Education’s plate: full but empty
A child is sitting in front of a plate, In which the entire history of knowledge is served together, and it is said – “Take, eat.” But when you look carefully, that plate is completely empty. When a child turns out after twelve years and is unable to read a simple paragraph, who will you point the finger at? Not a single promise was broken, rather all the promises were made together and disappeared together.
Whenever any pillar of the Indian system collapses, its smoke is visible in time. First comes the failure, which has been smoldering in some dark corner for years—like the silent structure of the examination board, the question paper being sold, or a policy implemented overnight on which no one even consulted.
Then the flames rise, and their light attracts crowds of onlookers—screaming students in the capital’s squares, tear gas smoke in the heat, hunger strikes and an opposition that seems to find its victory vote in every wound.
Finally, the monsoon-like observations begin. Writers, economists, policy makers and critics all come into the fray with their own opinions. Everyone has a ready recipe.
One sees in this the dictatorship of the government, which knows how to win elections but has forgotten how to run institutions. Others feel that the system is shirking its constitutional responsibilities—where the right to free education has become a commodity.
A third person says that the morality of policymakers is hollow and that it is simply a matter of the system—that is, the conflict between the school and the market. The fourth person is surprised that a country which is making children memorize old languages in the age of machines cannot conduct even a simple examination without piracy.
The fifth person summed up the entire situation in three words—communalization, commercialization and centralization—and started demanding the elimination of the examination agency. The sixth person called it a great revolution of ‘decolonization’ of minds and saw a conspiracy of coaching mafia in the voices of protest.
Everyone is right in his own way. And this is the real problem. The reader listens to these arguments, agrees with everything, but cannot understand why nothing is changing.
The writings of all these intellectuals have one thing in common – the target. Everyone is shooting at what is in front – the leaked question paper, the latest order, the crowd gathered on the streets and the minister standing in the dock. Everyone is attacking the effect, not the cause.
Our intellectuals have made themselves such fine tools for beautifully describing the symptoms of diseases that rhetoric has become an addiction in itself. A country that learns to name its disease in six different languages is in no hurry for treatment. This debate does not lead to any reform; It is actually an addiction that replaces that improvement.
Instead of looking at a building burning behind the smoke, look at the very structure that was built to burn. A few years ago I compared the Indian classroom to a thali. The child is sitting in front of a plate filled with innumerable dishes – dozens of subjects, three languages each and such a curriculum, as if the entire history of human knowledge has been presented to a ten-year-old child at once and it has been said – “Take, eat.”
The plate is full. But, if you look carefully, it is completely empty. No child in the world can fill his stomach with that plate. What is served is not food – it is just an illusion of food.
I named my book—The Full Plate. I thought I was mentioning an error in the system. But actually I was explaining one of his clever solutions. The plate has not been made heavy by mistake. It has been deliberately filled in this way, because the system which claims to provide everything cannot be accused of any single failure.
When a child comes out after twelve years and cannot read a paragraph or do a simple subtraction, who will you point the finger at? Not a single promise was broken, all the promises were made together and all merged into each other and disappeared.
This spread is not generosity. This is dividing the responsibility into such small pieces that there is not even a single clue of failure. How can a court run on something that cannot be measured? A full plate is actually a ledger which has been so complicated that no one can audit it.
This is not the incompetence of any officer. This is the original design of this machine, which is working exactly as it was designed to do. And this is the most scary thing. Because incompetence can be corrected, but a machine that is successful in its purpose cannot be made to stop from its nature.
Look carefully what this machine is doing? It has completely replaced the criteria of studies with ‘examination criteria’. These two things were never the same, and now there has been so much distance between them that an entire parallel economy is thriving in the same empty space where the deal of ‘having’ and ‘knowing’ takes place.
Examination has now become the only door. And because it is the only door, every force of society falls upon it – leaked question papers, gangs of Munna brothers, coaching shops and bought results. Analysts who puzzle over leaking papers mistake pipe pressure for pipe failure. That pressure is there because the system has put the entire burden of the expectations of the entire country on a single valve. That valve doesn’t burst because something has gone wrong; It bursts because when the burden of an entire civilization falls on one place, its only function will be to burst.
I later wrote that any system not only teaches but also learns itself. A system that cannot learn does not last—it begins to rot. There is no third way.
A learning system is one whose institutions learn from their failures; Where the disturbance at the edge reaches the center and forces the center to make changes in itself. But what we have is a ‘performing state’.
The acting system does not learn from failure, it dramatizes it. Question paper gets leaked. Children gather. Tantra wakes up with a startle. But look carefully at what awakens—not the intention to fix the pipe, but the arrangement for the pipe to be visible!
Committees are announced. Ministers are saved or made scapegoats. The agencies are renamed and given a new avatar. The infrastructure remains the same. Articles are published in newspapers. The public’s anger cools down. And the machine starts running again on its old pattern.
Nothing was learned, because learning was never the job of this machine.
This actor system does not have the capacity to convert any visible failure into fundamental change. It has only one ability – to transform apparent failure into complete silence.
But this disease is not exclusive to India. Every mature bureaucracy sooner or later understands that managing ‘image’ is much cheaper than changing reality. Institutions around the world are busy improving their appearance before renovating. Governments measure announcements rather than results. Universities measure degrees rather than knowledge. And companies sugarcoat announcements every three months rather than long-term potential.
Modern societies have become adept at the art of merely giving the appearance of change, while completely preserving the underlying structure that prevents any real change from taking place.
This is why even the most intelligent societies repeat the same mistakes over and over again, for which they have already made thousands of explanations. The explanation itself is considered an improvement. Identity itself is considered revolution. And taking a life is considered a lesson.
Comments are closed.