Witoubou Newmai
“Education gives meaning and values to life.” Prakash Javadekar said this moments after he was sworn-in as Minister of Human Resource Development (HRD) on Wednesday. While talking on improving ‘quality of education,’ the new HRD minister also said that “education should be seen as an emancipator”.
To the people, such comments have been usual utterances made by public figures for over half a century, while the wait for ‘quality education’ continues even to day. Nuanced debates of what constitutes ‘quality education’ have been further ruffled by the issues of proxy teachers, absenteeism of teachers, irregular salary payment of teachers, agitation of teachers and a bad teacher transfer policy (among others). Before these issues are addressed, the talk of ‘quality education’ is akin to placing a cart before the horse.
There is also another big challenge to the call for ‘quality education’. The call has been overwhelmed by the increasing commercialisation of education, creating more value for the “ranking game”. This is to suggest that the urge of the immoral side of the world has become too much for policy makers, thus real values have not been valued. This, in turn, has produced a strong obsession with the ranking game in education, wherein ‘employability becomes the central concern’ (to borrow the language of Shiv Visvanathan). Such indulgence has destroyed the whole purpose of education.
Noted educationists have been saying that a right education system is one that gives importance to attitudes and values which is the frame of sustained growth of a society. Eminent educationist Dr. NM Bhagia said, “It is the attitudes and values of individuals to themselves, to their fellows, and to their surroundings which determine the decisions they take and activities they conduct”. Educationists have also been saying that the “man-values-education is a sacred triangle where education is a vital medium to imbibe, foster and perpetuate values in man”.
However, due to the employment of faulty strategies, we do not give value to these ‘values’. In India, the concept of education is always correlated with materials or jobs. Eminent educationist VR Taneja said that “for failure to reach situations of profit and power, the students condemn education as irrelevant”. According to the educationist, such people resort to deplorable means to achieve success even at the cost of their self-respect and dignity.
Learning will not see its full meaning and purpose if values are not inherent to it.
In my earlier write-up on the same issue for a newspaper, I made a point to mention this beautiful comment of Shiv Visvanathan. According to him, the “ranking game” has had a more individualistic bias. “Earlier we used to worry about the number of Nobel prizes a country received and wonder why India hardly made the grade. Analysts failed to understand that rankings reduced the educational universe to a flat land, a uniform terrain where diversity and difference were ignored. What one did for economic indicators one did for education with even more devastating consequences. There was a literal economisation within the ranking game. In fact, rankings turned education into a dismal science,” the social scientist said.
Visvanathan said that globalisation is often a seductive game inviting people into unnecessary comparisons and unreal clubs. “One creates a system where one wants to rank everything from the most developed nations, the finest cars, the most beautiful women, often without wondering who the rankers are and what constitutes the basis of rankings,” Visvanathan added.
The talk of bringing quality education will continue to be a topic of immense importance. To dilate the issue is also a matter of immense importance.
