"It is the very notion of ‘change’ that causes fear in the hearts of the powerful. And in their pursuit for power, their need to control education and subdue the voices of conscience becomes inevitable"
Dr Aküm Longchari
First Words
Madame President, let me begin by first acknowledging and paying my respect to all the elders and leaders of the Nagaland Government Higher Secondary School Employees Association – past, present and emerging – for your valuable leadership. Thank you for being custodians as knowledge keepers and knowledge givers that shape and influence generations of young women and men with whom you have crossed pathways.
Thank you for inviting me to reflect and engage in this robust process of cultivating and nurturing dialogue to empower, to imagine new ideas and to strengthen learning. I am also grateful to Dr Theyiesinuo for sharing her insightful and inspiring voice on Reimagining the Government School Story.
While preparing for this morning, I was faced with a dilemma of what to share with you who have dedicated your professional lives to the field of education. I recognise each one of you is an expert with a rich background of experiences. So, let’s examine a few foundational ideas together – they are not new, in fact they are old ideas which you will be familiar with. But I request you to look at this framework of ideas with a new set of lenses and engage with Education as a Catalyst of Change based on your own practical experiences, with the hope it will provoke new meaning and imagination.
We are aware of how humanity, across all cultures, nations and countries, is facing sweeping revolutions like never before in human history. In some ways our world seems smaller. And yet, the historian Yuval Noah Harari says, some human cultures find themselves in a situation where old stories are quickly crumbling away and no new story has so far emerged to replace them. He asks, “How can we prepare ourselves and our children for a world of such unprecedented transformations and radical uncertainties? … What should we teach, that will help our children to survive and flourish in the world of 2050 or of the 22nd century?”
Indeed, new stories are essential for humanity to nurture itself and uplift new generations with new visions and an imaginative future, or we remain entrenched in the past. The difficulty is the failure to create new stories that reflect the current context while continuing to build on the past. This creates the risk of clinging to old policies, chosen traumas and chosen glories, and outdated models of conducting affairs in all realms of life which may no longer be relevant.
The Nagas too are faced with such a predicament. Are we facing a type of crisis which the philosopher Antonio Gramsci bluntly stated as one that “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.”? And, in “this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” We need to ask whether the new can be born. I believe that we are capable of birthing the new and yet at the same time ask, why is the new not being born.
Friends, can we agree that Nagas of today need stories that will stimulate and persuade new imaginations, new thinking, new ideas, new behaviors, new attitudes, new consciousness and new visions which reflect the current conditions while continuing to build on the transformative and vibrant values once expressed through our oral traditions. To persuade new imaginations and to enable the new to be born we need to purposefully think together on how the interplay of history, geography, and politics has led us to the present.
I am inclined to believe Education has a fundamental role to play in enabling the new to be born. This, however, involves rethinking Education by pushing boundaries to bring forth a new shared language and nurture a culture that connects the present to the future?
A Perspective on Education
Education in the Naga context is in dire need of well-meaning interventions. This implies a process that could involve: the education system undergoing self-criticism to enable appropriate and significant transformation by embarking on an intentional and conscious paradigm shift. But bringing about meaningful change means broadening and exploring the understanding of education beyond the existing realm.
The popular assumption reduces education to a linear process of attending formal institutions and acquiring academic knowledge and eventually receiving a degree. However, Education is more than mere acquisition of knowledge. It is a multilayered value-based process that serves as an anchor of enlightenment, transformation and progress which incrementally propels individuals and communities to evolve, develop, and foster a society founded on dignity, respect, fairness, compassion, justice, and harmonious co-existence. This involves a continuous process of learning, unlearning and relearning.
History also informs us that education can become a tool for those in power and authority. For instance, in his book Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Nicholas B. Dirks tells us that colonisation was a cultural project made possible by the production of colonial knowledge that supplanted all other existing knowledge systems. The violence against knowledge and the creation of colonial knowledge was central to the process of one culture consuming and digesting the other.
At the core of all historical processes, education and educational institutions have been primary movers in shaping the discourse of human relations and the relationship between States, which in turn has redefined the educational discourse. It has been a medium of both control and emancipation. Recognising the existence of this internal contradiction and power politics is essential in understanding the role of education in social change and transformation.
So, we need to begin by acknowledging the fact that no education is value-free activity nor a value-free process, and the student is not always the primary beneficiary. In fact, education is value-laden and shapes human behavior, human responses to the world and determines a people’s discourse towards an intended direction. Professor Mĩcere Mugo reminds us that: “education is one of the most political institutions of the superstructure and that as such it cannot be regarded as neutral, in the sense of not having a social vision, mission and agenda.” She adds, education “is created by a political system and the latter ensures that its interests are served.”
The concerns raised in her analysis are validated by Everett Reimer, an education theorist who wrote, “True education is a basic social force. Present social structures could not survive an educated population, even if only a substantial minority were educated […] People are schooled to accept reality. They are educated to create or recreate one.” In other words, education when truly imparted empowers free and conscious beings. By rejecting the status quo, they take responsibility in creating the new.
