Spotlight on population problem

INDIA POSSESSES 2.4 per cent of the total land area of the world but it has to support about 16 per cent of the total world population. With fast expanding population, education acquires a vastly different role. We've thought of rewriting Indian history. We've thought of the relevance of introducing a compulsory Sanskrit or Urdu in our curriculum. We've tried to update our schools with relevant or irrelevant computer courses. But have we ever thought of how our rewriting of history, how our Sanskrit and Urdu, our computers, can steer us through the staggering masses that act as barriers, walls, and stumbling blocks to every step towards any real progress?

Leaders have talked about the perils of population explosion. But there has never been any real effort at changing the nature of education in India to cope with the threatening dangers that we are swimming in. By extending the reservation policy for admission to educational institutions, and for jobs, in 1999, the Parliament has accepted that the reservation policy has failed to achieve its objective — bring at par the reserved categories.

But in the fear of losing votes, no political party has dared to come out in the open against reservation. Therefore we must at least try to make alternative arrangements so that the ravaging flood of the growing crowds doesn't drown us, and our basic rights. The alternative arrangement can be seen to lie in part in our system of education.

The quality of population

The Indian population can roughly be divided into three broad categories. Firstly there are the large ignorant masses of illiterate and semi-literate people who remain unconscious of the alarming consequences of their multiplications and additions. Secondly, there are the educated but communally inclined who may be able to think, but their thought may never go beyond their personal, religiously or socially fashioned ideas of what the ideal size of a family ought to be: the male child is a vital necessity to continue the lineage of the family, or clan. For them, Nature's plan to bless only with daughters needs to be frustrated and the effort to frustrate Nature's designs can be pushed to absurd limits.

Then there is the third category: the urbane class with the elitist class at its apex. This category does not over-breed, no doubt, but in this it helps the quality of our population to develop in ways not ideally suited to India's advantage. The quality of this category also cannot be considered satisfactory because in its attempt to Westernise and advance materially and technologically, it often leaves behind the need to be humane or even to remain truly Indian, cultivating and promoting Indian culture. This class of people is frequently obsessed with Information Technology and the fruits thereof, and the computer seems to be substituting not only its physical efforts but also much of its thinking.

The urge to think is fast disappearing — all thought being used up by which car to possess, which fridge, which TV, which computer, which money making profession to strive for, which posh locality to reside in and which shares to buy. Life is becoming more and more mechanical and humane emotions, sentiments, and considerations are disappearing from this class of the Indian population. This kind of development results in making people more selfish and self-promoting.

What is promoted along with them is a stony, insensitive, uncultured existence, which has nothing to strive after but money and power.

Even the top leaders are not free from ambitions, which lead to the same results. Their ideals, patriotic concerns and farsightedness are displaced by power grabbing tactics and involvement in scams. In a word, the quality of the Indian population in relative terms is rather unenviable. We have retained the negative traits of our own culture and are acquiring the negative features of the Western civilisation. And this is, largely because our system of education is not matching the needs of an overgrowing population.

Education & population

Our policy makers should first and foremost be conscious that the needs of our education are different from the needs of the more technologically advanced nations if for no other reason than the fact that the latter are not baffled by the hazards of overgrown population. Whereas they need literacy and education in the general sense of the terms, we need to cope with the mess we have procreated. Our education must be tailored to help our people learn to think independently and prepare for the particular kind of plight they have been born into.

It should teach them to love the villages (as for instance there is this kind of attraction for the countryside in European countries but the feeling is somewhat absent here). Movement should be towards the village rather than towards the town. Schools and universities should make this desired shift in our perspectives. Of course, the governments should make such movements attractive propositions.

Schooling

Our children must be brought face to face with the population hazards that they would face. To bring them up on old and dead metaphors and phrases is quite a meaningless exercise. The slogans and maxims with which they are fired should also be different to those that have existed in the past. For example, to say that "two is a company, and three is a crowd" or "more the merrier" is irrelevant for us.

We should breed in our children the fear of overcrowding by coining new maxims like "two is a crowd" instead of "two for joy". We can say "one for joy". A phrase like "crowded, cabined, cribbed and confined" would also help. Similarly a nursery rhyme like "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe, she had so many children she didn't know what to do,'' should be more useful than an ordinary one like "Where are you going to my pretty maid?"

New rhymes should be invented to mould the thinking of our children. For poems and lessons learned early in life go a long way in shaping our views. Nursery rhymes like "Hickory, dickory, dock" or "Jack and Jill", does little to young minds except bringing them closer to the structures of the English language and familiarising them with the concept of rhythmic utterance.

But of course, these are only peripherals. It is vitally necessary for educationists to work out new subjects to replace the present ones. These should be aimed as S.O.S. subjects without which we will only lead towards starvation, overcrowding, lawlessness and criminality. This will be a situation in which demand will always exceed supply. It is necessary to visualise new subjects like, "traffic rules" (without which our roads will become impossible to use), "decent language" (the kind of language which is necessary to keep such large masses of people from frequent tiffs and conflicts), "principles of co-existence" (new codes of social behaviour and actions like garbage disposal, without which society itself would often be on the point of collapse, "train and bus ethics" (the manners that are necessary for travellers that exceed the available travelling space); "overcoming class and caste barriers" (barriers which are increasing due to the reservation policies of our near helpless leaders).

