Education - A categorical imperative - III

I will start this post of mine with an anecdote which is not only hilarious but also demonstrative of how a proper lack of knowledge of languages can hurt the cause of understanding and enlightenment. A few years ago, 2006 actually, there was an outbreak of a viral fever in the Hyderabad, India, the city which is my home. The virus was imported into India from Africa and has a Swahili name - Chikun Gunya. I believe it translates to unbearable pain. The proliferation of news channels on TV has meant that they will pick up the "hottest" subject and beat it to death and beyond. In one of these channels onto which I stumbled by accident I saw a doctor explaining the problems associated with Chikun Gunya fever. Somehow in Andhra Pradesh Chikun Gunya was corrupted to Chicken Gunya. During the course of the interview that the doctor was facing, the interviewer posed the question as to why this fever had this name Chicken Gunya, that is. The doctor without batting an eyelid said that people who have this fever have extreme pain and therefore they have "gooni", Telugu for hunched and since they walk completely hunched they look like a chicken. Therefore the name Chicken Gunya. Over a period of time not only did this explanation gain currency but also was often confused with Avian Flu that was around that time. Chicken is a bird so chicken gunya is avian or bird flu!! The net result of this was that people who had simple fevers were afraid that they had the possibly fatal avian flu and when they were cured of their fever told everyone that they had survived bird flu.

I have given this anecdote here for two reasons. The first is because to show the horrible effects of bad translations. The second is to show that in the present world it is impossible to stop the process of new disease imports. You wonder as to what that has to do with anything that I have to say. The answer is simple. If diseases are global then there has to a global knowledge base to cure those diseases. In order to have a proper ability to share this knowledge, a global language called English is necessary. It is by avoiding English that we can end up being globally irrelevant. This is not to argue that English is superior or that Indian languages are inferior. It is simply to establish that is a Globalised world it is not possible to survive effectively without English. That is the reason why the Chinese are also beginning to teach English to their students from the Kindergarten itself. India on the other hand is going backwards. English was almost an English language, especially in the southern parts of the country. Today however, jingoism and a false sense of pride over one's own tongue have meant that we are a on a downward spiral.

Regional media for education were introduced in India in tearing hurry and that has led to the destruction of the education system. There can be no argument over the fact that socially, politically and medically relevant knowledge has to treat the world as its constituency. When the world is the constituency for knowledge, the language used for understanding this should have the flexibility and openness to describe and analyze situations and diseases etc. Now local languages are precisely that. Since every language evolves from within a culture its structures and vocabulary pertain that culture. English too was a local language once. But with colonialism and with the spread of English to most parts of the world and because it was the language of the powerful, English became the language which was better equipped than most to deal with new and emerging forms of knowledge. These developments meant that for a local Indian language to be enriched it needed translations from English. However, the problem with that is that it requires persons who have a good grasp and control over both the languages, English and the other language into which things are being translated. It also means that the translator will have to be knowledgeable of technical terms and the technicalities of the languages concerned. A tall order. For a nation in a hurry to establish itself as the equal of all others such an exercise proved to be time consuming. Instead, of then saying that English would be the language of instruction till such time that bodies of knowledge were adequately translated into Indian languages, to satisfy the jingoistic concerns of some, regional media of instruction were introduced taking education to where it is today. And all those who have been educated in the regional media and are hopeless about their future are a big constituency of lumpen elements whose services can be hired by politicians for whatever purposes they have in their minds. Otherwise how does one explain educational institutions becoming breeding grounds for all activities political, revolutionary or otherwise.

In a democracy where vote banks are of the utmost importance, it is quite necessary to satisfy the will of the people. The huge pool of the lumpen students is readily available for demonstrating the strength of the issue. So we have a situation where education institutions instead of enlightening people are serving the cause of the dark side of politics. The need therefore is to have English as the medium of instruction and starting teaching meaningful things to students. Otherwise, China will take over from us as the second biggest English speaking country in the world and usurp our position in the service industry which is the biggest employer of Indians.

