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"What is the role of schools in our society? What does the paradigm of education mean to us? Is the prevalent education system meeting our societal needs or only impelling us forward in the rat race for material gains? How can education be used as a critical vehicle for envisaging a democratically vibrant society?"

In the last fifty-five years, there has been a perpetual debate on the system of education prevalent in the country and how it can contribute to the socio-economic welfare. Much has been said and written since then; an array of aims and objectives being outlined customarily in the national-level conventions deliberating the education agenda.
We stand at a threshold where we are trawling for mistaken solutions of obscure problems. The real problem is not a depleted school building or a low attendance rate, the real issue here is the collective mindset towards the total concept of education; the lack of capacity to dismantle and unveil the nefarious groundwork that underlie the institution of schooling. We are still not sure where to head and what to pursue, we are still looking for that one guidepost which will rid us of all our economic, political, social and moral ailments. For most of us, economic growth (translated a job voucher for a multinational) is the ultimate, most sacred aim of education; there is no higher goal beyond. Achieving maximum material gain occupies the chief tier in the hierarchy of one's personal goals or for that matter collective aspiration of the society. It is a deep-rooted apathy, an heirloom of colonial times, a sad legacy we cannot get rid of. And we pass on the bequest to our youth; we give them gifts of competition, envy and an utter sense of inadequacy with their own caliber.

The Reality Underlying Schooling
Schooling ignores, negates, and demeans intelligences, knowledge systems, making-meaning systems, and learning styles that do not fit within its parameters. For example, a number of multiple intelligences have been identified by cognitive scientists/psychologists. These include intrapersonal, interpersonal, logical, spatial, natural, verbal, musical, kinesthetic, spiritual, emotional, creative, etc. Yet, schooling denies the existence of all of these intelligences in each and everyone of us. Furthermore, its emphasis on superficial info-knowledge - cramming us full of rote facts and mindless trivia - makes a mockery of what it means to be fully human. Nor is there any real space for creativity, for local languages/expressions, nor for exploring a variety of relationships or other kinds of settings.1

For us education is synonymous with schooling. There is no other definition. All parameters, which fulfill the promise of a 'bright prosperous future', come under the slogan of education. So immersed are we in the materialistic conquest that we deem the institution of 'schooling' as being the sole, unrivaled agency of producing civilized, progressive individuals, who in reality are culturally illiterate, all out to join the bandwagon of power-status seekers.
Our schools suffer from numerous explicit and far too many implicit problems. If this segregation is further classified we can easily distinguish the elusive line between the two peripheries.

The Explicits: This is stating the obvious, which we have been doing repeatedly over the last five decades.

Our schools lack the basic infrastructure: dearth of proper buildings, classrooms, water, electricity and sanitation facilities.
We don't have well-trained and committed teachers: teachers need skills and motivation to impart education.
The textbooks belong to the preceding generations: we are being taught the same thing as our parents and grand parents.
Lack of financial resources: how can we improve the schools when we don't have money? The children are poor and the State does not provide us with adequate funds.
Lack of supervision and monitoring mechanisms: no system of accountability for implementation of performance enhancing measures.
Lack of concerted efforts on behalf of the government to improve the state of education: despite sky-high claims, no substantial actions are taken at the policy level.

It must be noted that the purpose of highlighting the above-mentioned issues in this context is to draw a line between the too-obvious issues and the understated ones and not to project them as insignificant in any way.

The Implicits: Seldom stated and never left to critical public opinion, it is high time we become receptive to the real causes of the problem rather than stray in the endless circle of symptoms. The whole education phenomenon of our country rests on quantitative measures with qualitative outcomes playing a trivial role. We do not value the worth of shaping a long-term vision for the most important need of the society. As a consequence, our course of action determining every aspect of the education system (curriculum, teachers, students) is directed by a myopic vision for the future. Seldom the school has introduced a course teaching us how to resist oppression or how to value our own history and culture or for that matter how to work collectively for the welfare of the humanity. These are imparted as intangible lessons always secondary to courses rendering partial knowledge about a foreign history and language at the cost of undermining and devaluing our own culture, history and language specific subjects.

The underlying values of the current system of education are geared towards a single pronged goal of achieving accelerated economic growth by producing a breed of degree-holders (not scholars) to take the country full-throttle in achieving its dream of being a 'progressive' 'developed' nation. By steadily multiplying the number of education institutions each year, we falsely believe the realization of this dream could come through and yet it is not even remotely happening. Not only the literacy rate staggers low but also the status of employment opportunities, despite the mushrooming schools, colleges and business institutions all over.

The Colonial spill over: Our present day schooling system is one of the many (but most important in the order of destructive leftovers) remnants of our former British masters. It is imperative to understand where our present day schooling has its roots and why does it exist, as it does, in the present shape and form? Leafing through the annals of subjugation in British India, we can trace the advent of Western forms of learning to 1834 when Lord Macaulay stated in his famous Minute:
"The great objective of the British Government should be the promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India and that all the funds appropriated for the purpose of education would best be employed on English education alone".

This resolution laid the foundations to promote Western thoughts and cultural practices among the Indians of the Subcontinent and so began the still surviving tradition of demeaning our indigenous languages, culture and the richest heritage in the world.

