The bleak new academic scenario
Liberalisation has eroded the institutional capacity to train young people who might pursue liberal values
The other day, a student asked me what
exactly the word ‘liberal’ mean. She wanted to know whether ‘liberalisation’
promotes ‘liberal’ values. She had noticed that institutions of higher
education, which are supposed to promote liberal values, were finding it
difficult to resist ideological and commercial pressures triggered by the
process of economic liberalisation. So, was economic liberalism different from
political liberalism? And what do people mean when they refer to neo-liberal
policies? The questions she was asking could hardly be addressed without
invoking the political economy that has emerged over the last three decades.
When liberalisation of the economy started to
receive common consent in the mid-1980s, few people thought of examining what
it would mean for education. Then, in 1991 came the dramatic announcement of a
new economic policy, accompanied by a package of steps to be taken for ‘structural
adjustment’ of the Indian economy. The purpose of ‘adjustment’ was to
facilitate India’s integration into the global economy. Even then, education
didn’t receive specific attention. Some critics of the new economic policy
expressed anxiety about the consequences of state withdrawal from its prime
role and responsibility in sectors like education and health. The national
policy on education drafted in 1986 had mostly adhered to the established
state-centric view. A major review in the early 1990s vaguely resonated the new
discourse of liberalisation, but offered little evidence of change in the basic
perspective. The Programme of Action, announced in 1992, stopped short of
admitting that the state’s role in education was about to change. Nobody could
imagine at that point that over the following decades, the state’s role in
education would change so much that the Constitution would begin to sound like
rhetoric.
School education
In order to examine what happened, we must
make a distinction between school and higher education. When Prime Minister
P.V. Narasimha Rao spoke about liberalisation as the central theme of the new
economic policy, he also referred to the ‘structural adjustment programme’.
Under this programme, the World Bank offered a ‘safety net’ for primary
education. It meant additional resources and policy guidance to enable the
system to expand its capacity for enrolling children. The District Primary
Education Programme (DPEP), which later mutated into Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan
(SSA), symbolised the ‘safety net’ approach. It was designed to cushion the
harsh effects that ‘structural adjustment’ under liberalisation was expected to
cause in welfare sectors like children’s education and health. The DPEP and SSA
efficiently served this role, creating an ethos in which children’s education
seemed to have become a major priority of the state. The success of these
programmes emboldened the government to push the Right to Education (RTE) law
through Parliament. Governments of many States registered their anxiety over
their capacity to fund the implementation of RTE after the Central assistance
provided under SSA runs dry.
How valid that anxiety was is now amply
clear. All across northern India, the DPEP and SSA have left a radically
expanded system that no one wishes to own. The contractual teachers appointed
on a massive scale to fulfil the ambitious goals of DPEP and SSA are crying
aloud for dignity and stability. Post-RTE, many State governments have drawn on
the services of mega-NGOs and private companies to look after schools. As one
might guess, it is children of the poor who attend these schools. Under the
policy of liberalisation, the state has outsourced these children to non-state
players. Those belonging to the better-off sections of society have moved to
private schools.
Higher education
In higher education, the new economic policy
designed on the principles of liberalisation offered no safety net. From the
beginning, the assumption was that higher education ought to generate its own
resources. An accompanying idea was that higher education should respond to
market demands in terms of knowledge and skills. Over the last three decades,
these two guiding ideas have dented the established system of higher education
in all parts of the country. Both Central and State universities have been
starved of financial resources. Cutting down on permanent staff, both teaching
and non-teaching, has emerged as the best strategy to cope with financial
crunch. A complex set of outcomes, specific to different universities, makes
any general analysis difficult. In some, self-financed courses, mostly
vocational in nature, have provided a means of income. In others, such courses
have been resisted by teacher unions. However, these unions have gradually lost
their power and say because they are broken from within.
A shrinking elite of senior, permanent
teachers is struggling to represent a vast underclass of frustrated and
vulnerable ad hoc teachers. The old idea that an academic career should attract
the best among the young holds no meaning now. Research fellowships have been
used as a cushion to absorb the growing army of unemployed, highly qualified
young men and women. They have no organised voice, and each one of them is
individually too vulnerable to protest against continuous exploitation.
This is the bleak new academic scenario. In
India, the term ‘liberal’ essentially meant a voice representing courage and
wider awareness. Training of such a voice was the main job of colleges and
universities. This function grew under severe constraints in colonial times.
The constraints were both social and cultural, but as electoral democracy
advanced, political constraints gained ground. Politicians of every ideological
persuasion resented the role of colleges and universities in maintaining the
supply of critical voices. These institutions have now been forced to
compromise their role in training the young to speak out. The compromise has
taken over three decades to occur. It is hardly surprising that no political
party shed a tear. So, if we now return to the question my young student had
asked: ‘Does liberalisation promote liberal values?’ The answer is, ‘It
hasn’t.’ Rather, it has eroded our society’s institutional capacity to train
young people who might pursue liberal values by exercising an independent
voice.
Source | The Hindu | 26 May 2017
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @
Knowledge Repository
Khaitan
& Co
Upcoming Event | MANLIBNET 17th
Annual International Conference on 15-16 September 2017 at Jaipuria, Noida,
India
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