Education - A categorical imperative - II

My last post ended with a hortatory line and someone asked me if I was doing something myself or only asking other people to do things. I would like to assure all concerned I am doing my bit for the cause and if I were to start writing about the things that I do, this blog will turn into an advertisement for myself, something that I am not very keen about. In my many years as a student of the social sciences, I have observed that in the case of India, the social sciences have atrophied completely. With the exception of a few pockets such as Delhi and Kolkata, the social sciences never even had the opportunity to be properly grounded. Even in the case of Kolkata, the social sciences have not been oriented towards what is considered to their true nature, that of being a liberal art. But those are small issues that I do not intend to focus my attention too much on. Nevertheless, I did make that statement about the Kolkata version of the social sciences not conforming to the liberal arts with a reason. In the Western world one saw the social sciences incepting in an atmosphere that was conducive to free thinking. Free thinking was the desire of the individual to define and organize oneself on rational grounds in a way which would facilitate that individual's realization of the true potential of the self. Into this scenario were born the social sciences which took advantage of the liberality of a society that allowed the individual to do what I have talked about in the preceding sentences. The social sciences then were an extension of the liberal arts and at best a slightly more pompous version of the arts. All things considered pretensions apart the subject matter of the social sciences and the liberal arts is the same. Therefore that which is considered to be "social scientific" knowledge is one that still deals with the question of the individual and his/her place in society. Karl Marx, in his attempt to ground the study of human society in what he called "objective material conditions" created an epistemological break by seeking to eliminate the one variable for whose sake the study was being carried out - the human being. But by and large the agenda that even the Marxists and Marx had was very much consistent with that of the liberal arts. I know that you are thinking that this is a lecture on what the social sciences are and wondering about what the post itself. I have deliberately done this in order to demonstrate that whatever be their pomposity, the social sciences came into being for a purpose, and when we teach social sciences in India, we do that without even knowing what that purpose is and how it came into being.

The state of social science education in India is poor. There are many reasons for this but the most significant of them is the fact that the social sciences have got lost in an ocean of stupidity. After the attaining of independence the spirit was such that people took pride in their own culture and justifiably so. But when this pride in one's own culture is stretched to illogical levels, it only becomes jingoism that is completely devoid of any meaningful content. And that is what happened with the education system in India and especially so the social science education. One may ask why the social sciences especially? If that is your question you will find the answer to that in the following sentences. Most of the time when certain words find circulation in the sphere of public speech they begin to loose their true import and meaning. After a while they remain merely words with no specific content or meaning and therefore they become vacuous. Nevertheless they continue to circulate in the public sphere with people talking at each other than to each other. Education, the term or the word, has sadly met the same fate. People today talk about education without having the faintest idea about what is involved in it. For most education is a degree that one receives, to some it is a sacred cow and if you are in Andhra Pradesh it is a business opportunity. None of these correspond to what education is or should be. Armed with this inability to properly define education we have successfully created stereotypes about what it is and therefore we think that one who has 95% marks is educated or one who has a good job is educated and so forth. The furtherance of these stereotypes has created a mess that is now very difficult to clean up. In all this the very elementary purpose of education - that of enlightenment - has been forgotten. Compounding the situation are the pursuit of money and material happiness.

In this process the social sciences have suffered more and disciplines such as history have been reduced to the documenting of fictitious and peurile things. They have also become weapons in the hands of bigots. So why did this happen. The answer is simple. The social sciences when they were born in the West had a form that was consistent with the content. It has remained more or less like that till date. However, in India it is a different story. We have taken the form and have tried to stuff it with whatever we thought was the appropriate content. This parody of sorts happened because of the desire to study in one's own tongue and when there is no body of knowledge to support that ambition or aspiration, things are bound to go wrong. The true pursuit of social science entails either a translation of all Western content into whichever language that one wished to study in or the creation of an alternative body of knowledge. In India's case neither has happened and as a result people study the same book in their mother tongue, from class eleven to Ph. D. This means that higher qualifications are awarded for studying the same book. What is even better is that in spite of the ten odd years that go into the study of the same book, the students are still at a loss to explain what it contains. Social scientific education is a necessity in any society, for it is the tool that one can use to have an audit of the functions of society, politics and governance. Not only can it audit, it can also provide with good alternatives to bad policies and programmes. It is also a necessity for a good and enlightened democracy. In the case of India, the necessity for proper social sciences is even more heightened for obvious reasons. A society that has become fissiparous and threatens to fall apart needs good social sciences. And that is missing. Are the other sciences any better? The answer will be yes, but only a little. The other sciences are armed with mathematics and numbers which are considered to be lingua pura and therefore they are not bogged down so much by the problems of language. It is therefore completely a categorical imperative in order create a proper social scientific knowledge and once again create the globally competitive Indian. I will talk about more of the same in my next post.

