Dr Brainerd Prince
We live in the world of edutech and edubiz, where technology and business have effectively taken over the field of education. However, the question that begs answering is – have they made education truly more effective?In our modern world, if the traditional model of education was centred around Non-profits and the love of knowledge, then this new model focuses on profits and careers. Perhaps this is a good thing that has happened to education, even as it languished under outdated modes of teaching and non-inspirational pedagogies. However, by turning tech-savvy with a business plan does not necessarily address the entropy and destruction that the education field has suffered. Yes, there is a problem with education, but neither technology nor a business plan with a focus on careers and placements, can on their own make these problems go away.
What are the central problems plaguing education in our society today? The way I see it, there are four main problems with which contemporary education is grappling. They have to do with(a) the educational telos, (b) the role of the pedagogue, (c) the pedagogical system, and of course (d) the perception of studentship. Let’s explore these problems even as we seek to respond to them.
We rightly begin with the educational telos or the ultimate purposes of contemporary education.To what purposes do we educate? There was a time when both academics and their schools lived in ivory towers outside the city and pontificated about city life. They maintained a careful distance from regular city life in order to get perspective as well as to be able to offer an objective reflection and critique of life in the city. It all began with Plato setting up the Academy outside the city of Athens, and from then on, we find this trend of educational institutions setting up their campuses outside the city gates. The life of reflection and learning was seen as an end in itself, not as a means to other ends, particularly political or business. This was also the case with the Indian ashrama system where the gurukul was in the forest away from the humming life of towns and villages. However, today, the telos or the ends of education has become to provide for the job market. In one sense, education has been re-integrated within the city walls and it is meant to earn its bang for the buck by making its products valuable assets to city life. While this re-integration should be celebrated, one must also pause to reflect – is there a cost in making this move? This is where I advocate a fine balance. Education must continue to have its main goals of imparting knowledge and developing cognitive skills while equally building capacities within the students to enable them to use their educational training to make an effective contribution as part of the workforce. It will do the city well, if the telos of education is continually kept at imparting a life of reflection and learning while its utility in the marketplace is equally maintained.
What has also drastically changed is the role of the pedagogue or the job of the teacher. The move to a learner-centric approach was a welcome corrective to traditional non-performing teachers. The self-importance of traditional teachers had made them lazy and lethargic and they continued teaching, more like dictating, out of their unrevised and outdated old notes. They were preparing students to ‘pass’ exams and get certificates and degrees. This made the graduated student completely unfit for life in the city, leave alone for the job market. Hence the move to learner-centric approaches. While this rightly clipped the wings of lazy and lethargic teachers, it did not resolve the problem of bad pedagogues. The goal should have been to re-imagine teachership and the role of pedagogues. All ancient education stories, without fail, have names of great teachers attached to them. Actually, all these educational stories are stories about the great masters, be it of Socrates, or the Buddha or Sankara, or the hundreds of other teachers and masters who have walked on the face of this earth. What did these great masters have that our present-day teachers do not possess? Not just knowledge or a few intellectual tricks, but an entire way of life that they had worked out and whose success they had experienced in their own lives. In this sense, I have deep respect for chefs or other craftspeople who also teach. They are experts of their craft and they teach out of their huge wealth of experience. It is this combination of the reflective life with the city life that makes a master great. Just imagine Aristotle, he not only wrote the greatest texts on political philosophy but also tutored Alexander the Great, one of the greatest emperors of all times! Aristotle did not just have theoretical knowledge, but knew how that knowledge would play out in the real world. Similarly, Dronacharya and Bhismapitamah, possessed knowledge that was both deeply theoretical as well as meaningfully practical. Then, students will equally learn about both the reflective life and the city life, and how to be successful in both.
This brings us to pedagogy – the teaching methods. We live in a world of LMS, Moodle, Google Classrooms, SDS et al. And the list continues. Absolutely nothing wrong in using these tools to enhance the education experience. I am all for using technology to strengthen and make more efficient the educating process. But let’s not forget, they can never replace the unique ‘act of teaching’ that a teacher is required to perform. This brings us to the question about what exactly constitutes teaching? Is teaching an act of transmitting facts so that the learner learns the facts? Perhaps we need to ask a slightly different question – what constitutes learning? Of course, learning includes committing facts and knowledge bytes to memory. However, learning cannot be reduced to merely committing facts to memory. The learning experience constitutes of much more. In some sense it entails the entirety of the human life in a microcosm. The entire human existence is about enacting efficient change through decision making in order to transform both oneself and the world. Therefore, it is about possessing the necessary skills required for transforming oneself and the world around us. It is this skill-set that a student needs to learn so that the student can do life optimally and successfully – not merely in the job market, but also in every other domain of life. If this is what learning must result in, then how should teaching look like? Socrates, one of the greatest teachers the world has seen, used the dialectical style of teaching, by simply asking questions. His entire style of causing learning was by asking a series of questions that led the learner into wisdom. In the Indian tradition we have the dialogical style or the Samvada style employed by great teachers like the 11th century Acharya Udayana where different intellectual traditions dialogued and debated with each other in the search for truth and understanding. The teacher and his pedagogical approach play a hugely indispensable role in causing effective learning in the students.
This brings us to the final problem about the perception of studentship. In our present world, when education has been branded as a service offered by a service provider, the student naturally becomes a customer and a consumer. However, educational products are very different from other consumer products and services. It is intrusive, and prevails authoritatively over its customers, even if it is the customer who is paying for the service. This is very similar to medical products and services that we consume. Therefore, the perception of students as customers has serious downsides just like perceiving medical patients as customers both for the service providers as well as for the students. Let me reiterate, I am not against businesses offering educational products. Business houses probably possess a higher skillset to run efficiently and deliver quality educational products. However, in terms of educational services, it must definitely be seen much more than purely a business transaction. It presupposes that the institution possesses product knowledge and pedagogical skillset necessary to cause learning, and that the students are willing to put their trust on the teachers and institution for their personal growth and learning. The student must be perceived much more richly than merely a customer or client, as well as the institution must perform much more than a business providing educational products and services. It must view students as mentees or disciples or even as apprentices, who eagerly look up to their pedagogues and the institutions that house them as spaces of inspiration, training and learning.
If the telos of education is more than manufacturing a labour force for the market, then the role of pedagogues, approaches to pedagogy and perceptions of studentship need to evolve and be transformed for our time and age. In our technological and business-driven world, the aim is not to take education back to its primitive roots, rather to efficiently integrate and assimilate the technological and business world in the processes of education, so that ultimately the business of causing learning continues on effectively by producing all-rounded students who continue to make our world a better place to live in for the future generations.
