Imagine, could we say what we say, had we not been having these minimum requirements of life? Never, we could. Our youthful deprivations and our endeavor for better life chances and struggle through these grades that brought us here have empowered us to mock our journey or praise our endeavor.
What a social edifice we have created? If, you do not have purchasing power to go inside the mall, if you do not have a bat or smart phone for your son, and if you do not have clothes in vogue and if you cannot afford tuition and private schooling for your children, you are not a good father, good husband and a good citizen! Then, you realize reading this write-up of Shah Faesal is like believing in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Those who have all those luxuries assured for their children, they can easily vouch for the holistic development of their children and preach it to society.
We are in a capitalistic system that is based on ruthless profit making and severe competition. It is not our making. It has come to us since, when Europe found its centrality that gave us Project of Modernity, based on grades and competition.
This had market rationale and stage wise notion of progress with referent objectives. It was an epochal shift. It worked for us, for we had an educated middle class that got generated during subjugation, through the colonial engineering.
This educated middle class proved to be reforming and transforming class by initiating social reform movements, Brahmo Samaj in Bengal, Prathana Samaj in Maharashtra and Arya Samaj in Punjab, followed by Mohammadan reformation in Education.
This worked for a century and more, for it could bridge our intrinsic value system with modern education institutions to give system an inherent vitality.
It was based on primary relationships, which were value oriented, trust generative and social continuity through primary group socialization, a face to face interactions in collective moral consciousness, without any legal or rational obligatory apparatus.
Our fundamental institutions were strong. Altruism and sacrifice, as permeating values would connect moral and material from means to ends. Our premier educated middle class in different parts of country is the real harbinger of social transformation.
Imagine Bengal without the role of Badar Lok, imagine Kashmir’s educational transformation without the role of Kashmiri pandits. Because they benefited from the colonial regenerative processes, Muslim elite in general until Sir Syed’s arrival were resistant to colonial education system.
The new emerged educated elite worked hard for state education system. People could benefit from state established schools.
They had quality teachers and excellent curriculum. In Kashmir, other than a few missionary schools, the entire valley was well knitted with network of government schools and colleges.
The poor and resource less peasantry could benefit from it. This was a holistic education, where window of knowledge was open without bias and free from confessional and religious creed.
Religion was connected with morality and morality was inherent in the institutions. This all has changed since middle of 1960s.
The state sponsored measures of development, fruits, forests and tourism and handicrafts produced a new rich class. They had money without legitimate social identity. To pride it, they took plunge into political religion and decanted religious mystification in institutions and families.
With easy money, new social symbols replaced old metaphors. Private schools and mosques with outside imams mushroomed to bring in new discourse that projected against conventional socialization in homes and institutions. It broke moral from material. Material was judged by consumerism and moral by the preaching outside the homes.
Gradually, state schools lost its value of intrinsic holistic education. Private tuitions were taken by commercial coaching centres. Besides tutoring, it assumed social pride of parents.
The closing decades witnessed, exodus of teachers and doctors in large numbers from the public institutions. It was requiem for the quality education for poor and subaltern. Charity is in shows and reliance is in ritualism and bargain.
Since quality education has gone in privatized institutions, private sets targets in profit making. And profit making is visible through medical and engineering producing students.
These disciplines have assured economic viability, given the status and inability of other disciplines to assure foolproof employment. True, it is stressful, and a process of exclusion in the long run. But, this is the truth in the job market.
No doubt it produces one dimensional person, cut from worldliness full with stress and fragility. Nevertheless, there is no easy available alternatives to the parents, where they could foresee upward mobility. Grades give them what they want.
With emergent new requirements, we need overhauling of the system. In fact all our institutions need complete reformation. May it be religion, may be social institutions, like family and marriage or the legal rational justice and bureaucratic system.
These institutions have either outlived or lost its relevance, for capitalism has made new shifts, where individualization has turned to be private. Merit, justice, health and capabilities have price tag, marketed. Half traditional, half modern, partly poor and full aspirations, it will not work now.
A prior prerequisite are must to meet the challenges of globalization. English language is still the window of knowledge and computer is a must for any student to know. We need grades, but we need a powerful cheap education system at par with private schools.
We need competent teachers in schools and colleges, so that coaching centres become irrelevant. We need private public partnerships to own the responsibilities of poor, for their health and education, so that trust and fairness do not remain subject to rules and public show business.
We need real religious education on morality and values from mosques to homes, so that dividing people and selective binaries are rejected. It is possible, if we make our institutional means and objective goals transparent, functional on institutional merit.
Are institutions for generating resources or should its agenda be to groom a holistic evolving responsible citizens, creative and empowered for livelihood? We have to weigh the models of US and North American universities, for they started with fresh social and cultural capital, relied on formal institution for developing their citizens, some three hundred years ago. We had it and it worked so well, until we emptied our repertoire of cultural capital.
We are at cross-roads; half traditional half modern. The late capitalism with globalization has already sneaked in our bedrooms. The world is a data repertoire, comparisons and policy sets are marketed. The powerful and dominant avail bigger share, for they have capabilities and avail entitlements.
Fearing competition is instant perishing. We do not have alternative system, so that we can reject it. Presuming moral glues back to material is hard to happen. We are in no moral position to give judgments. We need real reformers, selfless preachers with their known fair conduct and transparent histories, who of their own, offer to transform society.
Agencies and structures should not collide. Kashmiri elites in the past worked against their inherent structures. We need to empower it. Otherwise, neo capitalism in league with market and identity politics will ensure exclusion of poor and non-functionality of big chunk of society. The write ups like that of Shah Faesal, might be fair in intention, but practically, it is to mock poor, not poverty.
We need alternate system. The system that can bridge enlightenment project with majority oriented measures for transformation. It is perhaps the present dispensation in the state has awakened to the challenges, thrown by the process of disintegration of families and weakening of institutions, to supplement education with inherent vitality of knowledge with practice to overcome the duality of knowledge and capacity building.
The idea of Higher Education Council is a step to identify tradition, so that renovations can be brought to in our education system through foundational education with skill empowerment. That is the need of the hour.
The author is emeritus professor in society at Banaras Hindu university
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the author.
The facts, analysis, assumptions and perspective appearing in the article do not reflect the views of GK.