‘Covid-19 and Education in India’: An educative take on pandemic

For Heidegger, to think is to attend, and it is this thoughtful, patient attention that the Covid-19 pandemic has never been bestowed with. While going through it, we were not supposed to attend to it, as the call for a return to the earlier apparent normalcy was overwhelming. It meant resorting to hasty actions, thus foreclosing the meaningful discussions that should have otherwise been generated around it.

The pandemic has been marked with a strange mutism and amnesia. As a community, we are supposed to forget about it like one bad nightmare. The pandemic has been written and re-written by the popular and policy discourses, hailing our triumph over the virus. This important book, edited by Satvinderpal Kaur and Pradeep Kumar Choudhury, brings a tear in this smooth version, pushing us to attend to those rifts that we were being told not to see and listen to those voices that we have long drowned.

The carefully curated chapters have diffused Covid-19 from the conventional temporal understanding that contains it within a calendar time. By demonstrating its lingering nature, the book underlines its detrimental effect, as it not only widened the fault lines that already existed, but how it would continue to be present for the times to come.

Neatly divided into three parts, with three chapters in each section, the book covers the landscape of the deep-seated impact of the pandemic on education, by locating it in the larger political-economic context of our country. Through rich fieldwork, the book demonstrates the ramifications of the social nature of this virus, as the marginalised stood further abandoned. Instead of bridging the gaps, education, by overtly relying on digital circuits of learning, has further intensified their social, political and economic abandonment.

While the book attends to mechanisms that illustrate how education has been deeply impacted by the pandemic, it doesn’t restrict itself within it. It pushes these conventional tropes by further highlighting how education has been systematically used to attain political ends of the state, as new ways of governance have emerged with the pandemic.

The age-old strong state-market connect is now going through algorithmic governance that marks late capitalism. The complex role that education plays in making these coordinated linkages of state with corporate capitalism is well evinced in the book. How this increasingly strong foothold of edtech has altered the nature of knowledge while giving space to the principles that are central to late capitalism is also unraveled.

Philosophers have argued how our memory, subjectivity and attention have been short- circuited and transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next, a process central to education, has been disrupted. Instead of turning away from the questions of technology, it is pertinent to look at it as a pharmakon that cannot just be rendered away as detrimental, but has a curative potential as well.

What can be the contours of this education are some questions that the authors of this book can further delve into, as we collectively need to attend to the times that we are in.

— The reviewer teaches at Institute of Home Economics, Delhi University