What Kind of Education for What Kind of Society?

In India, many good students, after completing their tenth grade, spend a lot of their time in coaching classes. Time spent there often comes at the expense of the time that can be spent in colleges/universities. They do this in order to prepare themselves for entrance exams for engineering and medical seats. ¹ Even if they do attend colleges/universities full-time, their main aim is to sit for the entrance exams. The coaching institutes which prepare students for the entrance exams are, more or less, in the for-profit sector. ² And increasingly, engineering and medical students are going to the colleges for their degrees, which are in the for-profit sector. All this is a part of increasing privatization of education in neoliberal India, and raises several questions concerning education and society. These are schematically presented below.

Parents pay an excessive amount of money for seats for their children. In many cases, they sell their assets or take loans. They save by reducing their monthly and daily expenditures. And many people make a lot of money out of this education business. But what kind of education in these colleges are their children receiving? Many of the so-called medical and engineering colleges may be ill-equipped to teach the relevant subjects. Many of the private engineering colleges hire teachers who have completed only an undergraduate degree in engineering in other (ill-equipped) private colleges. Have these teachers had a chance to polish their teaching abilities? Are there proper lab facilities in these colleges?

What is the outcome of the current system of technical education in India for the country as a whole? In a country of a billion plus, how many doctors does the system produce who actually invent new ways of curing an illness, as opposed to writing prescriptions on the basis of knowledge produced mainly in the advanced countries? Similarly, how many thousands of engineers do we manufacture who produce knowledge about new ways of making things? More importantly, how many scientists—in biological or natural sciences—do we produce who produce new ways of understanding nature and the human body?

Is the craze for professional-technical education promoting an overall scientific culture, a culture that encourages lay-people to be rational and to find empirically verifiable reasons for events around them rather than explain phenomena in terms of these: mystical, unverifiable, imagined things (including imagined things from the past), actions of gods and goddesses and their managers/brokers? Is it at all surprising that in the current atmosphere where rationalism has become the sacrificial cow, many people who believe in irrational ideas appear to have received education in science and technology?

The British system produced clerks in India. Is independent India not producing a different kind of 'clerk' or a similar kind of people: sophisticated semi-coolies, tech coolies and the like, out of the population that goes into so-called professional institutions? Is it not interesting that many engineers in India spend their working time reading/ processing credit card statements transmitted from the rich countries, which amounts to keeping records? Do they need engineering skills acquired from colleges to perform these tasks? Or, is it that the kind of education they receive makes them suitable for only this kind of semi-skilled, techno-coolie jobs, and nothing better?

Arguably, the aim of education, real education, should promote development in two senses: a) self-development (changing ourselves, our ways of thinking, making us more scientific in our attitude and more critical of things happening around us), and b) social development understood as increasing ability to contribute to a democratic, secular, economically advanced and fairer society and to an ecologically sustainable reproduction of natural systems. ³ Now, is being an engineer or a doctor (and in the ways in which people become engineers and doctors) necessarily the main way of achieving real education?

One cannot at all deny the importance of forces of technology and medicine. But to what extent is it the case that the major problems of human society can be solved through the actions of engineers and doctors, and the like, who mainly keep recycling old knowledge assembled in big textbooks written in advanced countries, and whose main aim is to make money? What about a scientist who finds new ways in which nature works, and new ways in which nature can be suitably 'modified' in an ecologically sustainable way and in the interest of humanity as a whole rather than in the interest of patent-seeking business people, who have been making an all-out attempt to own/commodify nature and knowledge about nature? What about a scientist who uses her/his scientific knowledge to fight not only irrationalism in culture but also corporates' attempts to own science and nature in the private interest, or who organizes protests against war that destroys ordinary people by using high-tech methods, or who organizes people to fight for better public health? What about a labour lawyer who fights for the rights of workers and poor peasants, or a human rights lawyer who fights for the rights of religious minorities and of women and children, who are increasingly subjected to violence from right-wing forces? What about a professor who aims at changing the collective self-consciousness of a society, who aims at making us rethink the directions in which a society is moving? What about a professional who can organize and manage the cooperatives of poor women or workers' coops? What about a political scientist or a sociologist who can organize, or who can inspire activists to organize, the poor masses in new ways to help them develop confidence in their ability to change things in the world and to fight for their rights independently of those forces who wish to preserve the current system (in slightly modified ways)? What about the role of socially conscious journalists who consistently and courageously lay bare the criminal conduct and corruption of our economic and political elites? What about artists and storytellers who can feel the pulse of a society and represent it in beautiful ways for us to enjoy and learn from? How about promoting an education system that produces writers/poets like Premchand, Tagore, Shelley, etc.?

When parents push their children into narrow technical education and when children opt for that kind of education, sometimes against their own internal desire as movies such as Three Idiots portray, do people think about these other options? If not, what stops them from thinking about these options? What is the implication of a society over-emphasizing so-called professional education? Is it not true that in part because of the sort of financial as well as ideological-political emphasis on technical-professional education that we see, other kinds of education (including in basic sciences; social sciences) are neglected?

Our ideas about society and ourselves, including what we wish to do in our lives, are not created autonomously in our heads. They are generally shaped by the kind of society we live in, even if we are not fully conscious of this fact. One must ask: why is this kind of education being promoted? What are the forces (i.e. commercial and state-bureaucratic interests) that drive the rush for engineering and medical seats? In more direct ways: to what extent is our obsession with the so-called professional education driven by the fact that investors make money by selling professional education as a commodity and by the fact that this kind of education is making India (and other similar countries) a cheap low-wage platform of global capitalism, both for its own business people and international business? To what extent are our bureaucrats and politicians benefiting from this business directly because they also invest in this and/or because they enable/allow such investment and thus make money in the process? Is it not the case that by allowing the growth of privatized education system in the form of coaching institutes to prepare students for entrance exams, and indeed similar other forms of privatization of education, the state is absolved of its duty to provide high quality affordable education at all levels, starting with primary and secondary levels? To what extent might it be true that India's technical-professional education-for-profit is creating a 'compradore' educated elite (whether its members work in India or abroad), which acts as a conduit through which the country is subordinated to international business and imperialist states?

Therefore, and ironically, is it not the case that: the kind of mind-numbing education that exists is stopping us—or discouraging us—from asking questions that challenge the nature of education that the country is providing, and therefore, the nature of society we live in?