By Deepa Majumdar
This article is dedicated to Ms. Dana M. Sangma
In our tree-lined convent school, in those halcyon days of post-independent India, we had many problems … but corporal punishment was not one of them. Our curriculum was westernized, with India somehow invisible, or misrepresented. Our pecking order had to do with skin color and degrees of westernization. After all, decolonization does not happen magically, with the mere hoisting of a flag, or the onset of the new nation state. But there was one problem forbidden in the hallowed portals of our school. No teacher was allowed to hit us. This did not mean that they could not punish us in other ways. Indeed, our teachers could use many excesses now proscribed in the liberal west. They could humiliate us … mock us before our classmates … make us kneel on the floor or write a hundred lines … for trivial reasons like failing to bring in our homework. But they could not hit us.
The first time I saw the brutality of the Indian school system was in a humble school in Guwahati, where I was a child visitor. It was a mathematics class. One child said she had forgotten her homework … but she had not. The teacher, a Dragon, hauled her to the front of the class, practically broke her slate on her head, shouted at her in tones unfit for the ears of a child and sent her crying to her desk. What appalled me more was the fact that the teacher never apologized. When she discovered that she was wrong … that the child had actually done her homework … this Dragon-teacher never apologized to the child, never folded her in her arms, never showed any remorse. The arrogance and authoritarianism of this model of education is stamped forever in my memory.
Turn the clock forward … to several decades later. I am at a university in upstate New York. It is a night class. The rain outside is a gentle drizzle. I enter the class to teach a course. I face my students. We do not greet each other. A pair of boots greet me. One student sits facing me, with her feet strung up on the desk in front. She is defiant, defensive … scared. The classroom is a battlefield … but of a different sort. Teachers here have little to no rights. You are supposed to coddle students, uphold their views, give them grades for anything they say … anything at all. For, it is as if they do you a favor by speaking up in class. All human relations in the classroom are strung in power terms … so great is the cynicism. No matter how badly a student behaves, you cannot say anything, for fear of a lawsuit. If a student is distressed by her grade, you design an extra-credit assignment. You are not a teacher as such … you are a mere facilitator, which is the term we use in these times of mindless utilitarian egalitarianism. They are not your students. They are customers. The invisible boundary that separates you from them is the Invisible Hand that separates sellers from buyers.
Both these models of education are unacceptable. Both extremes lack that love that stands as the hallmark of the pedagogical process. And love must be ever accompanied by the sense of responsibility. After all, how do you transmit that most precious of all entities … namely, knowledge … if you cannot communicate with your students … And how do you communicate, if you do not feel a love for your students? And how do you love them, if you do not feel responsible for their well-being … all the more in these sad times, when many kids come from broken homes? And how can they learn, if they do not feel a respect for the knowledge they are about to receive and for the human person who is delivering this knowledge to them? I am not sure where the blame lies for this state of affairs … Is it the fact that schools and colleges have turned into skill factories … or is it because authoritarianism is so often confused with authoritativeness? Why is there so little faith any more in earned authority … or leadership in the classroom? To defeat the tyrannical teacher, surely what we need is … not the faceless facilitator … but the true leader … someone who wields legitimate inner power in the classroom, having earned it inch by inch … through academic abilities and moral character.
In the opening lines of his novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens mocks the fact-ridden, ultra-scientific education of his times … the false dichotomy between Fact and Fancy. Are our woes to do with western education as such? Can we blame Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay for calling for an educational system aimed at creating the anglicized Indian, whose purpose lay in bridging the gap between sahib and native? In short, is colonialism to blame for all our educational violence?
Plato defines education as an orientation to the Good. Plato also warns against severing the discursive from this orientation, if what we want is something more than mere “empirical knack.” Western education today has certainly forgotten these prophetic warnings from Plato. The result is a barren zone of moorless discursiveness … inherently violent … inherently power-laden. Discursive knowledge when it is no longer consciously oriented towards the Good, will indeed be a battlefield, where mind fights with mind … for the sake of opinions, curricula, and degrees. With the Light of the Good banished, knowledge cannot help but degenerate into a trite trap for the soul. Is this the reason for our Indian woes?
Yes we were conquered by the British, as we were by many many others. Yes we are, like many former colonies, struggling with an imported and imposed educational system, quite as we are with parliamentary democracy. Yes we inherited an authoritarian educational culture replete with worldly curricula and worldly models of leadership exemplified by the “head boy” and “head girl” … yes we inherited the menace of violent practices like ragging or hazing. But is there nothing Indian about all this?
Why have we embraced the worst aspects of the west? Is it our own inner violence that makes us embrace the more violent aspects of western education? Why is our concept of the “examination” so sado-masochistic? Why do we warehouse students in incarcerating examination halls, guarded by invigilators … instead of using testing as a tool to help students unleash their own creativity? Why do we not use an educational paradigm that taps into the inmost spirit of the student, enabling her to reach that self-knowledge, which unleashes deep founts of creativity in her? Why do we have gendarme-like invigilators instead of a trust system, which gives each student personal dignity? Why do we have exams that are sources of despair and destruction? In short, why do we not respect the sacred personhood of the student?
Indeed, everything comes in pairs of opposites. If in our Indian world we have mindless rote-learning … an affront to the gift of memory … then we have in the west, an incapacity to retain much, and a crisis in reading. Neither model can be healthy for our precious youth. Decades have gone by since India became independent from Britain. Surely it is time we looked into our own iniquities … Why are we so authoritarian in our approach to students? And why do we have so strong a carnal sense that we recognize Indianness by physical features alone? Given the fact that we are an ancient experiment in cosmopolitanism, should we not adopt a wholesome sense of unity-in-diversity? When will we become a gentler society, which cherishes its youth too much to subject them to an abattoir-like-higher-education?
Only when we begin the long journey of ruthless introspection! The global economic scene today calls for young employees who are confident, creative, daring. How can India produce such youth if our educational system continues to be a slaughterhouse … if we define the Indian identity by physical features … if we approach this identity with hosts of racial prejudices? When will we inculcate a horizontal love for one another? Given the absence of this foundation of love and respect, how can our youth be confident? When will we translate into action the deep meaning … especially the virtue of respect … buried in our signature Indian greeting … the “Namaste”? After all, “Namaste” means “I salute the common indwelling spirit in you” … not “I salute you because you look like me,” nor, “I salute you because I stand to gain something from you.”(The writer is Associate Professor, Purdue University, USA)