Cost of commercialisation

Totakahini (The Parrot’s Training) by Tagore in 1918, foresaw the state of education we are now in, although it was originally meant to be a metaphorical critique of the recommendations of the Calcutta University Commission (1917–1919) and a review of the colonial model of education prevailing in British India. Today, we are witnessing a robust corporatisation of higher education supported by the State, which aims to build  ‘gilded’ cages, echoing Tagore’s words
in Totakahini.

The transformation of higher education in India is of critical importance, not just from a pedagogical perspective, but also due to its political and intellectual implications. The new experiments and structures reflect the dominant ideology of the ruling classes and the elite. This transformation aligns with the ascendant neoliberal world order that has effectively shaped the State and society to conform to market forces. Consequently, we find ourselves in a market-driven society where learning and educational institutions have become corporatised entities offering services for a price.

This shift has not only commercialised learning but has also had a subtle but profound effect on many people. There are many ways in which we may see the impact of this, but I would like to highlight only a couple of them.

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In the commercialised world of education, students are consumers. They consume what the institution has to offer, which in turn is determined by market perceptions. The institution would logically offer what it could sell. In the lexicon of neo-liberal pedagogy, this is ‘outcome-based’ pedagogy. ‘Outcome-based’ pedagogy creates a false hierarchy of learning values and marginalises fundamental and critical subjects, especially those that belong to the human sciences. The emphasis is squarely on learning skills and preparing the student to get a job. It is not a problem-posing pedagogy that is employed, but one that sees the student as a recipient of information. It emphasises transfers from teacher to student and marginalises a reflexive and interrogative learning experience. In other words, the pedagogy is tuned to the idea of ‘fitment’ – it aims at ‘fitting’ the student in the neoliberal milieu to maintain the status quo and the hegemony of the political order. Its main aim is to create docile learners who pay obeisance to capital and an imagined past. The student-consumer becomes wary of inquiry, dialogue, and critical learning because she sees them as barriers to the splendorous opportunities that the market has to offer. Conformity rather than the liberation of the mind becomes the raison d’etre of her existence as a student.

The second is more invidious. Privatisation of education effectively creates hubris, where the student knows that she is at the top of the pecking order on the strength of family wealth and that she ‘deserves’ to be there. Others who have not secured their places in the gilded edifices of higher learning must therefore be of lesser ‘merit’ and worth. Education of this type removes the individual from the larger community of learners and positions her in the abstract as an isolated and unattached individual who can only improve her lot through a lonely march to the top of the corporate ladder. In this struggle, she can be conscious only of herself and of those whom she considers her superiors. In doing so, she creates a pecking order devoid of other people and their consciousness by inhaling the wafting fragrance of exhilarating success and forgetting the role of luck, good fortune, and parental wealth that played a significant role and helped her on her way.

This smugness about success is the foundation of neoliberal pedagogy and its institutional avatars. For the individual, it gives the assurance that their position is much deserved and that those who could not make it deserve their fate too. Having eliminated by dint of the market mechanism those who could have challenged the hubris of the ‘deserving’, their ideology becomes the companion to the politics of authoritarianism and technocratic fixes. It is this interface between the skilled corporate manager and the polity at large—bereft of conscience—that contributes to the creation of dangerous politics—a politics of one-dimensionality that can only measure success through the prism of what one earns. This demolishes the idea of education as one that is transformative and reflexive simultaneously and, more pertinently, that which contributes to the common good. It may well be argued that this unreflective institutional approach to learning contributes in no small measure to the dangers that have vitiated our state and society and threaten to further exacerbate the rise of hate and sectarianism.

While the citizens of Karnataka may have paused the hate juggernaut in the recent assembly elections, we have no estimate of the poison that has managed to seep into the body politic. Our democracy and, with it, the lives of many millions depend on how we go about reclaiming humanity and dignity for all.

To cleanse the polity of the accumulated detritus, it is important that we see the linkage between the shrinking ambit and substance of education and the rise of an authoritarian dispensation that banks upon an uncritical and unreflective pedagogical approach to education.

Once we can call the bluff of the golden cage and see through the trap that awaits the unwary, we may be able to restore the democratic values that we are losing each day. For this to happen, we require a robust and thriving pedagogy that liberates the soul, interrogates hubris, and opens the world of dialogical learning. There are certain things money can’t buy; for everything else, there may be a MasterCard!

(The writer is a professor and dean at the Royal School of Humanities and the Social Sciences, Assam Royal Global University.)