The Robot Corporation

http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20070820&fname=Martha+Nussbaum
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Aug 20, 2007

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The Robot Corporation

Far from spawning mere skilled professionals, education must give us wise, sensitive citizens. Only then will democracy become valid.

MARTHA NUSSBAUM
A while back, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution praising the Indian Institutes of Technology for the manifold ways in which their graduates "advance and enrich American society". So great is the success of the IITs today that their graduates are seen as prize catches all over the world, a world dominated by the profit motive. Despite this evidence of a brain drain, the IITs have surely contributed, above all, to "advance and enrich" India. The greater prosperity they have brought to many, if by no means all, of India's citizens, is surely to be applauded.

What does the ascendancy of the IITs mean, however, for democracy in India? Given that economic growth is so eagerly sought, too few questions have been posed about the direction of Indian education, and, with it, of Indian society. With the rush to profitability in the global market, something precious is in danger of being lost: the human individual, on whose capacity for critical and imaginative freedom the very survival of democracy in India depends.

How, then, is education in India doing, 60 years after Nehru spoke of putting an end to "ignorance"—as well as "poverty", "disease", and "inequality of opportunity"? No honest assessment could be favourable. The staggeringly high rates of illiteracy, particularly among women and girls, the well-known problem of teacher absenteeism (in many areas it reaches the figure of 20 per cent), the scourge of "private tuition"—all these make the promise of educational opportunity utterly meaningless for large segments of India's population. At one end we have the shiny success of the IITs, at the other the dismal daily reality of government schools in many urban and most rural areas. Kerala has shown that it is possible to produce virtually universal male and female literacy through an ideal-driven combination of intelligent planning and determined administration; the rest of the nation, however, has been slow to follow the slender southern state's lead.

These well-known problems, however, are not India's only—or even her greatest—dangers where education for democratic citizenship is concerned. With the ascendancy of the IITs has arisen a dominant conception of education that is technical, indeed mechanistic, given to force-feeding and regurgitation and suspicious of critical independence of mind. Education, in this picture, is about the implanting of useful skills that will ultimately lead to both personal and national enrichment. It should, therefore, focus on these technical skills and on the rote learning of whatever historical and political information is strictly necessary to deploy them in profitable ways. As Rabindranath Tagore once wrote of schools he knew, "Achievement comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned machine can do better than a human being can." He already saw that the globalisation of the economy was leading to an educational imbalance, "obscuring (our) human side under the shadow of soul-less organisation".

Education is not simply a producer of wealth; it is a producer of citizens. Citizens in a democracy need, above all, freedom of mind. They need to be trained to ask tough questions; to analyse what they read for accuracy, logic, and comprehensiveness; to reject specious reasoning and shoddy historical argument; to imagine alternative possibilities; to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from themselves. These skills are crucial for keeping democracy vital, preventing it from degenerating into mindless ideological banner-waving. They are also pivotal in dealing with the pressing issue of ethnic and religious violence, since people who cannot criticise propaganda or imagine the pain of another human being are ripe targets for the rhetoric of hate.

The skills I have just enumerated are associated with the humanities and the arts, and they are utterly neglected, even in the more successful government schools. Rote learning is the method of the hour, the imagination is viewed with suspicion, and the central question that is endlessly debated is what version of history students should memorise and regurgitate. A parent's glory is the admission of a child to one of the IITs. A parent's shame would be a child pursuing literature, or philosophy, or art—and this means that these subjects are despised even as elements in primary and secondary education.

India, more than most nations, has a glorious tradition of humanistic education: Tagore's school influenced educational ideas all over the world. The school he founded in Santiniketan is in disarray today, but the legacy of similar ideas can be seen in many places, particularly in the Indian women's movement, which makes creative use of critical thinking and the arts in education programmes run through NGOs (and sometimes through government sponsorship). In many ways, the desperately poor who benefit from NGO programmes are receiving a better education for democratic citizenship than the increasingly prosperous middle classes. The rest of the nation should take note, for a nation of docile engineers and managers will not long remain truly free. It is time for a national focus on pedagogy—on the teaching of critical thinking and imagining—for a national acknowledgment that the humanities and arts are crucial for democracy's future.

How can India afford the luxury of thinking about such refinements, one might ask, when teachers do not even show up to teach, or do much of their real teaching in the homes of wealthier students after school hours? One might argue that the basic things need to be fixed first, and then one can move on to pedagogy. I believe, however, that we should reject this argument. When something exciting is being imparted and received in the classroom, when the whole enterprise of education is alive and full of surprises, both teachers and students want to show up. We see this clearly in NGO education, where nobody is coerced on either side, and yet pupils and teachers participate with passion, because what is happening strikes everyone as really pertinent to their lives.

India has one of the world's most vital democracies, with its enormous diversity, its strong traditions of argument and critical exchange, its artistic distinction, its great rational and imaginative powers. But India's democracy has also committed some conspicuous failures of public reasoning, giving way to parochialism, sloppiness, inattentiveness, and worse. Education based mainly on profitability in the global market magnifies these deficiencies, producing a greedy obtuseness that threatens the very life of democracy itself. Tagore said in Japan in 1917 that a nation might commit "gradual suicide through shrinkage of the soul". India's soul is so large that it would be difficult indeed to kill it; but it is surely in danger of shrinking.

(Nussbaum is the author of The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India's Future)