The school as factory: Bricks in the wall

Regarding the research atmosphere, the choice of topics is constrained by what is currently fashionable and relatively easy to publish. : Sourced by The Telegraph

Anup Sinha   |  TT  |  04.05.22  : In today’s society, education is considered as an industry producing value-added workers for the labour market. This is a technocratic approach and treats education as having instrumental value only. The industry has to produce skilled workers imbibed with values required to keep social stability — discipline, predictable behaviour, and respect for authority. The skills imparted would reflect the latest needs of industry and economy in general and would be updated with new knowledge created through research. The research is supposed to be carried out by academics, especially those working in institutions of higher learning. The creation of new knowledge has to be economically beneficial, with commercial applications and profit opportunities. Innovations in curriculum, pedagogy, learning technologies, and evaluation systems take place within this boundary. The metaphor of the school (any place of formal learning) as factory has a long and extensive history. Consequently, modes of reasoning, inquiry, and research characteristics have been modelled on assumptions drawn from a belief system that attaches high priority to predictability and control. The larger issues of knowledge as ideology and the usefulness of education as a means to greater social dynamism are ignored.

In a diverse country like India, the need to control and govern education becomes all the more important to create the kind of social stability that the ruling elite wants. There are many ways of establishing that control. The first is through national-level policies that treat all institutions of learning as homogeneous. A syllabus is set, rules and regulations laid out in great detail, modes of evaluation specified, the necessity of being accredited by a body approved by the government, and a learning scheme, which details learning goals beginning from a programme (like B.Sc. in Physics) to a particular paper, down to a particular class session, to questions set in examinations for evaluating how much a student has learned, chalked out. This is the industry’s quality-control method. Each school is supposed to produce a set of clones — “little boxes made of ticky tacky/... and they all look just the same” — as a famous song claims. It is only to be expected that the best leave for greener pastures abroad. Those who cannot go — the overwhelming majority of college graduates — become unemployable. They get jobs for which a college education is not required at all. India’s job market has people with post-graduate degrees applying for positions of janitors or peons in government offices.

The second layer of control comes from the composition of governing bodies or boards that oversee the functioning of the school, college or university. The most important aspect of this composition is the struggle for political control of the board. Politicians, their hangers-on and business men play musical chairs. In some renowned institutions, the alumni are brought in who are, in their own lines of activity, close to the ruling regime. Else, they remain quiet and have no useful suggestions to make. This is how an indirect control is exerted. The board plays watchdog for the government. For instance, it can announce that no one in the institution’s community can post any adverse comment about the government or the political leaders of the ruling party. The board’s members remain the sole arbiters of what constitutes the ‘adverse’. However, if such comments are made about a leader of the Opposition, it is ignored or tacitly accepted. It is authority that must not be questioned.

The third layer of control is more nuanced but hegemonic in character. This relates to the contents of the syllabus set and the atmosphere of research. The contents of a syllabus rarely permit open-ended critical questions to be raised even though the idea of critical thinking has been appropriated by the ruling ideology. Hence ‘critical thinking’ is a new buzzword in syllabi around India. Few engaged in the business know what it entails. Answers to specific problems are found in prescribed books. This mechanism of control has become easier to the extent that students of the current generation have so many smart toys to play with that just sticking to the text book comes as a matter of comfort to them.

Regarding the research atmosphere, the choice of topics is constrained by what is currently fashionable and relatively easy to publish. There are thousands of journals available, most of pathetic quality. Every subject also has a few ‘rockstar’ journals. One publication in the latter could set up a scholar’s entire career. These journals are tightly controlled by senior academics who will not allow papers that do not fit their niche to be published. Shifting from this deep-rooted influence is difficult in a system where careers depend on how many publications one has totalled early in one’s career — like batting in a T20 match. The quality of the shot is irrelevant as long as it fetches runs.

A few rare academics — students as well as faculty — challenge this realm of control. They raise deeper questions about the system of domination and unfreedom. They are obviously considered a danger to the stability of society. What is disturbing in India is that over the last twenty years or so, books have been burnt, libraries attacked, students and teachers beaten up or jailed without trial. Anti-terrorism laws have been invoked to book them in many cases. There have been suspensions of scholars perceived to be deviant or forced to resign. Two very high-profile resignations came from a university, which is supposed to be the haven for world-class, liberal education. One professor claimed, when resigning, that he had become a political liability for the university’s administration because he wrote and spoke critically about the government.

An international non-government organization called Scholars at Risk has recently published a report titled Free to Think 2021. There is a detailed discussion of the crisis in academic freedom across the world, even in nations deemed to be liberal like Japan or the United States of America. The rise of right-wing, illiberal states globally has taken its toll too. The report has come up with a composite index of academic freedoms, taking into account institutional autonomy, campus integrity, freedom of cultural and academic expression, freedom to teach and do research, and freedom for undertaking academic exchange. The index lies between 1 and 0. The higher the score, the greater the academic freedom. In India, the index fell from 0.7 in 2010 to 0.45 in 2020.

Education, apart from its instrumental value, has intrinsic values as well. It is supposed to open up one’s mind, one’s ability to think and learn autonomously, nurture human agency, and create possibilities of change. Education, if imparted properly, stimulates debates, disagreements and even dissent. The seeds of disagreement and dissent appear to those in power like disruptive weeds that need to be uprooted. What is beyond the ken of narrow-minded bigotry is that stifling academic freedom and the exertion of tighter control do not fulfil even the instrumental aspect of education — creating productive workers for the economy. The sector degenerates into factories of frustrated mediocrity. The longest-serving workers in these factories are the faculty members. It is interesting to note that like in other industries, they usually have the least say in the business.

Anup Sinha is former Professor of Economics, IIM Calcutta