A scrutiny of India's pedagogic system is absolutely indispensable while attempting to analyse the social and economic impact of India's economic growth which is often generally referred to as development. Determination of the best techniques for applying a new device or process to production of goods or services is certainly a part of development but definitely not its last word. In a country like India where a substantial part of the population (more than the population of Europe taken together) live under $2 a day, a certain percentage figure called growth rate cannot camouflage the sea of poverty and deprivation.
In a globalising India, the focus is entirely on technical education. India not only fully caters to the need of the IT and knowledge-based industry in the country but also supplies significant amount of manpower to new economies and new sectors emerging all over the world.
Accordingly, private institutions have sprung up all over the country, ranging from private schools to technical universities. While access to quality basic education had always divided India's people, the government-sponsored Ambani-Birla report on higher education in 1997, paved the way for setting up of private institutes of higher learning. The report said higher education was a marketable commodity and proposed full cost recovery from the students and immediate privatisation of higher education.
Riding the waves of liberalisation, by 2001, 42 per cent of India's higher education institutes were already in private hands. Today, it is well over 60 per cent. The 'can afford' and 'can't afford' divide comes to work here, excluding 80 per cent of young Indians. Stray examples of people having crossed the divide do not really prove any point though they are used as excuses every now and then.
This paradigm of development is irksome for the basic reason that it treats higher education as an instrument to produce manpower to accelerate economic growth instead of looking at as a means for holistic growth of the individual and society.
It also marks a significant break from the Nehruvian ideals of inclusive state responsibility. It has created a two-tier system, the decadent government one and the burgeoning private one, cutting people into two halves with the unlucky one significantly larger than the other.
While the digital divide grows and the IT industry continues to talk about the trickle-down effect in future tense, it is not hard to find the deficiency that plagues our education system. India's education policy is largely anti-dialogic.
Here the students are blank accounts in which the teachers deposit information which will become knowledge with regular updates. The stuff to be deposited is already decided by policy makers and, in turn, by powerful interest groups. After all, it is these students who will serve in future as workers skilled to maximise profit and to never question authority. The end of this pedagogy is not to further freedom of mind but rather to serve and preserve a particular market-driven world.
Brazilian scholar Paolo Freire in his famous work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, explained this beautifully. He rejected this anti-dialogic approach for 'dehumanising' teachers and students alike and for not having anything to do with 'liberation'.
He said the banking system, where no dialogue was possible or welcome, depended on conquest, manipulation, cultural invasion and divide and rule. This was a reality with all nations which were colonised at some point of time, he held, where the coloniser's legacy continued in the education system.
One has to keep in mind that Paolo Freire worked at a time soon after the 1968 students' movement in Paris which, though an apparent failure in terms of its stated goal, replaced the concept of conservative morality (respect for authority, religion and status quo) with liberal ethics (equality, human rights, sexual freedom) not just in France but throughout Latin America and large parts of continental Europe and US.
Interestingly, where as the developed world incorporated all of these and the dialogic approach while devising their curricula, India and most countries of the majority world insisted on the same non-interactive model which would later turn more into an elaborate vocational module.
While we bask in the glory of the achievements of a miniscule Silicon Valley population, the greater numbers that make up the Stonehenge remains largely uncared for. At a time when advertisements aired on mass media relate possession of particular products with how much of an Indian you are, one does have reasons to believe that in the not-too-distant future, there may come a point when citizenship will be defined by a person's purchasing power.
With very little sign that Indian pedagogy will take the dialogic route, that depends on cultural synthesis, mutual cooperation and innate concern for a larger humanity, it seems that majority of Indians are set for lives synonymous with poverty, ill-health, deprivation and the occasional poor man's carnival. They are still light years away from being a part of the great Indian growth story.
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