Education - A categorical imperative - II

My last post ended with a hortatory line and someone asked me if I was doing something myself or only asking other people to do things. I would like to assure all concerned I am doing my bit for the cause and if I were to start writing about the things that I do, this blog will turn into an advertisement for myself, something that I am not very keen about. In my many years as a student of the social sciences, I have observed that in the case of India, the social sciences have atrophied completely. With the exception of a few pockets such as Delhi and Kolkata, the social sciences never even had the opportunity to be properly grounded. Even in the case of Kolkata, the social sciences have not been oriented towards what is considered to their true nature, that of being a liberal art. But those are small issues that I do not intend to focus my attention too much on. Nevertheless, I did make that statement about the Kolkata version of the social sciences not conforming to the liberal arts with a reason. In the Western world one saw the social sciences incepting in an atmosphere that was conducive to free thinking. Free thinking was the desire of the individual to define and organize oneself on rational grounds in a way which would facilitate that individual's realization of the true potential of the self. Into this scenario were born the social sciences which took advantage of the liberality of a society that allowed the individual to do what I have talked about in the preceding sentences. The social sciences then were an extension of the liberal arts and at best a slightly more pompous version of the arts. All things considered pretensions apart the subject matter of the social sciences and the liberal arts is the same. Therefore that which is considered to be "social scientific" knowledge is one that still deals with the question of the individual and his/her place in society. Karl Marx, in his attempt to ground the study of human society in what he called "objective material conditions" created an epistemological break by seeking to eliminate the one variable for whose sake the study was being carried out - the human being. But by and large the agenda that even the Marxists and Marx had was very much consistent with that of the liberal arts. I know that you are thinking that this is a lecture on what the social sciences are and wondering about what the post itself. I have deliberately done this in order to demonstrate that whatever be their pomposity, the social sciences came into being for a purpose, and when we teach social sciences in India, we do that without even knowing what that purpose is and how it came into being.

The state of social science education in India is poor. There are many reasons for this but the most significant of them is the fact that the social sciences have got lost in an ocean of stupidity. After the attaining of independence the spirit was such that people took pride in their own culture and justifiably so. But when this pride in one's own culture is stretched to illogical levels, it only becomes jingoism that is completely devoid of any meaningful content. And that is what happened with the education system in India and especially so the social science education. One may ask why the social sciences especially? If that is your question you will find the answer to that in the following sentences. Most of the time when certain words find circulation in the sphere of public speech they begin to loose their true import and meaning. After a while they remain merely words with no specific content or meaning and therefore they become vacuous. Nevertheless they continue to circulate in the public sphere with people talking at each other than to each other. Education, the term or the word, has sadly met the same fate. People today talk about education without having the faintest idea about what is involved in it. For most education is a degree that one receives, to some it is a sacred cow and if you are in Andhra Pradesh it is a business opportunity. None of these correspond to what education is or should be. Armed with this inability to properly define education we have successfully created stereotypes about what it is and therefore we think that one who has 95% marks is educated or one who has a good job is educated and so forth. The furtherance of these stereotypes has created a mess that is now very difficult to clean up. In all this the very elementary purpose of education - that of enlightenment - has been forgotten. Compounding the situation are the pursuit of money and material happiness.

In this process the social sciences have suffered more and disciplines such as history have been reduced to the documenting of fictitious and peurile things. They have also become weapons in the hands of bigots. So why did this happen. The answer is simple. The social sciences when they were born in the West had a form that was consistent with the content. It has remained more or less like that till date. However, in India it is a different story. We have taken the form and have tried to stuff it with whatever we thought was the appropriate content. This parody of sorts happened because of the desire to study in one's own tongue and when there is no body of knowledge to support that ambition or aspiration, things are bound to go wrong. The true pursuit of social science entails either a translation of all Western content into whichever language that one wished to study in or the creation of an alternative body of knowledge. In India's case neither has happened and as a result people study the same book in their mother tongue, from class eleven to Ph. D. This means that higher qualifications are awarded for studying the same book. What is even better is that in spite of the ten odd years that go into the study of the same book, the students are still at a loss to explain what it contains. Social scientific education is a necessity in any society, for it is the tool that one can use to have an audit of the functions of society, politics and governance. Not only can it audit, it can also provide with good alternatives to bad policies and programmes. It is also a necessity for a good and enlightened democracy. In the case of India, the necessity for proper social sciences is even more heightened for obvious reasons. A society that has become fissiparous and threatens to fall apart needs good social sciences. And that is missing. Are the other sciences any better? The answer will be yes, but only a little. The other sciences are armed with mathematics and numbers which are considered to be lingua pura and therefore they are not bogged down so much by the problems of language. It is therefore completely a categorical imperative in order create a proper social scientific knowledge and once again create the globally competitive Indian. I will talk about more of the same in my next post.

