Avijit Pathak - Education in the liberal arts and humanities are important in themselves
In these “pragmatic”
times, it is not easy to plead for liberal education. Yet, as a teacher, I want
the new generation who have just cleared the board examinations and are willing
to enter the domain of higher learning, to realise that education is not merely
“skill learning” or a means to inculcate the market-driven technocratic
rationality. Education is also about deep awareness of culture and politics,
art and history, and literature and philosophy. In fact, a society that discourages
its young minds to reflect on the interplay of the “self” and the “world”, and
restricts their horizon in the name of job-oriented technical education, begins
to decay. Such a society eventually prepares the ground for a potentially
one-dimensional/consumerist culture that negates critical thinking and
emancipatory quest.
Before I put forward
my arguments for liberal education, I need to raise three concerns. First, as
the economic doctrine of neo-liberalism has become triumphant, a mix of
“positivistic objectivity”, scientism and technocratic rationality seems to
have become the dominant ideology of education. Knowledge becomes instrumental
and technical; “professionalism” demands dissociation of “skills” from the
politico-ethical; and moral questions and the contents of the curriculum are
required to be evaluated in terms of measurable “outcomes”. No wonder, such a
discourse refuses to see much meaning in, say, a serious enquiry into T S
Eliot’s The Hollow Men, or a reflection on “soul force” as articulated by M K
Gandhi in his Hind Swaraj, or a Freudian interpretation of Leonardo Da Vinci’s
Monalisa. Neither the techno-managers nor the market find any value in these
“subjective”/“non-productive” pursuits. When they do speak of literature or
sociology, they kill its spirit, and reduce it into a set of modules with
concrete “outcomes” — measured in terms of “life skills”, “communication
skills” and “personality development” skills. It is like destroying the soul of
education through the fancy management discourse.
Second, school
education continues to reproduce this hierarchy in knowledge traditions.
Whereas science or commerce is projected as “high status” knowledge, not much
cognitive prestige is attached to humanities and liberal arts. In a way, this
is like demotivating young minds and discouraging them from taking an active
interest in history, literature, philosophy and political studies. Possibly,
the standardised “ambition” that schools and anxiety-ridden parents cultivate
among the teenagers makes it difficult for them to accept that it is possible
to imagine yet another world beyond the “secure” career options in medical
science, engineering and commerce. Certainly, it is not the sign of a healthy
society if what is popularly known as PCM (physics-chemistry-mathematics), or
IIT JEE, becomes the national obsession, and all youngsters flock to a town
like Kota in Rajasthan, known for the notorious chain of coaching centres
selling the dreams of “success”, and simultaneously causing mental agony,
psychic disorder and chronic fear of failure.
Third, the state of
liberal education in an average college/university in India, I must admit, is
pathetic. With demotivated students, teachers who do not have any passion,
empty classrooms, routine examinations and the widespread circulation of
“notes” and “guide books”, everything loses its meaning. History is a set of
facts to be memorised, sociology is just common sense or a bit of jargon for
describing the dynamics of family/marriage/caste/kinship, literature is time
pass and political science is television news. Even though the state of science
education is not very good, the trivialisation of liberal arts is truly
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