In order to understand the colonial system of education, we must briefly dwell on the ideology, concept and implications of colonization:

The process of colonization involves one nation or territory taking control of another nation or territory either through the use of force or by acquisition. According to expert opinion and research, as a by-product of colonization, the colonizing nation implements its own form of schooling within their colonies. Two scholars on colonial education, Gail P. Kelly and Philip G. Altbach, help define the process as an attempt "to assist in the consolidation of foreign rule." Often the implementation of a new education system leaves those who are colonized with a lack of identity and a limited sense of their past. The indigenous history and customs once practiced and observed slowly slip away. The colonized become hybrids of two vastly different cultural systems. Colonial education creates a blurring that makes it difficult to differentiate between the new, enforced ideas of the colonizers and the formerly accepted native practices. Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, author of Decolonising the Mind, believes that "education, far from giving people the confidence in their ability and capacities to overcome obstacles or to become masters of the laws governing external nature as human beings tends to make them feel their inadequacies and their ability to do anything about the condition of their lives".

In short,
I. Colonization existed to exploit abundant natural resources in order to feed European and North American consumerism.
II. In order for the colonizers to exploit for labor they first needed to establish themselves as the authority. Because authority traditionally rested in the hands of community leaders or those well-versed with indigenous knowledge and wisdom, the colonizers needed to begin dismantling cultural traditions. The main tool for doing this was the colonial school.
III. The colonial school was set up to instill the values and practices of the colonizers on the indigenous people so that the indigenous people would open up their land and their minds to market economies. In order to establish control over these economies, the colonizers had to first establish control over the socialization of the people. As a result, the colonial schools began socializing the children in ways that conflicted with their traditions. The students were taught to despise their own language. They were taught that everything in their culture was inferior to the colonial culture. Students were taught in school that their beliefs were primitive and superstitious. As a result, they began to lose faith and respect for the elders as authority figures, and began to see the colonizers as the authority.
If we analyze our schooling system in the light of the above, we can easily draw similarities and conclude that we are still holding on to a system of education, which has nothing to do with our indigenous culture and forms of learning.

Our schools do not teach us to be a member of our local community/society.
We learn to read, write and speak things that don't fit in our indigenous knowledge system/life.
With the disappearance of traditional culture, the knowledge that once enabled us to be self-reliant has also gone.
We are painfully dependent on the First World countries to provide us with such everyday needs as food, clothing, and shelter.
The system of rote learning (memorizing subjects usually alien to inherent way of life) has replaced the local participatory and age-old systems of learning through the local environment (family-oriented methods practiced in the past)

Schools as institutions of career training: The culture of schooling drills into each child that there is only one definition of success - to make it to the top of the status-power-control ladder and dominate others. Of course, to get to the top, one must compete. Pitching child against child, schooling reinforces the notion that life is a huge race against every other individual and if one wants to win, they better be ready to fight against and crush everybody else.2

The purpose of education has been reduced to being well equipped to grab the best job opportunity from the very limited pool of available prospects. Higher learning goals, learning to be a better human and working towards the collective growth of the society, have been marginalized. The educational institutions of our country follow an isolationist curriculum. If one wants to be a doctor, she/he will only study medicine and cannot pursue any social science/ humanities or arts course in the formal setting of the medical university. Imagine those who pursue the world's noblest profession are not taught the magnitude and values of the social responsibility they are about to undertake. Imagine a nascent nuclear scientist not being formally taught the social consequences that his expertise could wipe out the entire human race. The importance of subjects like philosophy, education, religion, and literature is always undermined since they are not 'in demand', they do not ensure a swift hike on the ladder of material success.
Learning for the sake of learning is alien to our students. Shilpa Jain and Selena George elucidate this fact in their paper 'Exposing Illusions', "…not only are jobs being eliminated due to government and corporate down-sizing, but without a 'jack' or a 'donation' (i.e., influence or a bribe), a job is largely unattainable. And since schooling has denied youth knowledge and practice of traditional livelihoods - or has conditioned them to believe that such activities were below them - they are left with few other options to sustain themselves. Thus, for many, schooling has failed to deliver on the promise of 'better life chances.' In fact, the statistical and positive co-relation between education and employment/equity/poverty alleviation/health/democracy is seriously questionable in the face of grassroots realities. What is evident is that over the past 50 years, growing levels of school enrollment/completion have been accompanied by overall increases in inequality, unemployment, poverty, vulnerability (political, economic, social, physical)."

The content of the curriculum does not teach us about our own culture, history or language: Helena Norberg-Hodge beautifully expresses this notion in the context of Ladakh where she has worked for many years: "Modern education not only ignores local resources, but worse still makes Ladakhi children think of themselves and their culture as inferior. They are robbed of their self-esteem. We need to keep in mind that it is true everywhere. Just recently I heard a Ladakhi teacher saying to her Ladakhi students, 'Our best poet is Wordsworth. Now lets read some Somerest Maugham.' The same thing is happening in Bali, Africa, South America. The fact is that Wordsworth is not their poet. The distance between this English poet and Ladakh or Bhutan or Bali buries their own history and heritage. It's making their heritage and resources invisible. Everything that they represent - and this is particularly true of earth-based or indigenous culture - is seen as primitive and backward. It inevitably is within this spectrum that we have created of progress, meaning away from nature, away from spontaneity away from the uniqueness of individuals, of a particular culture and place. All the time towards a type of monoculture standardization which is inherently eurocentric." As Helena said, it is the same everywhere.