Education - A categorical Imperative

My last post on this blog ended with a question. I asked myself and all those who read this blog if we are just passengers being carried away by the immutable laws of physics into a world which will see us back in a position of inferiority vis a vis other countries. I have my answer and I hope the answer of those who read this blog is similar too. I want to believe that something can be done and that it must be done and that is the reason why I say it is a categorical imperative. All problems affecting this country today are those that go back to the lack of a good system of education. Let me draw a parallel here. The old USSR imploded mainly because it tried to something which was not sustainable. To understand what I am saying better, let us look at the structure of what was the USSR. There were sixteen republics and they lynch pin among them was Russia. A feudal colonial power that brought the fifteen other republics under its control through the usual violent means. In the post Second World War days, especially under the rule of Stalin, Russia pursued its imperial intents under the garb of World Communism. The fifteen other republics were already co-opted into the process by being part of the USSR. At this point I would like to state though there was supposed to be the use of the principle of self determination used in the formation of the USSR, it is well known that most became a part of it since they were not allowed any other option. Russia tried to take on the best imperial powers such as the West European nations and the USA in their own back yard. It believed that through military might the rest of the world could be brought down on its knees. So it accelerated the arms race and in the process spent its precious resources on military might while at the same time starving the people of the USSR literally. The collapse of the Soviet economy was that which led to the implosion and every republic went its peacefully, except Georgia and Chechenya.

For those among you who are wondering as to what this bit of Russian history has to do with the present post, I am drawing a parallel between the Indian education system's present plight with that of the economy of the erstwhile USSR. What makes the parallel possible is the underlying cause which is unrealistic ambition and a foolish determination to prove to the world that you are among the best when actually the basic frame work to getting there does not exist. Russia and the USSR tried to become the most powerful without having the economic strength that is necessary to satisfy such an ambition. India too is trying to climb up the ladder to becoming a brain power while in effect, every step that it takes on this ladder is pulling the ladder down. And that is happening because the basics of what should be good education are not in place. Even though this may entail a repetition of some issues that I have written in other posts, I will go ahead and say that the first big mistake was in expanding the education system without considering the hurdles that it would create. The second big mistake was the government's pursuit of socialism and therefore its inability to invest properly in the educational sector. The setting up of all the huge public sector where there were six supervisors for one worker saw a drain on the resources. This meant that the government had no money to nurture an education system which will feed the developmental process for a long time to come. The result was the almost complete abandoning of the primary education sector and concentrating on the higher education sector. The government was building the IIT's and the IIM's and at the same time creating schools that no one went to at the primary level, simply because there was no infrastructure such as buildings, black boards, teachers etc. The primary and secondary education sector went into the hands of the private sector which in order to sustain itself and to grow required to charge a fee, which millions of poor Indians could not afford to pay. Education was accessible only to the affluent and most who belonged to this category came from the upper castes who had built a base for themselves right from the days of British Imperialism.

This led to the creation of an educated elite, one that generally abhorred the other Indians who represented for them everything that they did not want to be. A couple of generations which emerged out of this primary education system went on to fulfill the aspirations of the IITs and the IIMs as institutions. They were able to churn out students who could compete globally and on equal terms with the rest of the world. At this juncture two things need to looked at. This globally competitive Indian did not see his/her future in India. America for them was the new land of milk and honey and therefore they went that way. Products of the elitist education system who paid for their primary and secondary education and also for a very subsidized higher education did not invest their abilities back in India. So there is in effect no growth in the number of properly educated people contributing back to the system that they came from. As generations of good teachers retired from schools and with not many to replace them the primary and secondary sectors of paid and private schools has also started suffering from the lack of good teachers. Therefore contributions from the private primary sector has also started slow down to a trickle and today it only succeeds in putting out disinterested, illiterate nuveau riche elites, who wannabe but cannot be.