Ironically, it is the very notion of ‘change’ that causes fear in the hearts of the powerful. And in their pursuit for power, their need to control education and subdue the voices of conscience becomes inevitable. Clearly, one must ask: If ‘education’ is designed to limit imagination, suppress free and critical spirit, and numb one’s capacity for social change, what then is the purpose of education? To be a living, vibrant and creative society, it is essential to rediscover education and to rehumanise it through self-criticism as an act of honesty, courage, and awareness of our responsibilities and will to accomplish the task.
Recovering the Fundamentals
Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, which sparked the changing character of India’s economic policy, multi-national corporations have greater interests at stake in defining patterns of human behavior and responses, which in turn is influencing the education policy. These shifting trends are certainly impacting education in the Naga context as well.
So, for education to be a true catalyst of social change, the process could begin by rediscovering:
1. The three fundamental elements of knowledge: Truth, Morality and Technique. Indigenous philosophy and praxis of knowledge often realised through the praxis of acquiring and upholding, always in the order of Truth (storytelling), Morality (values) and Technique (skills). The Morung as an institution of learning is a good example that is also founded on similar principles. However, in the modern world, truth is no longer talked about because individualism and consumerism govern, the individual's feelings matter more than truth. Since truth no longer upholds morality, and because morals are no longer important, the modern world thrives on technique and technology. In other words, today's education is focused on skills, more than any other factor, thereby disrupting the wholesome organic and evolving nature of knowledge.
2. In 1996 UNESCO in their Learning: The Treasure Within said that education throughout life is based on four pillars:
(i) Learning to be (identity, self-definition, self-confidence, who am I, what am I)
(ii) Learning to know (being objective, critical thinking, creativity and innovation, what is right, self-chosen purpose)
(iii) Learning to do (skills, technique, connecting action of values)
(iv) Learning to live together (life is relational, mutual respect, shared humanity, harmonious co-existence).
Again, modern education has steered away from these pillars. Learning to do has been emphasised with intensity. Consequently, education is reduced to a tool.
In 2021, Noah W. Sobe in Reworking Four Pillars of Education to Sustain the Commons proposed “reorienting the four pillars of education towards building capacity for commoning actions and strengthening the common good,” where he reworked the four pillars of education to be:
1. Learning to study, inquire and co-construct together,
2. Learning to collectively mobilise,
3. Learning to live in a common world and
4. Learning to attend and care.
3. For education to become a pedagogy of transformation, engaging the curriculum is required. As you know, the curriculum is multilayered, within which you have the Taught Curriculum, the Hidden Curriculum, and the Missing Curriculum.
The Taught Curriculum is the actual intended officially recognised course work which is usually State approved. However, very often there is a gap between the curriculum design and implementation depending on an Institution’s or teachers’ personal approach or political position.
The Hidden Curriculum includes all those things in an education setting that send learners messages regarding how they should be thinking and what they ought to be doing. In other words, unconscious processes are transmitted through the schools’ every day, normal activities that are aimed to obey, control, and conform, thereby building a culture of obeying in advance. This greatly influences student’s attitudes towards accumulating knowledge, processing information, skills, practices, and values which may have little to do with the formal curriculum or the teacher’s intention.
The Missing Curriculum refers to what is excluded, very often deliberately. It often constitutes relevant information necessary for developing an informed, active, inclusive, multicultural, and politically conscious citizen. The Missing Curriculum generally includes issues that are seen as ‘controversial’ by the State and may consist of historical narratives or social events, as well as using methods that avoid inclusive, participatory, or democratic procedures. This omission effectively restrains nurturing and developing critical thinking processes.
A Naga recovery process of the fundamentals needs to involve a truthful assessment of the Hidden, Taught and Missing Curriculum. It is by critically reflecting on these three aspects of curriculum that the existing gaps between the formal curriculum, and the historical, political, social, and economic realities need to be identified and addressed.
The recovery of the interplay of these three fundamentals of education is required if education in the Naga context is to be a catalyst of social change. This journey needs to be a continuous process of reflection and action where education is a means of co-learning together towards living a life of shared responsibility, empathy, respect, tolerance, and peace where our common living is a shared experience.
In Lieu of a Conclusion: Education as Social Change
As you have will have noticed, this framework is familiar to you. But when we engage with it through the lens of social change, Education is a form of emancipation. It is about creating a humanising culture so that healing, regeneration, and renewal takes place at all levels of human interaction. In essence only when it leads to a new shared language of humanity, will education result in genuine social change.
Within this analytical framework the teachers are the fulcrum to germinate education into a living methodology of change. This means a pedagogy of creativity that celebrates the uniqueness of each individual and each community where learning is a fluid open organic process. A pedagogy of transformation is imperative in realising the full human worth through an interactive co-operative learning praxis that embraces politics, culture, economics and spirituality in order to consolidate critical thinking and optimise human potential. In essence a decolonising methodology!
