have to both earn it and merit it. It is there for anyone who respects life, who believes in harmony, and who wishes to live. Several schools and colleges do offer promising education; but these are the few who swim upstream. Commitment and well-being fail to find adequate places on our agenda; and understandably so, because these are tricky areas that defy not only power and reward, but also evaluation. So we return to our classrooms and continue with our teaching and our corrections, praying for sanitisation in routine. And so we throw in odd- lectures and odd speakers who pontificate on secular values or the beauty of spirituality and justice. We seldom recognise that for every platform that we provide for passionate discourse on justice we also need to teach ourselves the non-necessity to be fundamentalists and to revere and acknowledge sentiments that have been excluded from these discourses.

Schools and colleges are indeed small worlds, sometimes seemingly insular. But they are replicas of our larger world, and sometimes uncomfortably so. And we really have no authority to hurl insults, whether we are a minority or a majority. Even if that hadn't been quite the intent. We fail to make clarifications. Cries of Jihad or the Blood of Martyrs find their way into everyday rhetoric. It is time to look our students is the eye and without ambivalence contextualise issues and call for sub-texts. And articulate the subtext. For we need to dispassionately look at cracks in logic that posit oneness and ensure selective privileging in the argumentation. We need to hear each other and resist each other without profiling the declared enemy.

Today's world invites a new grammar that to me only education can deliver.

SUSAN OOMMEN

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Education in values
Next     : Know your English