Future of education in India and the ‘knowledge century’
Former professor of English and literary critic, G.N. Devy, in his new book, reflects on the present status of education in the country and offers solutions for future challenges. An excerpt.
By G.N. Devy Published by: Aleph Book Company Price: Rs 399 Pages: 130
The present century is often described as the “knowledge century”. We cannot be sure if this tag will stay valid until the end of the century or whether future historians will characterise this period as the “Age of Knowledge” as has been the case with the Dark Ages or the Age of Reason in the past. Perhaps the description sums up the euphoria resulting from the information explosion and the technologies surrounding the exponential growth in the information generated every passing second. It is possible that this epithet may not be sufficiently adequate for characterising our time. The century has also been forecast to be the era of water wars, an age of deathless humans, an epoch of ecological termination, and the moment for an irreversible merger of the physical and the digital. The “knowledge century” label is open to discussion and is not incontestable. Indeed self perceptions of human civilisations can change quite radically over a relatively short temporal span. But if at all the present century can be viewed as a unique era in human history, marking a new kind of engagement with M LIS NA UR JO Welcome to the Post-Truth era— a time in which the art of the lie is shaking the very foundations of democracy and the world as we know it. The Brexit vote; Donald Trump’s victory; the rejection of climate change science; the vilification of immigrants; all have been based on the power to evoke feelings and not facts. So what does it all mean and how can we champion truth in in a time of lies and ‘alternative facts’? what is considered “knowledge”, it would be interesting to reflect on where India stands in relation to this new turn in history.
Numerically speaking, in 2017, nearly one in every six human beings is an Indian. This number, a staggering 1.34 billion (134 cr) out of an estimated world total of 7.4 billion (748 cr), is unprecedented in scale, and is next only to the Chinese population—1.38 billion (138 cr). In 2011, the year in which the last census was carried out, India’s population stood at 1.21 billion, while the Chinese population counted a year earlier was 1.31 billion. In a few years, India will surpass China’s population level. Also, the demographic proportion of the younger population in India at present is the largest ever in India’s history, with more than half of the population below the age of twenty-five. Of the entire global population, nearly one in every twelve humans is a young Indian for whom meaningful education is the most assured means of finding a decent livelihood.
Education, knowledge production and research leading to widening of the horizons of thought and imagination, therefore, ought to be seen as concerns of our time. The figures mentioned here provide only a very broad quantitative measure of the challenge before us. Considerations of how and how much knowledge is produced, how it is transacted and how it is responding to social inequalities and ecological disconnect add to the vastness and complexities involved in a study of knowledge and education in India. This book about the status of education in India, particularly higher education and the forms of knowledge that it pursues, is a modest attempt at unravelling some of the complexities. It is not intended to be a comprehensive report on education in India, nor does it hope to provide an exhaustive analysis of our knowledge status. Though knowledge and education are its twin central themes, I must at once clarify that this is not an academic book. Having spent close to half a century in and around universities, and having elsewhere presented academic research and essays, I thought it not too inappropriate to present my observations on the theme through a reflective statement. I do not intend to present a position or positions in it. Quite often, analytical studies have a purely subjective weave as their flip side, a tacit class bias presented as “objective” culture-critique. To the extent possible, I have avoided such analysis. I would therefore like to describe this book as the “reflections” of a person for whom knowledge and education have been serious concerns for several decades.
When I began working as a young researcher in literary studies in the early post-Independence years, the colonial experience was the obsessive interest of the day. Most forms of formal knowledge, scientific disciplines and social sciences were seen as having originated in the colonial “transfer of knowledge”. Scholarly debates revolved around the question of acceptance or rejection of these forms of knowledge. These debates were happening in several disciplines, if not all of them, ranging from history to literature, architecture to aesthetics; but invariably the reference point was the knowledge of the colonial mint.
During the 1980s, the interest started shifting to discussion of disparities inherent in every intellectual transaction between the colonizing Western cultures and the post-colonial societies. These discussions were fascinating and produced several works of great brilliance. They gained in significance as similar discussions had been taking place in other post- colonial cultures. In Western intellectual circles too colonialism and postcolonialism acquired as much centrality as the Cold War and imperialism had enjoyed earlier. I have chosen to overlook in this book many of the valuable insights generated over the decades in both these phases as they are by now well-settled in the arena of the history of cultural relations. Given, however, the significance of the enormous amount of descriptive and analytical studies that those two moves produced, both within India and outside, I begin by briefly alluding to some of the iconic period-statements in the next section, before moving to the discussion of the more contemporary, and no less significant phenomena having a profound bearing on the question of “knowledge” and education in India. These phenomena include the rapidly sinking fortunes of ‘natural memory’, technology of knowledge incubation and knowledge reception, and the sanitisation of “knowledge” effected through several exclusions— linguistic, ethnic and epistemic. This book, therefore, reflects on the condition and crisis of knowledge as much as it is, by implication, about the condition and crisis of our democracy. In order to analyse the present status of “knowledge” in India and the problems at the heart of India’s higher education, this book will focus on four important elements: first, the idea of “knowledge” in Indian tradition(s); second, the trajectory of “memory”; third, the patterns of social exclusion and their effects on “knowledge” construction; and finally, the impact of technology on the forms of knowledge.
I must at once clarify that this is not an academic book. Having spent close to half a century in and around universities, and having elsewhere presented academic research and essays, I thought it not too inappropriate to present my observations on the theme through a reflective statement.
Extracted with permission from The Crisis Within, by G.N.Devy published by Aleph Book Company