Then there should be an over dose of the arts, particularly Indian classical music and Indian art, painting, sculpture and literatures. Because, for example, these can be packaged to the West in a big way if our educationists and governments make the effort.

Well planned textbooks

Science should be taught in relation to Indian agriculture, horticulture, and ecological awareness. Students should be made aware of the importance of planting trees, particularly fruit trees and other useful trees for our ecology. Rainwater harvesting should also be indoctrinated at the early stage, if Indians are to be saved from a perilously thirsty existence. It is only in schools that such awareness can really be instilled with the help of properly planned out textbooks.

Computer science should not be introduced too early in schools because it can also be seen as a bane of our new education. Millions of people are learning this subject at the cost of so many others, which might be more relevant to our approaching problems. We are learning one computer language after another. But the applications of these computer languages are often missing for the majority of learners.

We are only providing markets for American computer companies, and recycling and putting into motion a system which will lead to more and more unemployment and frustration in India, besides producing unemotional, mechanical and uncreative young men and women. Computers are necessary and must be retained in the curriculum but only after students have been warned about the dangers that will accrue from an indiscriminate use of these visionless idiot boxes.

Even in the West computers are leading to an impoverishment of the quality of life, a life that is continuously improving materially but is losing out on its cultural and humane concerns. Governments would do well to visualise the problems caused by overcrowding — the problems of our near future, and the more distant future, if this violent breeding is not checked.

Learning music & art

Indian music, the arts and literatures should be taught and encouraged. They should be developed as never before. If students are exposed to these treasures instead of over learning computer science and its allied technologies, they may make India a more attractive place even for the West.

Musicandart have always lured people and they can be used to make a significant kind of industry, which no other nation is working to create.

Studentsarebeing drawn towards Western and other models of music and art. We are turning out inferior replicas of Western music. We need to look into the richness of our own music. This is one of the few things that India can really be proud of.

Pandit Ravi Shanker, Ali Akbar Khan and Pandit Jasraj had the power to captivate the West. Our schools should help prospective talent to take shape and help in creating a taste for our rich music and arts.

Quality of education

Universities in India have been loosing out in esteem in the last two decades. Technological and other career-oriented institutes have been gaining at their cost. Only about the best 10 per cent university students in the country can be certain of getting good jobs solely on the basis of their university degrees. The quality of students as a whole is also deteriorating. It's either the best colleges of Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai and a few other towns, or its nothing!

Boardssuch as ISCE and CBSE are producing fine students, no doubt, but there is something robot-like in them. Their education makes them good at cramming facts. They have crammed factual knowledge at school and often supplemented it with the cramming of factual knowledge provided by coaching institutes. Their creative side is hardly allowed to blossom.

Thestudent of today is on the road to specialisation— to reach the 95 per cent mark or something close to that. Where is the time for stupid things like creativity, games or public speaking and dramatics?

The concern for the fellow human beings is also taking a back seat. He/she rarely identifies with the Indian villager. The goal is quite clear, a fat salary packet, the rest is moonshine.

Asaresult, several of the humanities and social sciences, which are enriching disciplines, are scarcely found relevant by them.

A course in hotel management or catering or interior design turns out to be much more deserving of their attention than literature, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, history and political science.

Thequalityof education sought by our best students itself not the best. The universities are packed with students and thousands are denied admission. Those who cannot always be described as our best study the more enriching kind of subjects.

Studying humanities

Education in universities and other professional institutes must in each case be supplemented with the humanities particularly with the study of literature and the other performing arts.

Literary studies acquire the highest importance at the university level because literature contains within the best ideas and experiences of some of the best and most sensitive minds — minds which has visions and has acquired the voices to convey the visions.

Literature is not a subject that can be compared with other subjects that have been approached by minds, which were merely intellectual. Literature contains surrogate experience potted and boiled.

It takes us into another's experience. One can know (like Hamlet) what it is to be the son of a mother who has married soon after his father has died.

It can tell us what it is to be black and 38 and be the husband of a white woman of 18 (like Othello). It can tell us what it is to feel marginalised (like Ammu and Velutha in God of Small Things).

The list of things one can experience though literature is endless. Literature can make people more humane because it enables them to feel for others by entering into the experience of others — say a character in a novel or play, or poem, or simply the world of a literary text.

A sensitive man reading literature can know what it is to be a woman, and a similar woman can know what it feels like in being a man.

Conclusion

Whereas it has become unavoidable to mechanise our students by making them study computers and allied courses, it is equally necessary in an over populated country like ours to humanise them with courses like literature and the arts.

In India where the numbers are fast multiplying, imagine a society where indifferent mechanical people, unable to feel for each other, live and interact in close proximity in overcrowded localities, each trying to outdo the other in order to advance himself and in the process give birth to conflict, ill-will, crime, corruption and despair.

Perhaps such an education would soon lead us back to the state of nature as envisioned by Thomas Hobbes, who depicted in it the life of man as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

If India's population was not growing at such an alarming rate, we could have continued to have the kind of unplanned progress we currently have in this country. But we can't give to ourselves the luxury of such an unplanned kind of system of education. We've got to control the kind of people who are to be sardined into the can called "India".

If school and university can work together towards bringing awareness of the forthcoming threatened existence in our students and then humanise them as well, we might not be entirely condemned sardines.

Our political parties can, in that case still afford to ignore the population problem and continue their chase of vote-banks, without any real harm coming to the nation.

LAKSHMI RAJ SHARMA

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