Therefore, by way of conclusion, I will share with you Vox Populi – the voice of the people – responses from your fellow teachers about how education can percolate transformation, and how teachers can contribute to the process. These are their voices:
Education Institutes
To some extent, education provides a level playing field for people from different backgrounds to engage objectively in approaching shared issues.
Shift away from the ‘banking system of education’ and promote critical thinking by encouraging young people to question existing norms, define problems and seek solutions and to be part of the solutions.
Strengthen identity, self-confidence while also encouraging objectivity and tolerance for others as part of a global village.
Education can bring about positive changes in gender norms by increasing awareness on consequences of Gender Based Violence, domestic violence and inform of available services and measures to prevent, address and educate.
Independence of educational institutions with full responsible autonomy where students, parents, teachers, and community members share responsibility in decision-making process.
Education institutes as an ecology to celebrate the human experience as an expression of diversity and a source of knowledge and wisdom.
Role of Teachers
• Teachers as agents of transformation assume multifaceted roles in promoting social change — as educators, role models, advocates, and community leaders.
• Social change begins from the heart, and the heart and soul should be rightly and properly nurtured from a young age. Teachers should tailor and deliver the courses in such a way that it adds educational and moral values that supports learning, unlearning and relearning beyond the text, and how to apply in action helps them become better humans at a time when Technology, Social Media and Artificial Intelligence are making human beings mechanised.
• We as teachers need to be well-versed with what's going around us and especially with young people. One concerning issue we face is the influence of social media. We need to educate on the usage of social media platforms as they greatly influence the social norms.
• The context will differ depending on the location or the practices carried out in the school. But a teacher can bring about social changes by living an exemplary life by not showing any kind of discrimination among the students, treating them equally as one.
• Through education, teachers can help communities bridge Tradition and Modernity in adapting to social, political, economic, and technological changes by preserving and also applying positive cultural values, while at the same time promoting a scientific temperament and a progressive outlook.
• Teachers play a crucial role in shaping values, attitudes, and critical thinking among students. This will enable them to orient their thoughts and perspectives towards questioning social injustices and work for equality, democracy, and sustainable development.
• Teachers are among the most powerful agents of social transformation. Beyond imparting academic knowledge, they shape values, attitudes, and worldviews that help individuals engage with society. Teachers do not merely educate minds — they nurture citizens. By promoting critical thinking, empathy, equality, and a sense of civic responsibility, teachers can challenge social injustices and inspire generations to build more inclusive and progressive communities.
• The role of teachers in driving social change is both profound and enduring. By educating hearts as well as minds, they build the intellectual and moral foundations upon which a just and compassionate society can thrive.
• Teachers are a powerful tool to influence young minds and so we need to be aware and keep a check on how we behave ourselves to the students.
• Teachers can be catalysts for social change in our society, as they shape the mindset of younger generations. They can help students understand the importance of unity, honesty and respect for all tribes and communities.
• Teachers carry societal trust and confidence, which includes examining one’s own commitment and conduct of our duties and responsibilities with dedication and sincerity in an exemplary way. A teacher should be able to say to society come and witness what I am doing and not come and listen to what I am saying.
• Teachers need to partner with parents. Parents these days are not helping enough...too engaged in pampering their kids. Teachers’ hands are tied. We are not what we were 15 years back... everything we say or do is scrutinised by the parents and questioned even to the extent of invading our privacy.
• Teachers can contribute by teaching students to value good work and to adapt to life’s changes with a positive outlook and a constructive mindset. They can also encourage the preservation of our culture and promote discussions on social issues such as corruption, substance abuse, unemployment and exploring new ways to earn an honest living, helping students become responsible and active citizens.
• A teacher’s classroom can become a microcosm of a just society — a space where diversity is respected, dialogue is encouraged, and ethical behavior is modelled. When teachers question stereotypes, confront discrimination, and encourage students to think beyond prejudice, they directly contribute to dismantling systemic inequities. Moreover, teachers often extend their influence beyond the classroom by participating in community programs, advocating for educational reforms, and empowering marginalised groups through access to knowledge.
• In this way, teachers are not just transmitters of information — they are catalysts of change, capable of sowing the seeds of transformation that ripple through families, communities, and entire nations.
What was interesting to note was that most of the teachers’ responses touched on the hidden curriculum and not so much on the taught or missing curriculum. It further reminds me of the Greek classification of society into the idiot, the tribe and the citizen. So, does social change happen only when education can mold a citizen? Can only the citizen create the new?
I trust this dialogue will be a place to mobilise new imagination for Education to become a Catalyst of Change.
Reflection shared on during the Nagaland Government Higher Secondary School Employees Association at the Aiko Conference Hall, Dimapur on November 1, 2025
