By Dr. Ranee Kaur Banerjee
Let us take an informal look at the formal education system as it is currently practiced in much of the mushrooming spaces we call urban India.
Imagine a male child is born today. I refer to this child as him/he based purely on biological sex. I assume he cannot yet know or articulate whether or not he is cis-gender.
When he is merely 1.5, his parents shall take the first frenzied steps to give their child the best education they can afford. They will try to enrol him into a reputable Montessori or Kindergarten that will become his stepping-stone to a “big” school. They will bravely bear the heartache of leaving him at the gate of his Montessori bawling and throwing a tantrum and ignore his pitiful cries of separation because here, their child will be taught the skills required to enter the regular school system, preferably in one of the three schools in the city that are considered aspirational.
Still, they will not be assured that they are doing enough to give their child a real chance. So they will send him to a computer class, and perhaps they will also enrol him in an art class where he will learn to colour within the lines and always, but always, in one direction.
When he is 2.6, it will be time to seek his admission to a coveted mainstream school. His parents shall now move heaven and earth and unearth every possible connection to get their child into a good school. Just to be sure, they shall also send him to a coaching class. At this coaching class, an “auntie” will teach this two-year-old to talk like a five-year-old with the vocabulary of a ten-year-old.
This is also the time when our little adult-in-the-becoming may have to learn one of life’s very tough, very adult lessons—rejection. Despite the fact that his parents have done everything right and on time, his name may not appear on the interview list. This, of course, is the list of children privileged enough to spend an entire day standing and waiting in the heat, all dressed up just so they can be paraded and can perform for some more adults who have power over their destinies
Our almost-three-year-old man-in-the-becoming has every chance of being mysteriously rejected by the system.
His parents will persevere, however, and finally, at age three, our child will get to wear a smart uniform and go to a big school. The parents will now be able to heave a sigh of relief as big as the school and relax for the next ten years. Or so they think.
School will be Darwinian—only the toughest, the fittest, the most extrovert, the naughtiest, the most talkative, the most something— will matter. Our shy, quiet, obedient, unobtrusive, average child will be forgotten and left to fend for himself. At the end of the year, he will be lucky if his teacher can remember his name, let alone be aware of and nurture his potential!
It is not the teacher’s fault. It’s a jungle out there: the better and more desirable the school, the bigger and more vicious the jungle is. The teacher-student ratio in these schools is so beyond impossible that the teacher would have to be a superior being if she could remember all the names and faces in her class.
If our child is never a problem that needs to be solved, if he does his homework on time, doesn’t display any outstanding talent, doesn’t raise his hand, or call attention to himself, he is likely to fade into the background.
His mother will pick him up from school sometimes, and there she will meet other mothers. Suddenly, our almost-man, who is now all of six years old, will constantly be ragged by his mother. “Rahul got nine on his grade; how come you only got an eight?” “Amit was chosen for the art contest. Why don’t you ever get chosen for anything?” “Have you seen Vedant’s handwriting? Why can’t you be neater?”
Our six-year-old almost-man will now learn another adult lesson on becoming—even his mother would like him to be Rahul or Amit or Vedant. He is not good enough even for her. Not as he is now.
By the time he is eight, our little man will already be creating employment opportunities for others. The city’s orthopedics and physiotherapists will make their careers and write research papers on his shoulders that have manfully—and oh, so painfully— sagged under the weight of his school bag.
By the time he is ten, he will have no time to play. Competition will be fierce, and his records will show him to be average. His parents will have ambitions for him, and average will not be enough. Tuitions will be added to his daily roster of activities that will include swimming or karate or cricket, computers, elocution or public speaking and personality development and maybe even learning a musical instrument.
By the time he is ten, our child would have learnt his final adult lesson: life is hard work. He will finally be a man. He will know what burnt out means before he has any business to.
