THE ORIGINAL PIECE
This is a slightly edited version of an earlier post.
In terms of the disruption to social and economic structures that COVID-19 has caused, it is probably the most consequential event in the life of the 70-year old Indian Republic. While we wait for its full impact to become clearer, it unfortunately appears from their pronouncements that most people, including political leaders and policy makers, are simply waiting for “when this is over”. That may be short-sighted, a misunderstanding of what “being over” might really mean.
That is because COVID-19 has brought lessons in its wake that we will ignore at our peril. In a societal sense, the pandemic has laid bare the fragile and counter-productive assumptions that underpin the way we have organised ourselves. In particular, education, as the primary mechanism that drives long-term change in a society, must respond to protect and strengthen children today and the nation tomorrow.
Three important mechanisms of social organisation that have been taken for granted in education during recent decades are institutionalisation, urbanisation and globalisation. If COVID-19 is not a one-off event, and there is no reason to assume that it is given how exploitative our engagement with our environment continues to be, each one of them must be reassessed for worth, especially for how they affect the future of our children.
Institutionalisation of Education
Institutionalisation has promoted the idea that the only learning worth our children’s time and our money is the one that is provided in schools, colleges and universities. Across most of the world, this has made learning information-centric and uncritical. It has packed children into rows and columns in classrooms and made them unfamiliar with their surroundings. It has taken them away from productive use of their hands and bodies and valorised “brain work”, creating an artificial crisis of periodic unemployment (even before the unimaginable destruction of employment caused by COVID-19). It has snapped their connections with their land, their environment, their culture and their communities, replacing them with words in ink on paper or, more recently, typeface on a computer screen. In India, a mindless pedagogy has further ensured that institutionalisation fails even in its own objectives, as student achievement on its “learning metrics”, mainly focussed on literacy, numeracy and irrelevant information, has kept falling.
By shutting down its pre-school centres, COVID-19 brings India’s attention squarely to the role of parents in the holistic development of their young children. (We started Sajag, a programme for coaching caregivers in nurturing care in April 2020. It now reaches over 1.5 million families and is set to expand further. Many others have started similar programmes.) By forcing the closure of schools and colleges, COVID-19 presents us with the opportunity to explore what exactly is being lost when schools close. It also creates the possibility that we will discover how much there is to learn in communities, on land, in relationship, and in discovery and invention, even when schools are closed. It has the promise of suggesting a radical overhaul of what we value in school education.
Urbanisation of Communities
Urbanisation has caused us to believe that ghettoization of people in cities is inevitable as we “develop”. With economic and social policies in most countries oriented towards this shibboleth, we have seen unhygienic living grow exponentially in the cities, even as rural communities have been devastated by loss of populations. Mental health challenges in urban communities have become alarming, accentuated simply by the inhuman stresses that accompany urban living. For our young, it has meant few physical spaces for wholesome growth and play, little opportunity for meaningful community engagement and a social landscape tragically barren of nurturing experiences.
By attacking densely-packed urban communities disproportionately, COVID-19 has laid bare the fallacy of organising ourselves solely for economic efficiency. It asks us to reconsider how physical communities should be laid out, how large they should be, how they should harmonise into the surrounding landscape and how their cultural, economic and political sinews should function.
Globalisation of Society
We have also been fed the inevitability of globalisation, almost as a primal force. It is true that it promises economic efficiency, but we have, in the process, lost much. Diversity is the essence of risk reduction and long-term survival and thriving, whether at the level of an organisation, a community, a nation, or indeed, evolution of life itself. In a few short decades, blinded by the promise of economic efficiency, we have traded diversity away for massive inequality and loss of local skills, trades, crafts, self-reliance, agency and autonomy. Our text books, the only source of information promoted by our policies, have consistently failed to ignite an examination of the underlying assumptions and their all-too-visible outcomes among our children.
The globalising impulse has led to entire education systems being un-moored in authentic experience and unresponsive to local needs. As a result, it has fostered and valorised the creation of an alienating and alienated elite. The reaction to that is a distressing level of anti-intellectualism throughout the world. That, of course, creates the fodder for the assembly line that is perhaps the holy grail of the globalising philosophy in the first place, but it also creates a dangerous level of instability and irrationality in society that can eventually only tear everything apart. This is not just a possibility. It is happening now, around the world.
COVID-19 has alerted us to the downsides of these Faustian bargains. Its dramatic spread is certainly a result, with air travel having been the primary vector. The heart-breaking spectacle of tens of millions of migrant workers walking hundreds of kilometres and sleeping on asphalt roads in India’s scorching summer, is another. They discovered that they had no means of support, no community, no fall-back when their employment away from home ceased. COVID-19 has also awakened us rudely to the reality that having the world’s fastest GDP growth rate is no protection against ending up with the world’s steepest fall in GDP and widespread misery.
