THE ORIGINAL PIECE
This is an edited and somewhat expanded version of my comments in the education panel of Harvard India Conference 2012. The topic of discussion was "Education in India - Opportunities and Challenges in the Next Decade".
We are considering what challenges and opportunities in education await us in India over the next decade. I would like to share with you three lenses I look at the question through — from the perspectives of the individual, the community and technology.
For me, the highest purpose of education for the individual is simply this: to cultivate attention, the state of being where one can engage with the question at hand with clarity, care and affection, bringing all one’s resources, physical, intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual, to bear. Only then does the individual begin to approach that holy grail of education, being a self-learner, who can allow the scaffolds of school, teacher, books and accumulated wisdom to fall away without undermining their importance in bringing him where he is.
How do education, and educators, meet that challenge? It seems clear that as long as indoctrination, as opposed to creative inquiry, remains the goal of organised education, we have a task at hand. That task is both discovering how that higher purpose is to be approached, and how to engage with the sensibilities that do not lay the same emphasis on it. We are not very good at it, having pursued rather vigorously the other kind of education for several centuries, first in the service of a colonial master and then in the cause of nation-building. To move away will require a patient but persistent dialogue with various parts of the society as well as actual demonstrations of what such an education can mean for the individual.
One interesting example of this problem, though by no means the only one, is the increasing vocationalisation of education. It is hard to find anyone at all, at even the highest policy-making levels in India, who does not act as if the only goal of education is to produce a well-adjusted work-force for the industry. That is a worthy goal, but scarcely enough by itself for any of us to flourish.
My dialogues in villages and towns with parents and other community members often involve people discovering that they want their sons and daughters not only to become good doctors or engineers, but also good husbands and friends and neighbours; they want them to be not just good workers, but good co-workers. They do want them to be people who have an eye for beauty, a capacity to engage with the unknown, a sense of their connection with the larger world. But it needs drawing out, simply because we have for too long believed that education needn’t concern itself with those aspects.
At the level of the society, two key issues occupy my mind. India has seen dramatic changes in the way the society is organised over the last few decades. Nuclear families in India today account for over 70% of all families, compared to just over a half just a generation ago. This is a seismic change, which has imposed extraordinary stresses on the way the community educates its young. The family support systems are less in evidence, the parents are less able to spend time with their children, and a huge loss of institutional and cultural memory is occurring every day.
This is problematic from the educator’s point of view, but it is especially troublesome for the less affluent, the less privileged and the less well-connected. That, unfortunately, is about 70%-80% of the children in the country. As a result, the education system has turned into a giant engine for what Anthony Carnvale of Georgetown University calls, in the US context, the intergenerational reproduction of privilege, scholar-speak for “the mighty get mightier, the poor poorer.” It is even truer for India, where the application of both public and private resources is highly skewed in favour of the more privileged.
The inequality does not only create social stresses and potential violence, issues that should rightly concern any educator. They also impose a large cost in terms of the society’s creativity, productivity and its capacity for joy. While perfect equality is dysfunctional utopia, gross inequality is an invitation for a community to disintegrate.
The other challenge that concerns me is the lack of involvement of communities in the education of their children As we stand today, organised education, whether public or private, pays practically no attention to contextualising education, respecting local traditions or inviting the community into the classroom. For a country with the diversity of India, this is extremely problematic.
The Right to Education Act of 2010, with all the noble intentions which marked its conception, is a huge step backward on the path of empowering communities to become a part of the education of the young. It implicitly vests, in the state, all authority and wisdom about what is worth learning, how and where it should be learnt and who should teach it. As a result, a large number of innovative education practices that have flourished in quiet nooks and under village trees are threatened with closure.
The challenge for educators here is to discover ways in which feedback from communities about what is valued and relevant to them gets incorporated into the curriculum as well as the teacher-student relationship. This involves the educators acknowledging both the limitations of the models under which they operate, and the value of the wisdom of the community. The makers of the constitution, mindful of this, made education a state, rather than a union, subject but even that is not enough. In my work, we come across cases daily where a state capital-mandated educational practice is grossly inadequate for, even unfair to, the children being subjected to it.
And finally, I want to talk about two challenges of incorporating technology into education. The first is comparatively straightforward. Most technology initiatives, at least at the school level, at the moment seem to be a set of recipes, either as delivery mechanisms for existing content or for new tech-related content. We see little anchoring of it in genuine enquiry, or a framework of meaning-making. Without an embedded organising principle, it is hard to see such technology making more of learners than technicians.
