Elevate education to a ‘general interest’ topic
Thank you for reaching out. But I’m afraid a book on education will not appeal to a general interest audience”. Hearing this more than a few times from editors who commission book reviews forced me to reflect on the true import of the message. I realised that schools and education are not quite considered “general interest” material, a label which has been easily affixed to books on history and fashion and food and economics and sport. For me, these conversations revealed the commonly held notion that schools are outside of, and separate from, society.
For far too long, we have looked at schools as cocooned in a rather mechanical education system, which is meant to produce literate, numerate, and employable individuals. Achieving foundational literacy and numeracy is doubtless an important and incontestable goal. We should strive to provide this for every child. But should the building of such individual academic ability be the sole goal of education?
The macro-issues plaguing our nation, and for that matter the world, are not those that stem from a lack of technical expertise or scientific know-how. Instead, they are arising from the inability of individuals and institutions with differing world views to work together, a general inclination to amass power and authority to further one’s ambitions, and a pervasive climate of division, discord, and one-upmanship.
Can we have a just, equitable and humane society if schools are not interested in these issues? How will children learn to live and work together despite these differences? How can children be encouraged to think independently and listen to and learn from each other? How can they feel related to each other in a way beyond the rigid identities of religion, language, and socio-economic class? Aren’t schools well-placed to catalyse some of these conversations and enable children to engage deeply with them?
Schools and society inform and shape each other in equal measure. How we respond to the question “What kind of schools do we want for our children?” will most certainly determine the answer to the question “What kind of society will we be tomorrow?” And so, there’s an urgent need for pedagogy and learning contexts in our schools to speak to philosophical themes of knowing oneself, learning to work together, learning from (as opposed to “about”) the environment, nurturing sensitivity, and examining fear. School trips, art, sport, community work, stagetheatre, student assemblies, parentsteachers meetings, and exams, can all be reimagined to allow children, and by extension, their parents, to explore these themes.
For example, the simple, sustained practice of playing games over many years in school in a mixed age, mixed gender, mixed ability format can enable valuable insights for children into patience, mutual respect, and openness to working with people of varying abilities. And doing this can diffuse the undue focus given to the scoreline in most physical games.
We are taking concrete steps toward making education a social good in our country. But this work can be infinitely more fruitful if we stop looking at schools and education as a “niche and specialised” topic, and as something that only teachers, administrators, and policymakers should be concerned with.
Instead, the need of the hour is to elevate education to a “general interest” topic, to open it up to more non-politicised public discourse, and hold it accountable to higher order goals than just literacy and numeracy. If we can manage this, we may well end up sowing the seeds for the kind of society we want to be.