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Commodification of education

THE hegemonic imposition of a uniform curriculum under the leadership of Smriti Irani focuses attention on the intent to bureaucratise education that would, no doubt, suffocate scholars and scholarship across the country.

Commodification of education

Can we allow our syllabus to turn into something ordinary and invisible?



Shelley Walia

THE hegemonic imposition of a uniform curriculum under the leadership of Smriti Irani focuses attention on the intent to bureaucratise education that would, no doubt, suffocate scholars and scholarship across the country. With this new agenda on the cards, it now appears that any change in the ongoing exercise of shaping a syllabus would sadly and ridiculously require the endorsement of an unimaginative bureaucracy in the UGC office. 

How many of us academics would like to endorse that? Are we prepared to be handmaidens to an anti-intellectual ideology? Without participation in reshaping our own curriculum, we will become guilty of following the colourless lens of oppressive perspectives without an academic cause.

The recently-floated idea of centralising the drafting of curriculum at all levels of higher education proposed by Smriti Irani, the HRD Minister, displays blatant contempt for public voices and ensures the end of autonomy and critical inquiry. Irani’s initiative of introducing uniformity in curriculum across the nation so all universities follow a homogeneous syllabus obstructs the free practice of innovation, experimentation and formulation across disciplines. By upholding a narrowly tailored system, she has initiated an assault on decentralised democracy and heterogeneity. The MHRD and a compliant UGC — the very constituents of the government machinery specifically required to safeguard and sustain higher education and its generation of an engaged citizenry — thus end up brutalising higher education.

Quite on the contrary are Prof Romila Thapar’s views of drafting the syllabus at the JNU: “We were given substantial time to frame syllabi based on our new concepts of courses suited to a semester system. In the Centre for Historical Studies members of the faculty constantly debated and discussed what should be included in our courses. We would discuss different proposals intensively. There were disagreements, compromises and agreements, and it was also one of the most intellectually exciting years for me inasmuch as I was forced to think analytically about many aspects of the discipline of history.”

The rigorous and democratic exercise she outlines would surely and certainly be overruled under the new dispensation. Since any adjustment in a syllabus would need the approval of the UGC, education would become merely a wing of neoliberal, right-wing forces that would impart skills suitable to the state economy and the corporate sector all right, but also reduce instruction to a technicality. 

A uniform curriculum promoted by the BJP would provide a system that churns out citizens more immersed in self-growth than in social responsibilities, promoting not a free development of interests or the substantive growth of the democratic process through education, but the ideology of a market-driven, capitalistic economy that heeds only to consumerism and instant profit. As Terry Eagleton has appropriately emphasised: “Across the globe, that critical distance is now being diminished almost to nothing, as the institutions that produced Erasmus and John Milton, Einstein and Monty Python, capitulate to the hard-faced priorities of global capitalism.”

Such an argument must not lead to the impression that an interdisciplinary curriculum is in favour of jettisoning professional skills altogether. John Dewey, the American philosopher and educational reformer, recognises the necessity of gainful employment through education which integrates daily work with “all there is in it of large and human significance”. Such a system inculcates a culture of openness that allows learning through “the process of living”. The uniformity that is sought by the reigning ministry is contrary to such a system though it is fundamental to the bureaucracy’s shenanigans of straitjacketing the academia that would lead inevitably to the closing of the liberal mind. 

What we need to understand is this: the imposition of a uniform curriculum retards radical imagination, which, in turn, displaces the academy’s broad intellectual engagement with society that is necessary for local needs as much as for the larger national concerns. We need to look beyond the campus to a life of continuous learning through enhancing and restructuring the processes of understanding ourselves as well as the world to which we contribute in our own small way. We would like to rediscover our own free space in which, no matter how despotic our government may be, we would have the stamina to fashion our own freedom. Educational activism has to respond to the hegemonising tendency of established structures of disciplines and curricula, moving into a new era of post-disciplinarity where research becomes a collective and comparative enterprise.

The retrogressive politics of the MHRD undermine the very raison d'être of a curriculum that needs to reflect critical radical thought through engagement with the central aims of higher education that go beyond mere skill-imparting training. Such an exercise would have to involve brainstorming sessions among the faculty, the students and the research scholars who alone can help to retard the gradual demise of the university as a “centre of humane critique”. Liberal learning must be seen as a priority over specific and narrow requirements of a job. 

The government has to realise that education calls for a diverse participation in a globally engaged democracy. A curriculum imposed from above in a culturally diverse country like India will smother the interaction that a student has outside the university. The educational experience of a student cannot pan out in isolation from its geographical context and within the constraints of a uniform national syllabus. Education cannot be imparted at the cost of a decentralised democracy that emphasises self-governance, civic virtue and individual freedom in institutions of higher learning, supporting engagement between academic learning and nation-building.

What we need is to introduce some colour into the drab uniformity of the curriculum and flaunt our insubordination of repressive regimes so as to imaginatively articulate and shape our vision for the future of higher education in India. What the present government does to our education system is what we allow it to do. The significant question that is called for at the moment is: do we, in fact, know what we want? I think many of us would agree that we cannot negate ourselves under the authority of a system with ideological limitations. And we cannot allow our syllabus to turn into something ordinary and invisible because that is what it would become through the very nature of its uniformity. 

The writer is a Professor of English at Panjab University, Chandigarh

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