Note

‘Modern’ (Mis-) Education
Yoginder Sikand

Modern’ school educa tion is geared essentially to imparting a body of knowledge to students. The ultimate purpose of this process is to prepare them for their future careers, through which they will assume certain roles in the modern economy. That is why schools are conventionally judged in terms of their ability to produce graduates who get 'good' jobs-by which is meant jobs that come with hefty salaries and fancy perks.

It is thus hardly surprising that schools pay only lip-service to the moral or ethical growth of their students. Helping their students to become good, loving, kind and caring human beings, as opposed to 'good' (by which is essentially meant rich) scientists or economists or whatever, is definitely not their major purpose. They might make some cosmetic concessions to ethical concerns by introducing moral science or civics classes, but these are hardly taken seriously by both teachers and students. The latter often think of them as a burden that they have to suffer in silence in order to be promoted to the next grade. Other than this, schools generally have no other arrangement for students' moral or ethical growth. In fact, contemporary 'mainstream' schooling is geared to inculcating a whole set of negative attitudes and attributes, which so damage their students that only some fortunate few manage to overcome them in later life. One of these is fear. Most teachers maintain and reinforce their authority over students by instilling abject fear in them. Students sometimes cringe before their teachers and generally dare not question them or 'misbehave' (and this may be just something as harmless as sharing a whisper with another student during class-hours) for fear of being punished-scolded or even beaten-by their teachers.

Then, of course, there is the ever-present fear of 'failure'. Learning, for most students and in most schools, is far from being a pleasurable activity. It is the fear of failing that drives most students to study, as well as the fear of having to face the wrath of their parents and the taunts of their class-mates. 'Cut-throat competition' is also what schools actively work to instill in students from a tender age onwards. Learning in 'mainstream' schools is not a group process, something that students and teachers together participate in and grow together doing. Rather, 'learning' in modern schools is geared to train students to become aggressive competitors once they leave school and enter the job market. The conventional examination system reflects that purpose. Being structured in such a way as to produce 'winners' and 'losers', 'toppers' and 'failures', each student is made to believe that his 'success' is dependent on the 'failure' of others, whom he comes to see as his competitors, or even as 'enemies'. He can 'succeed', he comes to think, only if others 'fail' or, at least, fall behind him. It's almost like a war, with each student being set against the rest. This, of course, can only produce aggressive selfishness in students and an absolute indifference, or even hostility, to the welfare of others.

Of course, it isn't just by reading about  hard social realities in textbooks that students can be sensitized to the bitter social realities of poverty and oppression that continue to plague India. Ideally, students should be exposed to such realities through short field visits, including to organizations and groups working on these issues, so that they can witness them for themselves. But that, of course, doesn't happen at all. At least none of the high-brow schools does anything remotely like this. On the contrary, they do everything to make their students completely blind and wholly insensitive to such realities, and, instead, to programme them to accept Western-style culture and consumerist hedonism as normative and 'natural' and, as it is now called, the 'in-thing'.

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 7, Aug 26-Sep1, 2012