Education: Enquiry Vs Utility

The utilitarian angle to education has been stretched too far enough. Our society is imbibing an idea in all its vulgarity that education is meant to prepare students for industry. Unfortunately, students are treated as commodities and educational institutions have donned the role of suppliers. Blame it on the commercialization of education, but the problem lies beyond that. The problem lies in our very understanding of what is education.

What is education? A casual browse through the history of education will suggest that education was not born, but slowly built. Education is an answer to man’s quest. As a matter of fact, it is the collection of answers to various questions that haunted mankind throughout human evolution. One has to just go through the first few pages of David Eugene Smith’s ‘History of Mathematics’ to understand the growth of a subject and the inherent need for it. The subject itself was an attempt by early civilizations to comprehend the whole, the infiniteness that surrounded them. Every subsequent generation adds a further drop about its own understanding of the universe to the existing reservoir and it keeps filling. The journey goes on and the quest never ends.

The worth of a generation should be gauged by what it added to that reservoir. To put it bluntly, what is our contribution to education? The answer is “Competition”. A couple of months ago, Swami Vivekananda Thought Center, an NGO that is working towards reforms in primary education organized a painting workshop at a school in Bangalore. The very first question from students shocked us - “What is the prize?” This illustrates the idea that our entire education system is enveloped in a muddy reward and punishment model and anything that has no material incentive is not received enthusiastically by children.

The children are not to blame, however. We are in an age where success is measured by the amount of money, power, or fame someone possesses and hence we teach our children that the ultimate goal of life is to succeed. We emphasize on that point by conducting time bound examinations and awarding ranks. It is easy to argue that examinations are necessary to gauge knowledge, but the question is whether our method of imparting knowledge is fool proof at all. Our educationists assume that the existing pedagogy suits children of all sensibilities. But that is far from the truth.

One of the reasons a child fails to acquire knowledge in classroom teaching is because the method of teaching does not resonate with the natural inclination of the child’s mind. Each child is different and hence only those children, who can align themselves to the existing black board approach to teaching, succeed. In short, creativity has made way to adaptability. If you place the students in a hierarchy of ranks, you can clearly see an almost pyramidal structure or a diamond turned upside down. We have more people towards the base than at the top. The model then goes on to replicate itself in our very social structure and leads to all the disparities we see today. If we look further we can understand that the root cause of all social problems lie in education or the absence of it.

The purpose of education is to free the minds of children and not bind them to conformities. Only a free mind can contribute to the reservoir because it knows the art of questioning. Unless competition disappears from education, freedom is impossible because children always end up trying to achieve a predefined goal. When there is no competition and no predefined goals, the mind seeks freedom and that is the beginning of education. As Swami Vivekananda puts it “Education is the manifestation of perfection already in man”. The irony is we don’t even understand what perfection is because we never journeyed in that direction. I reject the idea that the minds of children are like clay and hence can be molded. Please don’t treat lively minds like dead matter. Of course, education has to be useful and cannot be just spent in philosophical debates. But, it is only appropriate to point out that all that is useful is born out of enquiry and not out of methodical training the corporate looks forward to. Training is aimed at learning to use things, not to discover useful things.

Above all, educational institutions are not obliged to obey the demands of the industry. They are only answerable to society at large. Also, the industry’s demand from education is preposterous because industry doesn’t contribute to education in whatever way. If the industry is spending so much on training, they are earning so much more from each resource they train. The end of education is character and not employability.