Corporatization of education: According to Henry Giroux, corporate values threaten the democratic purposes of public education. He further elaborates, "Our youth are absorbing the most dangerous aspects of the commercialization of everyday life. Within corporate models of schooling, young people are now subject to the same processes of 'corporatization' that have excluded all but the most profitable and most efficient from the economic life of the nation. No longer representing a cornerstone of democracy, schools within an ever-aggressive corporate culture are reduced to new investment opportunities, just as students represent a captive market and new opportunities for profits. And the stakes are high. Education becomes less a force for social improvement than a force for commercial investment. Such education promises a high yield and substantive returns for those young people privileged enough to have the resources and the power to make their choices matter - and it becomes a grave loss for those who lack the resources to participate in this latest growth industry.

It can certainly not be concluded that the too-obvious problems facing our education system are in any way underrated. The inherent reality is that these are so much overestimated that the authentic origins of the real problem never see limelight. As a result we, the torchbearers of universal education, fail to understand the full reality of their impact on our society. We are oblivious to the fact that these schools are the native grounds of promoting evils like inequality, oppression and maintenance of status quo. Far from fulfilling the promise of 'building a free, just, and tolerant society', schooling actually encourages inequality, injustice, and exploitation. It reinforces many of the oppressive structural aspects of society. In fact, the least children learn from school (irrespective of whether they go or not) is that they are not as good as other children who have more, in terms of money, power and status.

It is a vicious cycle. Access to the Game and movement up the power-status-control ladder depends upon one's academic qualifications, which in turn depend upon the level of wealth and power one has to obtain those qualifications. The 'head start' is greatest for those who have paid the most for their academic degrees (i.e., those who attend elite schools and universities).3

What can we do as Educators and Community?
Our present system of education (read schooling) can be aptly understood in the light of Paulo Friere's 'banking' method of education in which passive learners receive deposits of pre-selected, ready-made knowledge. The learner's mind is seen as an empty vault into which the riches of approved knowledge are placed. The 'culture of silence' which dominates our institutions need to be shattered through collective efforts at the individual, social and political level. Dialogue and participation from all sections of the society is necessary to bring about a sustained change in the learning mechanisms and institutions of our country. Not only a transformation in the curriculum is needed but more importantly a critical shift in the collective attitude and vision towards education is required. The decision makers must redefine the concept of education and recreate a new set of values and objectives in harmony with our own cultural context and heritage so that the culture of schooling can be transformed. This will not only help us learn how to value our local resources and culture for self-sufficiency and progress (which benefits us as a people) but also facilitate us to work collectively in the larger movement to transform the world.

Children should not be merely taught abstract pieces of knowledge to be memorized for exams, but instead knowledge that is necessary in everyday life. This knowledge could extend into three practical areas: social duties, social values, and spiritual beliefs. The process of learning should instill in children values of unity and collectiveness with the rest of the members so that they know it is their duty to look out for the welfare of their people.
Parents, elders and care givers should be able to influence what is taught in the schools, and how it could be taught to be meaningful for life.
Schools should make indigenous knowledge - local knowledge of the environment and the culture and history, and the social structure - the focus of education.
School and the community should not be viewed as separate institutions of learning. Infact they should be a source of mutual interdependence for the learner.
Stories, fables, and legends are commonly used by indigenous peoples all over the world to communicate and transmit knowledge systems from one generation to the next. Because knowledge about the traditional institutions of customary law, land tenure systems, inheritance rights, and rituals are preserved in local stories and legends, the lessons based on these stories can promote cultural identity, as well being as a means for children to learn to read and write

Henry Giroux, one of the leading critical educators, suggests the following in his article 'Education Incorporated':

As educators, it is important to confront the march of corporate power by resurrecting a noble tradition, in which education is affirmed as a political process that encourages people to identify themselves as more than consumers, and democracy as more than a spectacle of market culture.
Given the current assault on educators at all levels of schooling, educators must also struggle against the ongoing trend to reduce teachers to the role of technicians who simply implement prepackaged curriculums and standardized tests as part of the efficiency-based relations of market democracy and consumer pedagogy.

In the face of the growing corporatization of schools, educators should also organize to challenge commodified forms of learning in the public schools. This suggests producing and distributing resources that educate teachers and students to the dangers of a corporate ethos that treats schools as extensions of the marketplace and students as potential consumers. In addition to raising critical questions about advertising, educators might also consider addressing the long-standing tension between corporate culture and noncommercial values in order to contest the growing tendency to subordinate democratic values to market values. At the level of policy, public schools should ban advertising, merchandising, and commercial interests. And educators should establish a bill of rights identifying and outlining the range of noncommercial relations that can be used to mediate between the public schools and the business world.