The Universities as I had said in another post also have no talent available and I read with dismay and horror the news that the Central Government in India is not setting up some of the new Central Universities that it proposed to, due to the lack of employable talent. It did not say there were no people holding the required certificates. It only said that the certificate holders (including Ph. Ds) were unemployable. There are two ways of looking at this, horror (for obvious reasons) and relief, because it means that there is a realization that there is no necessity to employ and feed people who will only be a burden on the system. I shall talk more about this in my next post.

But I do appeal to people here in India and abroad who maybe reading this post. Please do not donate money as a fulfillment of your philanthropic objective. Please donate your ability. Do not try to change the existing institutions. They have rotted. Try and create new ones which avoid the trappings of the old. Thank You. I hope someone is reading this and deciding to do something about it.

Leadership Crisis in India - Going on

In my previous post was talking about the changes in society of the urban areas and the consequent change in politics. In one of the ending sentences of the last post I used this expression micro-regionalism. Micro-regionalism is in fact the outcome of the changed politics. The prime example of this is Telangana. In most of the literature that is available today the demand for a separate Telangana is commonly referred to as sub-regionalism. I disagree with this taxonomy because sub-regionalism accepts that a certain region is a part of a larger region. If Telangana is the sub-region of Andhra Pradesh, then a demand for a separation cannot be logically sustained since the sub aspect refers to the lack of independent existence of the same. Micro-regionalism on the other hand conveys the desire of the people to draw out identities based in culture from smaller and smaller geographies and the phrase (micro-regionalism) also denotes a lack of commonality between the different geographies. This micro-regionalism which began due to an insecurity created by an improper and inefficient education system percolates to all aspects of society and politics. The net result of the change is that there is a dissolution of the symbols of commonality that were once used in order to build more and more homogeneous communities. The emphasis shifts to difference. Let me explain this through an example.

If one were to take the case of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata they can be (and have been) used to build threads of a common culture based in the idea that the epics symbolize the collective past and history of an entire people. This actively happened during the freedom movement. What happened during this period and later also the disputes of this imaginary. The example of this can be found in the Justice Party and the DK movement which evolved into the DMK and AIADMK later on. I have talked about that in one of my previous posts when I talked about how the differences between the Telugu/Tamil Brahmin and the Tamilian non-Brahmin found articulation as a racial difference. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata have been rejected as Aryan (Brahmin) creation and foisted upon the Dravidian (non-Brahmin) with the intention to dominate and subjugate. If one were to take into consideration of the recent debate and controversy between the DMK and the BJP over the Ramar Sethu one finds the echoes of this past. The DMK wants the demolition of that natural barrier while the BJP wants to preserve the bridge constructed by Rama and his Vanara army.

I am now arguing that the acts of construction and dissolution are both deliberate and always have a political agenda behind them. The intellectually impoverished society, a result of a farcical education system, in conjunction with the migration of the originally educated elite whom I had called the OUI contributed to the emergence of a lumpen political leadership which is a result of a society that itself has become largely lumpenised. This leadership has the sole purpose of capturing of political power with the view of self aggrandizement and monetary gain. It is common to see political leaders having made thousands of crores in deals and there is no protest based in indignation from the general society, which means that this is now an accepted way of life. Development is just a by product of the politician's greed. The new politician may hold degrees but has no education and consequently no idea of what good can be done for the country and how it can be done. Appointments to all crucial positions such as Vice Chancellors of Universities have become political and the Vice Chancellors, themselves products of the failed education system, contribute to the farcical aspects of the education system thereby rendering it more and more meaningless. Today there are still some leaders like Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who have vision. Therefore there is still some enlightened development which percolates to the lower levels of political leadership. But once this generation of leaders ceases to exist, then only politics of pragmatism will remain and tear the fabric of the country apart, rendering meaningless the sacrifices of the previous generations. Here let me quote my favourite poet/musician, Roger Waters. He talked about what happened in England after the second World War. "But when the fight was over, we spent what they had made". We are also on the verge of spending everything that was made for us by our freedom fighting generation. Separate Telangana, Gorkhaland, Vidarbha, Harith Pradesh, Maharashtra Navnirman Samithi, caste based politics and political parties, illiterate and uneducated teachers in schools, colleges and universities are all symptoms of a deep malady that will kill Indian society and the nation itself. Yet we only behave like we are passengers to laws of physics. The question is are we?