July 3, 2013

India as the producer of human resources and supplier of experts to countries of the world may claim to stand first. Certainly it stands first in supplying less expensive manpower compared to all the other countries which claim to climb the ladder of development with great velocity.

The question that everyone could ask as Indian is ‘how far has the Indian educational system has educated the disadvantaged, the weaker and the marginalized section of our society?’ We can recall the incident in Bangalore where parents of the pupils were not happy to educate their children with the poor children, for they felt the poor children would corrupt the moral character of the rich children. Some of the parents even stated that the poor children must be admitted to schools in accordance with their 'limited' intellectual capacity.

They represent the entire group of people who consider themselves as the distinct class that is to be protected, educated, talented, intellectual and privileged. This group also passed judgment on the disadvantaged and the poor on their moral character and their ability to study. Where is the responsibility of this group? One has to feel ashamed of oneself at the poor uneducated brothers and sisters of our country because we as a nation keep claiming to be growing and developing in human resource, economy and education, yet a huge chunk of citizens are still in the state of denied education and utilization of their talents. Covertly or overtly, each of us is responsible for the uneducated, poor state of such population.

Today we have many prejudices of rich and poor and through this we try to distinguish between both. We say that the economically poor are morally poor, the economically rich are pure. The poor are unintelligent and not talented; the rich are talented and intelligent. The poor will corrupt the rich; the rich have the right to learn etc. Unless and until these filthy ideas are washed away, there is going to be a big problem in our society. Our education system would end up creating two classes of citizens of India. There will be the class of the educated rich who morally claim to be pure and talented and condemned to be morally irresponsible or poor and talent-less.

Like Tagore we all have to say, ‘into the heaven of freedom my father, let my country awake’ - the freedom that seeks for everyone to have the right to education and to live a decent dignified life; the freedom that the opportunities are shared equally without discrimination; the freedom that everyone’s talent is an asset to the country and the freedom that everyone has good moral conscience and every child is a good person. Every child is morally responsible and every child is talented if proper opportunities are availed. Everyone who is in the deepest slumber of false superstructure of judging the poor without conscience and irresponsibly and who is drugged by the ideology of the ‘pure and talented race’ should wake up to such freedom. If they do not wake up, then they should be woken up, for education is not an opportunity or a privilege, but a right. The poor shall not think that ‘Right’ is given… take it, even if it is denied.

Soon after gaining independence in 1947, making education available to all had become a priority for the Indian government. As discrimination on the basis of caste and gender has been a major impediment in the healthy development of the Indian society, they have been made unlawful by the Indian constitution.

The 86th constitutional amendment has also made elementary education a fundamental right for the children between the age group- 6 to 14. According to the 2001 census, the total literacy rate in India is 65.16%. The female literacy rate is only 54.16%. In order to develop the higher education system, the government had established the University Grants Commission in 1953. The primary role of UGC is to regulate the standard and spread of higher education in India. There has been a marked progress in the expansion of higher education if we look at the increase of higher educational institutes in India.

As education is the means for bringing socio-economic political and cultural transformation in a society, various measures are being taken to enhance the access of education to the marginalized sections of the society. One such measure is the introduction of the reservation system in the institutes of higher education, but in the process of implementation, it always meets with anti-reservation agitation by a section of student community who fight for promoting merit based reservation. How can they talk of ‘merit’ when unequal students are facing competition to qualify themselves as merit students? It is like conducting a running competition for a group of students to decide who comes first when the group is consisting of healthy, wealthy, blind and lame students. It is absurd to consider merit as a criterion when students’ background and their upbringings are different and unequal due to various discrimination that are still prevalent.

Education should not only provide a means of living but also teach how to live. Today knowledge society is very much linked with knowledge economy. Just earning a degree is not enough unless the student is equipped with the requisite skills for accomplishing a task. Our education may help to earn our living but seldom helps tells us how to live. Fast and continuous deterioration of social and moral values among the so-called educated is disheartening!