The Indian history was not documented until the Imperial rule, William Jones gave way to the history of India with his orientalist view. This orientalist view according to Edward Said was extremely pessimistic of the East and patronised the West, it believed that India’s past was cyclic, and they had an impoverishing quality due to which the richness of the Empires of the subcontinent deteriorated. This view was biased, overlooking major periods and was centric to the dominant Brahmanical society. The education system can be compared to this very idea of imposition of painted views and conditioning of the people through the means of motivational learning.
Previously we have seen education being imparted in the places of worship, in medieval India during the rise of the third urbanisation there were the constructions of the very first temples in India as an instrument of establishing authority and as a momentous representation of the king’s superiority. These places were used for education, business and other purposes. This was the time when religious education took priority.
The Gurukul system is considered an inspiration to the modern-day classrooms. With the advent of the English education system, the curriculum was tinted with prejudiced views of the European renaissance inspired historians and intellectuals. This has been carried out till date in the contemporary curriculum of the children with very little development and changes.
There was a particular time when the BJP proposed the deletion of the stories of loot and plundering from the history textbooks pinpointing at the Mughals and addition of glorified stories of kings of Indian origins, which was nothing better than what the orientalist intellectuals did, maybe worse.
Modern Education System:
In a separate context, modern education is a system entirely run based on scores and competition.
There is the competition between the boards of education, institutions, the people who are in charge of imparting knowledge and the students the list goes on.
How every child today is directed not to learn something but to achieve a specific benchmark. This has further impoverished the thinking abilities of the child and turned him into nothing but a rule-following machine that would do anything to serve the capitalist agenda.
The reproduction of the means of production, as talked about by the famous philosopher Louis Althusser is a necessary requirement for the capitalist to continent their production. This is exactly what the education system is doing today, recreating similar scenarios over and over again to produce similarly-programmed individuals. How is this any different than robot making?
Education today has become nothing but an ideology that is not innate, but needs to be continuously reiterated so that the individual loses his /her ability to come out of it or even recognise the fact that he is under the influence of one.
Skill development has taken a front seat whereas topics like personal grooming, behavioural skills development have taken a back seat in the bus ride of a student’s life.
The modern education system in the dire need and drive to be pseudo-liberal, and extremely neutral has left out basic Indian values that are to be at least introduced to the students, not imposed again.
The complete westernisation has reduced the number of intellectuals and increased the number of unemployed. What use is another machine in a world of billions of machines? The system that once produced legends like Late Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, has produced over 70 per cent of the engineering population that is unemployed.
It is just sad to notice such decline in the once the number one country in terms of wisdom and knowledge. We need to come out of this at the earliest or we shall turn into a society of mere thoughtless workers.
