100% and counting

A few days ago, a national daily ran a piece where they interviewed citizens who'd landed up to support Baba Ramdev's fast. One question asked of everyone was -- what would you like your child to grow up to be? Almost all said they'd like their children to join politics, social activism or work which would "contribute to society."

Notably, most of them were from small towns, of working poor or lower middle class background. In direct contrast were my recent conversations with a 10 year-old boy and his mother, from an upper-middle class family. The little boy refused to participate in any activity though we were in an exciting place, seemingly from an utter lack of curiosity.



Suggestions that he could help with a problem were sassily met with, "What I can do if that happens?" I shouldn't have been as taken aback as I was when he announced that he was headed to the Wharton School of Business. Wondering if he even knew what it meant, I said, "Hope you're putting your pocket money aside then." "Oh he doesn't need to worry" his mamma said. "His uncle and grandfather have already started an account. He's gonna grow up and make a lot of money and have a good life, no?"

In a culture of these two extremes, then, why feel shocked that the cut-off score for a Delhi University college is 100 per cent? It's a piece of succinct performance art really, a logical outcome to valuing only what is quantifiable, in numbers, which are just temporary suggestions, soon to be replaced by numbers representing money.

Kapil Sibal was very sad to hear about this. He said, in that case I wouldn't have gotten into St. Stephen's today. Omar Abdullah also feared that he might have had to do a correspondence course in such a scenario.
Would that have been a terrible fate? Then, isn't that what they need to worry about -- that they are in terror of being in the same place as a major percentage of this country's literate folk instead of at the top in the educational hierarchy?

As it is we follow an archaic system of "streams" -- science, commerce, humanities. There are hardly any cross-disciplinary courses or approaches -- students are actively discouraged from mixing things up. Then there is a hierarchy within these streams, with science and commerce wrestling for supremacy and humanities the slow kid no one wants on their kabaddi team. The unimaginative way science and commerce are taught, this basically means analytical, inventive, creative ways of thinking are discouraged and a mechanistic education is mirrored by a mechanistic marking style.

And eventually this fits in with a society which is increasingly grooming people only to care about money and the fields which most obviously are concerned with money, while attaching no value to art, activism, construction labour, domestic work or teaching as important professions. Some people might call this a new caste system.

The push to privatise education is only going to exacerbate this. Instead of strengthening the municipal school system, the government is creating a sort of Slum Rehabilitation Scheme for education, where land will be given to private schools in return for subsidised schooling for poorer kids.

But is the pedagogy of these schools expected to change to accommodate diverse students or are they supposed to privilege the already privileged and churn out aspiring Whartonites and Miss Indias? Where will that leave the "free" scholars -- at the back of the class, where they "deserve" to be? I don't know. Maybe if Mr Sibal hadn't gone to St. Stephen's he could've told us.
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Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevi.com.

The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.