He will now learn to take class tests, block tests, half-yearly and annual tests that will prepare him to take board exams and joint-entrance exams. His every waking moment will be spent in school or at coaching classes worrying about the next examination, and the next, and the next. He shall spend his holidays working at internships for work experience or attending diploma classes that add some mystical value to his skills. And so it will go until he joins the grind of the full-time workforce.
I define childhood as the condition of “becoming adult.”
Within a short span of ten to eleven years, a body grows from the size of a full-stop to adult dimensions. In just a few short years, an incognate spirit is socialized, moralized, and made part of an existing structure—of tribe, nation, race, language, gender, and religion. At a fast, almost breakneck speed, a child acquires language, values, morality, personality, socialization, culturalization, schooling, behavioral rights, and wrongs.
Childhood is, thus, a period of terrible, accelerated growth, a state of constant and turbulent flux in which, to borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, a being is always and forever caught in the process of becoming and desiring to become something other than he is.
The system that we trust will guide and nurture our country’s children is also India’s greatest growth sector, the Education Industry. Parents, urban and rural, above and below the controversial poverty line, are spending more than they can afford to educate their children. They have been made to believe that education will help their child stand out and be counted.
In fact, this education system is the root creator of generations of disciplined mediocrity: what I call ice-cube children.
Michel Foucault described discipline as the “art of making bodies more obedient even as they become more efficient.” It is the nature of those in power to seek submission to the rules they establish. It is equally the nature of the powerless to try to subvert the power of the authorities. When rules are flouted, as they always are, authority must punish transgressions or lose control. Thus, the system of discipline and punishment is instituted.
Foucault sees this system of discipline and punishment as most prevalent in prisons, hospitals, and, yes, schools. (Foucault, Michel (1975). Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, New York: Random House. French original published as Surveiller et punir, Paris: Gallimard, 1975)
Unfortunately, this phenomenon is nowhere clearer than here, in our schools.
Our school system makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker. It is a system that fosters competition and stifles creativity. It is a system based on theoretical learning that does not consider or explain applications. It is a system that reinforces all the stereotypes and socioeconomic differences that exist in our society. It is a system that changes history in its books to promote the ends of its political masters. It is a system that credits the one who can learn by rote and disregards the one who does not know all the answers but has learnt how to find them. It is a system that still has a colonial hangover and has no idea how to deal with the changing zeitgeist of our strange cultural heritage.
Come to think of it, there is no system, no congruity, no logical alignment in the way we educate our nation’s children. There are government schools that experiment with teaching or not teaching certain languages and subjects depending on the whims of politics. There are parochial schools that teach and indoctrinate what they want. There are state-language or “vernacular medium schools” for which standards are different. And then there are all kinds of “English medium” schools—from those that want to be Indian in their values (whatever that means) to the missionary schools that are so coveted by all parents.
Each school must be affiliated to a board—the state-controlled boards, the ISC or the CBSE, and now even the O and A levels or the GCSE or the International Baccalaureate—that administer school leaving tests and decide whether the schools have imparted enough education to their students and pronounce on the quality of education received. The problem is, a student is certified proficient or deficient depending on the standard of the board his school serves. The boards do not themselves agree on standards, syllabi, or even testing and certifying methods.
Our education system is a structure designed to manufacture adults faster, more efficiently, more scientifically and mechanically than ever before. It exists to create uniformed and uniform armies of young people who have memorized facts that are already known. These armies will become the custodians who protect the status quo—that which already exists. New worlds are not created out of rigid, old structures—they need the amniotic fluid of indiscipline to grow and become viable. Visionary reflection requires the leisure to dream new worlds. Creative ideas need the freedom and pure pleasure of playing games.
Prophets of the future breed not in discipline but in undisciplined eccentricities. I wish our little imaginary child had some time every day to be unfettered because indiscipline in the form of unstructured, unsupervised play is the child’s way of exploring himself, learning himself, and finally, of asserting his independence and his readiness to take control over his life. But where do our children find the indulgence of being kids? They are too busy becoming adult.
(Dr Ranee Kaur Banerjee holds a PhD in Comparative Literature University of Georgia)