Educating the soul

“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is,” said Ivan Illich in his book, Deschooling Society. He went on to accuse the teaching-learning system of confusing “process and substance”. “Once these [process and substance] become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results… The pupil is thereby ‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is ‘schooled’ to accept service in place of value.”

Half a century after Illich wrote those words, the academic situation has only worsened. It is producing robots with specialised expertise but without certain desirable values. This has happened largely because we live in a global system that has given undue importance to wealth and wealth creation. Wealth is the ultimate determiner of success in the globalised world. Wealth is the final goal of life.

There is nothing wrong with creating wealth. On the contrary, wealth is good and let there be more of it. But the services offered by the expert should have other objectives than mere creation of wealth for himself. The medical expert should place the wholesome health of the patient above all other considerations. The engineer should seek perfection in his work, and so on.

We have coaching institutes that fill the brains of our students with more and more knowledge or information that will help them pass the entrance exams which are becoming increasingly tougher. Those who can’t pass those gruesome tests may buy admissions to the institutions of higher learning by bribing. Either way, the admission is quite ‘costly’ and once the learning is over the person is naturally driven to making up for the costs.

Perhaps, the solution lies in altering the global system itself. Instead of wealth, certain basic human values should become the focus of the entire system itself. Even our religions have degenerated into money-minting institutions.

The latest In[di]spire theme #EducationSystem prompted me to write this. Blogger Vartika Goyal suggested the theme wondering whether the present system is encouraging only bookish learning to the detriment of practical skills. At school level, perhaps, the concern is valid because little stress is laid on practical skills at school. However, the higher education levels produce excellent doctors, engineers and other professionals. What it fails to create are good human beings.