To the extent that we continue to regard globalising as self-evidently good, we create the potential of damaging our children, inhibiting their learning and creating a world that is less fit for them. Time has come to drop the fiction that local wisdom is somehow inferior and to engage in a meaningful dialogue that hasn’t foreclosed on the alternatives.
The Need for Dialogue
Pandemics have ravaged humanity fairly regularly, but the last decade and a half has seen a large number of concerned voices talk about the urgent need to reassess the social, economic and environmental systems we have created. They have warned about the high likelihood of their causing “zoonotic health threats”, diseases that migrate from animals to humans, exactly as happened with COVID-19. As long as they were just scientific papers or rarefied symposia, the common man paid no heed. Today, we know better.
We know, in particular, that none of these questions is trivial, yet none has an obvious answer, either. There are good reasons why these systems have taken such a hold in our collective psyche. These should be the subject of widespread dialogue including, perhaps especially, in our schools and colleges. The sensibilities that arise from such deliberations must inform our liberal education as well as the conduct of professions such as engineering, town planning, medicine, economics, sociology and, indeed, education. As of now, there seems no evidence that any of that is likely, or India wouldn’t have had a National Education Policy, passed in the middle of the pandemic, with exactly three sentences referring to it.
Crises are opportunities. Our response to this one may be the difference between thriving and perishing. COID-19 has much to teach us, but education must be paid for with the currency of attention. Will we pay heed?
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Returning to the question
I wrote this piece in the first year of the pandemic, when the disruption to social and economic life was still unfolding. What struck me then was how quickly we began speaking about “when this is over”, as though the principal task was to survive the interruption and return to the order that had existed before it. I was more interested in what the pandemic had revealed about that order: the assumptions built into our institutions, our cities, our systems of education and the way we understood community.
The pandemic made visible the dependence of education on institutions that we had come to regard as almost natural. Schools and anganwadis closed, and suddenly children were learning in homes and communities that the formal system had largely treated as peripheral. At the same time, the movement of migrant workers exposed how closely urban economies depended on people whose own lives and communities had been invisible. What appeared to be separate systems turned out to be deeply connected.
I was also struck by the difference between the way we normally respond to disasters and the kind of challenge the pandemic presented. A flood or an earthquake can often justify a centralised response because a particular place has been damaged and a known set of measures can be brought to bear. A pandemic that spreads across large parts of the world, persists for a long period and confronts us with incomplete knowledge requires something different: central coordination, certainly, but also distributed judgement and the ability of smaller communities to respond to circumstances that cannot all be anticipated from the centre.
Some of what I wrote then was necessarily written in the middle of uncertainty. I made predictions about the likely duration of the crisis and about the opportunity it might create for rethinking rural economies and the relationship between villages and cities. Those predictions belong to that moment. What has stayed with me is not whether each prediction proved correct, but the larger question: why do we so often need a crisis to see the assumptions on which ordinary arrangements depend?
And the even larger question: whether or not we saw the fragility-inducing assumptions in time, how did we go right back to the same systems after the pandemic passed. Today, the institutionalization, the urbanization and the globalization that I then talked about has only intensified, even when there are credible voices that say that the way we are organized, the next outbreak is all but certain.
Societies operate based on interlocking systems which form extraordinarily durable, even seemingly impregnable fortresses to guard current processes. For me, when their dysfunction has become visible, education is the most effective point to create a break in the chain. For the future to be wholesome, our children must learn to look at our social organisation with a clear eye, and have the capacity to craft what serves the communities best.
The pandemic also changed the way I think about education as an instrument of social change. If education is understood only as what happens inside schools, then the closure of schools is simply a disruption to be overcome. If it is understood as the process through which a society helps its young make sense of the world, then the disruption becomes an opportunity to look at the many other relationships through which learning happens. Families, communities, work, technology and institutions are not separate influences that can be added to education; together they constitute much of the environment in which education takes place.
The pandemic did show us the fragility of systems that had appeared robust, the importance of relationships that institutions often overlook, and the limits of our confidence in central solutions to problems that are experienced differently in different places. We obviously didn’t learn much from it, despite the massive human, social and economic cost it imposed upon us. The value of returning to the experience now is to wonder if, perhaps, we can still see what we seem to have closed our eyes to.
Responses
This is a space for responses to the piece above. Responses are moderated before publication. Disagreement is welcome; personal attacks are not.
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