Unfortunately, after independence we ceded our responsibility to the state, which led to the setting up of education commissions to gear education to the needs of the nation state and the organized economy. If there is one major failure of our education system, it is its abject neglect of peoples’ basic needs. Yet, the pressure of democratic politics has led to substantial expansion of education in India. Hitherto education policy has merely worked towards making course corrections and upgradations to meet the needs of the emerging economy; first, the state-led planned model to a more privatized one and now responding to the needs of global capitalism and its chain of enclaves strewn all over the world. The new economy is driven by knowledge and hence the middle class and the state’s aspiration for building world-class universities.

The organized economy, the state and now the enclaves of global capitalism under electoral democracy has sharply divided our education into two sectors; one, an elite and well-funded chain of institutions starting from private schools to universities and institutes and two, under the pressure of democracy an expansion of a largely vernacular and shoddy public-funded system. Some our public universities still play a critical democratic role in this system, but they are under severe strain. However, this underbelly plays a crucial role as the catchment area for drawing out talent who can move to the elite sector.

This also helps legitimize the system, as the vast majority armed with sub-standard degrees and knowledge work in the lowest rungs of the state and economy and blame themselves for their lack of merit to make it big. This results in a colossal waste of resources and has created a parasitical middle class living off state revenues. The English language is the marker of this structural divide. The other option of the poor and the lower middle classes is to opt for local private English medium schools; which often leads to the unlearning of their mother tongue and only picking up a smattering of English.

10+2+2+2; 11+3+2; 10+2+3+2+2; 5+3+3+4+1. These are not sums for a school kid to do, but reflects the mind of our policy-makers. Education reforms, to them, has merely meant tinkering with the number of years at various stages of the educational ladder. The ideological preferences and populist politics have added some spice and wrappings to this mess; sometimes, its Sanskrit and skills, or vernaculars and no-detention and so on.

Can something be done to change our education system?

The most important question is change for what? And how to bring about those changes? The coming together of knowledge and labour is responsible for everything in human civilization, but in structurally unequal societies this duo is harnessed to serve the power and profit of the privileged. This structure and elite institutions serving it cannot be changed overnight. But the education system catering to the aspirations of the people and expanding under the compulsion of populist and democratic politics need to be addressed on a priority basis. Locationally, most of this segment is in the districts and most of them are a shoddy replication of the elite system, from schools to universities and even some professional colleges.

If we have to redeem the constitutional promises made after independence, best expressed in the Preamble and the Directive Principles then we have to organize a serious social and political movement to ensure that district level educational institutions are geared to address the needs of the people living there. In this project we have much to learn from the ideals and experiments of the Swadeshi movement and those of Tagore and Gandhi, especially the Tagore of Sriniketan and not so much of Santiniketan.

Education in the districts is an irrelevant routine bureaucratic exercise draining our resources and numbing our minds. The challenge, the excitement and joy of discovering and creating knowledge which serves the people is largely absent. Democratic politics and intellectual intervention must give central importance to re-imagining education at the district level, where most Indians live. This is a challenging task, but not formidable. Education and the local community must intimately and critically engage with each other, for the involvement of the community, its labour and knowledge and skills, with the modern system can transform both in positive ways. Schools have to be re-imagined where the local potter, the farmer or the weaver would become part of the school teaching faculty.

This exchange will be intellectually rewarding when the district colleges and universities teaching and research is geared to address the issues of their district. This does not mean closing the doors and windows to the outside world, but engaging with it on mutually beneficial terms. This project of change does not involve new expenditure, it only demands public commitment on the part of our political and intellectual leadership.

Unfortunately, in the century since the Swadeshi movement, most of our efforts have gone to demand either rights to enter the system or that new colleges and schools should be built in the districts; at best there have been serious efforts to make education universal and to evaluate and assess the educational attainments of students to expose the hollowness of it all. We need a new imagination to rebuild our civilization from below. Its not an appeal to go back to the past, but build upon it for a democratic and just society. (IPA Service)