Note On Education

Context:  Ashoka University episode reveals the problems in the education system developed over the years.

Background: While the recent Ashoka University controversy has been revolving around the issue of misuse of political power in the education system, it also presents us with some civilisational questions/issues –

• One is, what is an education in liberal arts, and why do we need more of it in the 21st Century?
• Another is, how do we, and how should we, determine what is “world-class”?
• Questions about the governance of institutions.
• Question over clashes between principles of capitalism and democracy.

How different ideologies hijacked the above civilisational questions –

• Dominance of science over liberal arts: European enlightenment in the 17^th Century paved the way for An epistemic colonisation accompanied the economic and political colonisation.
  • Spiritual quests in religions and philosophies, eastern as well as western, were pushed aside in favour of science; It was considered as the solution for the world’s problems in the 20th Century.
  • The British scientist C P Snow lamented in 1959, in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, that there is not enough science.
• Privatisation of the ownership of knowledge: This was on account of the belief that humans are incapable of governing a collective enterprise (Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons — infected economics). 
  • Thus knowledge was privatised like land, forest, and water resources were privatised to improve the productivity of their use and the speed of their exploitation. 
  • With the expansion of intellectual property regimes (IPR), intellectual monopolies had grown, even when the knowledge was created largely with public money.
• Impact of Capitalism: Business enterprises have a narrow purpose which is to create profits and wealth for their owners by using resources efficiently.
  • Thus, ethical questions about the impacts of businesses and technologies (and indeed economic growth) on society and the environment are not important in this ideology.
  • Designs of economic institutions have caused financial wealth to be sucked upwards faster -> creating more inequalities:
    • For e.g. During 2020, stock markets soared, and the wealth of the rich increased by over $3 trillion, while over 500 million people fell into poverty.
  • Conflicting goals with education: The principle of good governance in a capitalist enterprise is that one dollar invested gives one vote.
    • This creates problems when financial donors’ concepts of value differ from democratic values.

Way Forward: Reforms are imperative for institutions of business and public services,

• Public institutions of national and international governance need reform to make economic growth more environmentally sustainable and to “leave no one behind” — the UN aspiration for the 21st Century.
• Reforms in the old “World-class”: India and the world must invent new forms of world-class institutions.