Dummy schools or a meaningful college library

EVERY year around this time, our colleges become vibrant, alive and festive, as young and fresh students take admission, radiate their life-energy, enter the realm of higher education and undertake a new journey. Yet, this is also the time when every sensible and sincere teacher becomes introspective and begins to reflect on the challenges ahead. After all, it is not easy to orient these young students, decondition their minds and invite them to the realm of higher learning. Let us understand these challenges.

First, it is important to realise that a college cannot be seen in isolation because the fate of higher education depends on the quality of school education. We see the growing devaluation of schools. How ironic is it that we have accepted the reality of ‘dummy schools’. In fact, we seem to be quite comfortable with the death of meaningful schooling, and simultaneously the mushrooming of coaching centres in every locality. In a way, it is difficult to negate the harsh truth: coaching centre strategists have replaced good teachers; strategic/instrumental learning attracts more than what good schools used to provide — a creative mix of science and arts, or sports and theatre; ‘success manuals’ have displaced good books; and above all, a sustained and non-utilitarian relationship with good pedagogues is becoming increasingly rare.

Accept it: the students who are joining our colleges, barring exceptions, have already been conditioned by the ethos of this sort of strategic/instrumental learning. No wonder it becomes exceedingly difficult for them to accept and internalise what the ethos of higher education demands — the habit of visiting the library frequently and reading original texts and classics; the creative skill of writing exhaustive and interpretative essays; and above all, the art of concentrated listening, particularly when the professor, far from dictating notes for exams, delivers a rigorous lecture.

Second, these youngsters are growing up in an environment that is not particularly conducive to the celebration of critical thinking. In fact, as the rationale of market fundamentalism has begun to colonise the everyday life-world, the meaning of education has altered drastically. Quite often, it is reduced into a ‘skill’ the neoliberal market demands to create and train the workforce. And one’s ‘success’ is measured in terms of one’s job profile in this techno-economic empire.

No wonder it is becoming increasingly difficult to convince this generation of young students that not everything is for sale; and the higher objective of education is to become an alert and sensitive citizen who can think critically, raise new questions, see the world beyond the glitz of technocratic reasoning and monetary transaction and imagine a just/humane world.

At a time when there is an obsessive craze for market-friendly/technocratic knowledge systems like artificial intelligence, robotics, data sciences and machine learning, it is not easy to convince a young student to visit the library, borrow the books of, say, Marx, Gandhi and Ambedkar, study these texts mindfully and write a paper with critical insights that might even unsettle the status quo. But then, this is precisely the challenge good teachers of, say, social sciences and humanities need to undertake in order to make it clear that education is not merely a training for future jobs.

And third, the cultivation of critical thinking is deeply related to the moral/ethical question confronting us, particularly at this moment when the cult of violence implicit in the all-pervading war, militarism, rising authoritarianism and climate emergency has begun to pose a threat to the dream of a peaceful, egalitarian and ecologically sustainable world.

Can the youngsters be altogether indifferent to this pertinent moral question — the kind of life they should live, the kind of politics they should prefer or the kind of relationship between technology and environment they should celebrate ? And can the teachers keep pretending that their teaching is ‘value neutral’, and hence, they are not supposed to discuss anything beyond the ‘official syllabus’? In fact, if our education refuses to address these ethical issues and sensitise young students, it remains futile and produces only a bunch of soulless graduates.

However, I have no hesitation in saying that it is not so easy to create and nurture a meaningful learning environment in our colleges. Think of an average undergraduate college in the country. Empty classrooms, demotivated teachers, poor infrastructure, petty politics, the ritualisation of examinations and the mass production of intellectually impoverished graduates: yes, we see the trivialisation of higher education.

“I visit my college only to mark my attendance as students hardly come,” a college teacher from West Bengal once told me. But then, if we think of elite colleges in big cities, we see yet another kind of obstacle. In the age of ‘ranking’ and branding’, as a bright young teacher from a prestigious college in Delhi once told me, the pedagogic art of intense and meaningful teaching has been severely devalued because it doesn’t help the institution improve its ranking as it cannot be measured and quantified.

Instead, as yet another teacher from a reputed private college in Bengaluru informed me, she has been asked to publish four papers, organise a couple of conferences in one semester and bring more students in the department so that these measurable ‘achievements’ can impress the ranking agencies. Yes, these days, except qualitatively enriched meaningful teaching and engaged pedagogy, everything that is quantifiable matters: from the citation index to the mass production of ‘research papers’! Furthermore, in these toxic times, when academic freedom is in danger, not many teachers are willing to take any risk. As obedient soldiers, they just follow the official curriculum.

Indeed, it’s tough to sensitise young college students.

Avijit Pathak is a sociologist.

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