And yet, technology has an enormous potential for enhancing the skills of enquiry and deeper reflection. It can dramatically reduce the repetitive drudgery in a number of tasks and free the mind to focus on the creative tasks. The challenge for the educators is to use technology so that it harnesses this creative energy.
The other challenge is somewhat subtler. Technology has been hailed as the educator’s panacea, helping solve the problems of access for the poor, uneven teacher quality, and lack of interesting learning materials in the classrooms. In reality, available data suggests that we must be very mindful of the inequality enhancing effects of technology.
By its nature, technology serves to improve the output-input ratio of existing production processes. The wheel made it possible to haul a larger load over larger distances using the same effort. A networked computer gives the one who knows it access to a much larger volume of information compared to one who doesn’t.
This, of course, enhances the overall welfare of the community using the technology. However, as it does so, it inherently also amplifies the existing processes for manufacturing inequality in a society. We don’t know if there was a name for some people not having access to the wheel. We do have one for uneven access to the computer network. It is called digital divide and it is something that rightly concerns educators and leaders around the world.
We can point to a lot of cases where use of technology seems to have evened out existing inequalities. However, we discover, mostly, that new technology has simply created a new set of winners who are now on the way to becoming more than equal. The identity of those who are unequal changes, the fact of inequality doesn’t.
This is not to say, at all, that technology should, therefore, be shunned. The challenge for us is to be aware of the many ways in which use of technology might exacerbate inequalities and, as a society, take steps to mitigate it.
Challenges, as the Chinese say, are opportunities. The ones we see around us today are, potentially, a ladder upwards.
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Returning to the question
I wrote this piece after speaking at the Harvard India Conference about the opportunities and challenges that might face Indian education over the following decade. I looked at the question through three lenses: the individual, the community and technology. At the centre of the first was a simple idea that has stayed with me: that the highest purpose of education is to cultivate attention, so that a person can bring clarity, care and all the resources available to him or her to the question at hand.
I was already uneasy then about an education system that seemed increasingly concerned with producing a well-adjusted workforce. That is certainly one legitimate purpose of education, but it seemed to me an impoverished one if it became the concern that drove all others out. I was more interested in the possibility of education producing people who could learn for themselves, examine what they encountered and eventually move beyond their dependence on the institutions and teachers that had helped them begin. That distinction between being educated and being trained still seems important to me
I think what has changed most since those days is how we understand attention today. My 2012 use of the word was based on a definition that cast it as the mind’s ability to pause, to reflect, to stay with a question without being distracted. Attention then meant the quality of an undisturbed pool, able to reflect, faithfully and authentically, what it saw. This would then enable it to assess without distortion and meet with presence, whatever the world chose to throw at it. That, as I saw then, was the highest purpose of education.
I still think it is. What has changed is what we mean by attention. I cringe when I hear about the seven-second attention span of young people, or the plotting by corporate behemoths to capture audience attention by providing a dopamine rush. This is not attention. It is the opposite of it, an engagement ready to be distracted by the next blip on the horizon. It doesn’t assess relevance or significance – it doesn’t have the skill for it – it can only taste pleasure. So, when information arrives without asking whether we have finished thinking about what came before, the problem is no longer simply how education cultivates attention, but how it helps a person learn to protect it; not only how to use technology well, but how to remain its user rather than becoming its product.
The question about community has also stayed with me. Education cannot be understood entirely as something that happens between an individual child and an institution, because what the child learns is continuously shaped by the world in which learning takes place. Yet, to be cognizant that communities carry their own assumptions, inequalities and received wisdom is to have the ability to observe and to have choice. The challenge for education is not to replace one authority with another, but to help people acquire the capacity to examine the worlds they inherit, including the worlds created by the institutions that claim to educate them.
The questions, then, haven’t changed; the context has. Education, of course, has to transmit knowledge that generations have accumulated. But it also has to prepare us for life today, make us capable of paying attention, asking questions, learning without being told what to think, and remaining open to the possibility that what we believe today may need to be reconsidered tomorrow. If that capacity is not cultivated, we may become very efficient at acquiring information while becoming steadily less capable of knowing what deserves our attention.
Responses
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