Higher Education: Turning students, teachers into zombies

Like other countries, India observed the World Population Day (WPD) this week, and there was much discourse on the now exhausting question of our ‘demographic dividend’. In the commentariat, macroeconomic numbers were bandied about underscoring India’s declining fertility levels owing to an overall amelioration in public health and other developmental indicators over the decades since the WPD commenced. Yet, population studies experts caveated them, insisting that we consider even strong quantitative indicators with handfuls of salt. They said those gave only a partial view.

In its wake, there was pointing to how India fared with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) as well. The imperatives of the WPD to some degree and the SDG to a good extent accentuate facilitating quality education in highly socio-economically unequal countries such as India. Along with health and gender equity, Indian education and higher education are dismaying matters. No matter what government or other data and quantitative studies may say, the qualitative realities tell a sobering story.

For instance, take the matter of Indian higher education. With the SDGs in mind, how is India going about the role of ‘delivering’ quality education to all? In many ways, the SDGs and the WPD foreground the individual human in society as much as the role of the community/region/nation one belongs to. It’s somewhere in these abstractions that we’ve to locate what informs the thinking behind some of our higher education practices. How are they aligning with SDGs, and do they expedite what they set out to do?

Seen in this light, Indian public higher education is in massive disarray. While policymakers babble on ad nauseam about numbers demonstrating improving enrolment over time in higher education, the sphere throws up phenomena from time to time, regularly telling commoners what statistics and numbers may mask.

For instance, the botched NEET and NET exams have exacerbated the already spotty standing of administering bodies like the Ministry of Education, the UGC, or the NTA. In a nutshell, these institutions appear to have lost sight of the student or faculty as an intellectual individual sharing a web of social relations with their community. Having studied, written and cleared it myself less than a decade ago, I can vouch that a competitive public exam such as the NET treats the exam-taker as a non-thinking zombie leached off their social setting. While preparing for it, I often thought, what thought went into this thoughtlessness?

In the wider sense, contemporary India is witnessing the human-made terminal decline of such major public higher education institutions as Delhi University and Jadavpur University. Citizens know how the Centre has treated JNU since 2014.

Coming from a civilisation where numerous faiths order and anchor social life and behaviours, millions of Indians genuflect to gods, goddesses and seers, known to be beacons of knowledge. In such a worshipful environment where Knowledge, the life of the mind, and intellectual striving is coterminous with seeking Truth, it’s disconcerting to find how negligibly these traditions influence actual educational policymaking.

Regular people are made to want educational ‘degrees’, they are made to spend lakhs for their children to prepare for public exams. They spend as much to get into coaching classes. Sometimes, coaching classes are harder to get admitted to than actual colleges. Sometimes, coaching classes run courses that institutions parcel off to them. No amount of number-mongering on our educational growth can hide plain-in-sight everyday reality.

This is a massive crisis, completely human-made, and the Centre owes our ‘demographic dividend’ many answers. As proud people of the world’s largest democracy, it shouldn’t even need saying, we need to get our education right.

(Rahul Jayaram is a teacher and writer who believes we are living through the apocalypse. X: @rajayaram)