One Pitch, One Hand.

If you’ve lived in Madras and if you’ve ever committed the grave error of even gently nudging an English-speaking gent whilst commuting, you’ve probably been asked this question. The implicit assumption is that if you were educated and if you really did have something in your cranial cavity, you would be more mindful of venturing into the other person’s space. Inadvertent as the trespass may have been, it is widely understood that such heinous acts are caused due to a lack of formal education and not, well, because of the laws of physics that apply when the bus driver decides to step on the brakes.

This question was posed to me when I was in Chennai recently and it got me thinking about what we expect out of those who have had access to formal education.

Over the last year or so, I have had the peculiar misfortune of having to prepare for and write a whole bunch of entrance exams designed to help me get admitted into a business school. The idea, at least in principle, was to acquire an MBA from a ‘reputed’ institution which would, in turn, ensure that I found a job that paid handsomely. You’ve got to concede that there’s essentially nothing wrong with that. It’s another matter that the MBA wasn’t what I really wanted to do. But then, money is important, yada yada yada and therefore, an MBA makes more sense than, let’s say, a Masters degree in a particular subject. So, you learn to dismiss your instinct as a flight of fancy and move on to make the choice that provides the ‘best return on investment.’

But really, is this all that education is designed to do - provide a suitably massive return on your investment of time and money? While I have no qualms in admitting that it makes little sense to spend hard-earned money without setting expectations as to the kind of returns sought, it pains me a great deal to see that we have allowed ourselves to be conditioned into thinking of education simply as a well-placed punt designed to garner maximum bang for every buck.

It is then instructive to note that we have a large number of ‘educated’ people who spit on the road. Some of these ‘educated’ people starve and abuse their domestic help. They ask for books and cinema to be banned, when it offends them. They believe that, by virtue of being ‘educated’, they no longer need to participate in the nation’s democratic election process. The ‘educated’ also rape occasionally and when they don’t, they obliquely agree with the thoroughly rational hypothesis that skimpy clothes are but an invitation to sex offenders at large. What the ‘educated’ run, they also ruin - <insert scam name here>.

In ensuring that the metric of evaluating the effectiveness of education is based solely on the employment opportunity that it results in, we are steadily a creating a class of citizenry that is conditioned to stay within the constructs of an artificially-created prestige and is consequently insensitive to all that ails society today. Currently, our grand plan seems to be ensure that all of these people move abroad, learn how to be better citizens and return eventually to demonstrate/cause change, while tendering remittances to bulge homeland purses in the interim. Fool-proof as it may seem, something tells me that this isn’t exactly the best example of a sustainable practice.

If you ask me, we need to be taught empathy. We need to be taught how to convince ourselves wholly that we are all, well, equal. We need to be taught how to resolve internal conflicts without killing ourselves and external conflict, without killing others. We need lessons in respect, participation and acceptance. We need to re-establish what patriotism really means. We need to make honour more honourable. But really, can this be done? Can all of this even be taught to those who haven’t, well, learnt? And more importantly, aren’t these things expected to be intended side-effects of undergoing formal education?

We’ve got no answers. Out of syllabus, these are.