Time to pivot?

It creates human capital, i.e. skills that we can acquire and then use to get jobs, provides credentials that allow us to signal to the market that we are suitable for particular kinds of jobs, and sorts of people into a hierarchy based on talent and merit.

I was a teacher for six years, and a part of my job was to interact with parents. It was important to understand what they dreamt and hoped for their child. Conversing with them, I often used to wonder “What does education do?”. However, the further I dwelled on this thought, I realised it is pertinent to also ask the question, “Whose needs does education serve”?

Is education a site for the generation of knowledge (production) or is it a site for the preservation of knowledge and experience from one generation to another (re-production)? This dynamic, ever-evolving tension between these two facets helps us understand the role(s) education plays in society. From a policy lens, education has three main objectives.

It creates human capital, i.e. skills that we can acquire and then use to get jobs, provides credentials that allow us to signal to the market that we are suitable for particular kinds of jobs, and sorts people into a hierarchy based on talent and merit. But is that all there is to education? Isn’t there more to it?

Not just schooling

People often conflate education with schooling. While the school is an important site of education, there are multiple other sites through which the production and reproduction of knowledge happen.

Family, the spaces one inhabits, and the identities one adopts or is given are all sites of education. Here, I would like to turn your attention, particularly to identities. Caste, class and gender identities continue to have an outsized impact on one’s chances in India.

For the privileged, these are sources of advantage that allow them to accumulate social and cultural capital. The same is not true for others. For example, upper-caste children attend elite private schools where they can form powerful networks and participate in status and capability-enhancing activities.

They are later able to assimilate into a globalised economy effectively, with skills and networks while others are left behind. It is clear that the success of particular caste and class groups in India, and the relatively poor achievement of others is not something inherent in cultural differences, but an artefact of the way schools operate, and also of the lottery of their birth.

We are all affected by globalisation. I use the term ‘globalisation’ liberally. We live in a very interconnected world where messages can be exchanged in a second, but walls and borders are built to keep people apart.

Globalisation was meant to benefit everyone and integrate us all into a global economy. However, there is a mountain of empirical evidence to suggest that the forces of globalisation have contributed to new dimensions of inequality and stratification, and education plays a key role in it.

‘Functionally illiterate’

By the turn of the new century, the Indian state had achieved something phenomenal. The Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER) in primary schools was almost 100%. The GER has been at 100% for many years now. However, India has a learning crisis, similar to many other developing countries.

One of India’s largest educational NGOs, Pratham, has been measuring learning outcomes in India’s schools for almost 15 years now and the results are astonishing, as seen in their Annual Status of Education Reports (ASER). In 2022, only 42.8 per cent of all children in Class V in government and private schools in India could read a Class II-level text.

Moreover, there has been a steady decline in these reading levels from 2008 to 2018. In 2008, 53.1 per cent of all children in Class V of government schools in India could read a Class II-level text; in 2018, that number was down to 44.2 per cent and in 2022, the number was at 42.8 per cent. This is corroborated by evidence from the National Achievement Survey (NAS) run by the Government of India.

These numbers become worse when it comes to numeracy. In 2022, only 25.6 per cent of all children in Class V of government schools could do division, and just like the literacy levels, these numbers have shown a steady decline as well.

Many developing nations show abject levels of foundational literacy and numeracy, and in some cases developed countries as well, in a phenomenon the World Bank calls “learning poverty”.

This has allowed people who have access to quality private education, mostly the upper-caste and upper class, to corner many benefits, be globally mobile and secure high-paying jobs that they later mask as meritocratic.

Clearly, there is a difference between access to education and access to quality education. In the words of Madhav Chavan, founder of Pratham: ‘Not only are we not creating a sufficiently literate population, but most of our population is functionally illiterate’.

Tyranny of merit

This data should also be understood in the context of a rapidly developing service sector in India. It is now a commonly accepted cultural notion that service sector jobs — or jobs in the “knowledge economy” — are the desirous, aspirational jobs, where effects and results are felt at a global level.

Upward mobility is understood to be moving “up” from blue-collar jobs, which continue to be considered menial and are mostly performed by people from oppressed caste groups. But what about those who continue to rely on their physical prowess as compared to their intellectual abilities to make a living? Do they deserve to be left behind? Poor-quality education is not allowing a large majority of people, not just in India but across the developing world, to access such “aspirational” jobs.

It is becoming increasingly evident that these aspirational lifestyles and jobs in the knowledge economy are dictating what needs to be taught in schools and how it is taught. By prioritising what we teach and how we teach it, we, the purveyors of the knowledge economy, are creating a hierarchy of legitimacy. We decide what the most aspirational and “legitimate” jobs are and condemn those who haven’t been able to access these jobs as people who “deserve their fate.”

As Michael Sandel, a Harvard political philosopher says, this is the “tyranny of merit.” Education achieves a lot of things; it pulls people out of poverty and allows them to be socially and economically mobile, among other things. Education can bridge many differences, but in its current form, it is creating a new class of people; the ‘smart’ and the ‘dumb’.

The ‘smart’ stay ahead of the game while the dumb are forced to lag because they ‘deserve’ their fate. The politics of education has thus become a politics of humiliation, antithetical to its original promise of dignity and recognition. We ought to not forget that education can be an engine for mobility but also a site for the reproduction of inequalities.

The author is a Gates Cambridge Scholar and has a master's in international education policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His book, The Smart And The Dumb, was published by Penguin recently.