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THE lopsided election campaigns in Punjab and elsewhere did spend much time on how revolutions of all shades, hues and varieties are just about ready and rearing to transform the nation inside out and upside down. The ‘how’ part of it was not touched upon which is understandable for public forums are not meant for such niceties. Besides, no one actually knew much about it.
Education, as a critical component of any future plan, did crop up a few times, but it was mostly about the pros and cons of distributing laptops rather than anything else. Simply put, it was more political, emotional and rhetorical than substantial. All this basically means that regardless of who ultimately gets to sit on the throne, the masses have little option but to follow the age-old adage of hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.
As things stand today — and they have been standing that way since long — the problem in the education sector is three-fold. The low literacy level is only one-third of the issue, the second fold is brought up by what is being taught to those who actually make it to some education centre, and the final fold, equally critical if not more, is represented by the huge difference in the quality of contents being taught at different strata and to different segments of society.
Together, they are playing havoc with society’s fabric, having led to a situation where the perceptions and notions of young adults coming out of the various educational streams — seminaries, state-run schools, and private institutions of all kinds — happen to be divergent in dangerous proportions. Alongside the prevailing financial inequality in society, the class-based education system is a quick recipe to ensure that the present levels of polarisation in society — already alarming as they are — will only grow in the days ahead.
At the lower level, the system produces clerks and semi-skilled workers, while at the upper level it creates westernised people whose lifestyle depends on conspicuous consumption of western products. The result is that the two classes together are perpetuating capitalism in its worst form; the lower by providing cheap labour, the upper by creating inane and selfish consumers. This naturally portends disaster for the future, as both levels are not capable of ushering in an era of self-sufficiency, egalitarianism and dignity for the masses.
Take any political party worth its name — both the established ones and those who have hogged the limelight in recent times — and try to see their manifestos, track record and potential. And, for good measure, include the armed forces as well for two basic reasons; one, they have ruled the country for long periods of time; and, two, they have been active players in the education sector for almost two decades now. Do they actually realise the emerging social scenario? Probably a few. Are they pushed? Hardly.
Though living in the same country, the two classes are completely alienated from each other. Dangling in the middle is the Urdu-medium majority. Pulled by the two extremes in diametrically opposite directions, it sometime goes in one direction and sometimes in the other. This tug of war continues, but it is a battle which nobody can win.
Drawing the class lines, the school-going lot can be divided into four well-defined categories; seminaries, Urdu-medium schools, cadet colleges and public schools, and elitist English-medium schools. A survey was conducted a few years ago in the pre-NRO days, which aimed at feeling the pulse of the country’s youth in terms of their perceptions about such key issues as militancy and tolerance.
Interestingly, when it came to supporting state-level covert militancy in occupied Kashmir, 52.82 per cent pupils in the seminaries and 53.08 per cent in cadet colleges favoured the approach, but the figure dropped down to 33.04 per cent for Urdu-medium schools, and further down to 22.41 for the elitist institutions. Not surprisingly, the survey of teachers at the same institutions brought out almost similar opinion patterns.
While the statistics on this particular issue were understandable for the three other categories, the author qualified the figures for the state-run Urdu-medium schools, aptly pointing out that since the government of the time itself had reversed the policy of carrying out a covert war in Kashmir, students and teachers “might have felt that it was safer and perhaps more desirable not to support war.”
Among other things, the survey rightly pointed out the fact that while the armed forces had a history of using seminaries and state-run schools to promote their concepts and ideologies, the very same armed forces had established elite schools for the children of their officers.
At the other end of the spectrum are the seminaries where poverty rules. According to the survey, a staggering 48.95 per cent of those found in the seminaries said they were there purely because of economic reasons.
This pigeon-hole compartmentalisation of the youth is simply giving birth to future citizens who will only arrive at different destinations at the end of the paths they are currently treading on.
Moving in private jets and helicopters — and occasionally in four-wheelers — the leadership could not be too bothered by such possibilities. It is pointless to expect the ruling elite — both the experienced and the aspirants — to do away with something that at least in part has ensured their social dominance. To expect them to deliver on this count is like asking for the moon.
