NEW GLOBAL INDIAN
Casual Education for serious Marxists
Thursday, 27 May 2010 00:00
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Our guest editor Amrita Mitra Mukherjee probes into the current education scenario in West Bengal.
Education has now come to be a secondary priority in power. Once the land of the intellectuals, the state is now reluctant to face changes. The prominence of the communist government can be called the key to such a change in the state.
There was a time, some thirty years ago when the socialist who called themselves communists (I still doubt how else communism can be followed without actually living in a commune) came with the idea of Marx to a land where the humanitarians ruled. After the war of the Naxalbari was over, the idea of bringing in an alternative brought in the Communist Government. What the last two decades showed was that though the war was over, the battle remained. Lord Acton's view was “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Marxism cannot deny the exploitation of the greater intellectuals towards the lesser intellectuals. So who remained the intellectuals and supporters of communism now turned to look for the loose ends.
Marxism was not indigenous to India. Just like the Indian version of Chow Mein is now sold on the streets of Kolkata, so is the Indianised version of Marxism selling at the Alimuddin Street. Now we have to discuss who are the customers? Well, the Bengali youth and not without reason. We are not the Bangladeshis. We don't have Bangla as a separate state language, let alone the national language. But English was comfortably removed from the Primary School syllabus; a link failure to the external world. What a borrowed idea! Britishers detested all who went abroad to study and on return never joined the British administration. The reason was clear. The more educated the commoners become, it becomes more difficult to cheat them. Therefore the less Marxism the Generation Y learns in English, the better chances remain to educate them to the home-grown, adapted Marxism as they grow from school to college.
Now comes the next level, the college level. With the foundation in the vernacular, where the curriculum revision is a distant dream at the secondary level, the college-goers now turned 18 specialise as the best vote banks for the ruling party, with an English education that has impaired them to face the world. Awful pronunciation, bad grammar and weird structured sentences taught by some under-qualified teacher, securely holding on to a job obtained through merit of quota or being past cadre, does little help.
We generally consider Kolkata as Bengal. But the truth is Kolkata doesn't even constitute ten percent of the whole Bengal population. I am talking about the districts. We have a Sector V in Kolkata that marks the globalised India world but the mindset of the district people hasn't changed. Sister Kiran of St Agnes Covent, Kharagpur says “quality education needs money.” To an extent it is true since what we find is the state - aided institutions subscribing to vernacular language as the medium of education. We are often reminded that it was Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay who commented that 'vernacular is the breast milk for a nation'. Undeniably it is mentioned through this process that we can attain self-reliance. The problem is, changed perceptions of quality in the world aren't quite visible, except for the grading system in the Secondary/ Higher Secondary results. The inherent idea of Marxism that qualitative changes bring about quantitative changes gets falsified here.
Education is not all about literacy. It is about the modification of behaviour. With SFI pioneering as the students' pressure group, and as an interest group as well, has distributed the ideas to DYFI, CP, TMCP et al. In this competitive world of students' politics now bunking classes, being irregular are no more crimes and attendance easily become manageable with an identity as a cadre. If that is what modified behaviour is all about, we definitely need more of Engineering and medical colleges, and B Ed colleges and general colleges, that is on the rise, with more people who understand the necessity of Coordination Committee and rallies. We are after all trying to be self-reliant and these are the methodologies! Let us hope to see the effect of Diminishing Marginal Utility in his regard pretty soon. Afterall, Marxism, they say is also largely about Economics.
