Education: Personal goals attuned to social progress

by Susantha Hewa

Education, for an overwhelming majority of students and their parents, is the one and only way for gainful employment, financial success, upward mobility and social recognition. Yet, it is just where education is made to function in its most utilitarian gear, grooming the individual for a livelihood. Education is also a handy tool for the fashioning of a cultured person who can contribute towards both individual and social wellbeing. However, in an exam-oriented, competitive system, which is primarily designed to provide workers to run the economy, the above broader function of education naturally gets underrated and overlooked. This has produced two factions debating about the primary function of education: whether it should prepare individuals for jobs or guide them to be refined citizens, who can contribute towards social progress.

It’s no good eternally arguing whether education is for jobs or, alternatively, for making students to be good, intelligent citizens as well as furthering overall social progress. We often seem to think that these targets are mutually exclusive, which may not be the case.

Those who favour job-oriented education seem to consider ‘inculcating values’ as too naïve and wishy-washy. Conversely, those who overemphasize education’s role of value-inculcation seem to dismiss job-oriented education as starkly materialistic. Both parties seem to look at these two broad aims of education with some bias. However, the fact is, those seemingly opposite aims need not be contradictory. Education can be made to meet both these ends: employability and the inculcation of values for individual fulfilment and social cohesion. There is nothing to prevent proficient employees being broad-minded citizens and vice versa. What we need is the political will and the pooling of expertise of all interested parties including educationists, economists, psychologists, administrators, academics and professionals of arts and sciences to achieve both personal and collective goals.

In fact, education plays a crucial role in promoting self-fulfillment as well as social advancement. All beings are naturally self-centered and continuously look for opportunities for self-gain. Hence, it’s not strange that today, for each person, education appears to be one of the safest means of achieving their personal goals – wealth, comfort and social recognition. There is nothing reprehensible at all in it. After all, as a means of achieving those desirable things in life, education is more society-friendly than most other options available, specially, for those who don’t rely much on education: deceit, profiteering, theft, money laundering, sale of liquor and dangerous drugs and, last but not least, dabbling in politics. So how can we condemn those who pursue education for moving from “rags to riches”?

One may say that education should not be seen as a magic formula for prosperity and that learning is too sacred a pursuit to be regarded as a key to material success, power and social status. However, such a view often fails to recognize that education, in its different forms, serves as the best bet for securing a decent livelihood for many people in a civilised world and also, that it has taken the place of the brute force characteristic of primitive life which happened to be a relentless struggle for survival. As such, if one condemns education being used as a way to personal success, one may do it at one’s own peril, for the alternative paths available may turn out to be starkly antisocial.

In fact, our aversion towards higher education being used as a way of producing “employable graduates” seems to come from our disapproval of it being used to sustain a profit-oriented economy which divides education as ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ according to how it serves to maximise profit of a handful of elites while leaving an overwhelming majority in dire poverty. Further, we forget that ‘employability’ assumes that derogatory sense only in a context where the economy absorbs graduates to maximise profits of a few.

There would be nothing sinful about being groomed to be employable, if we happened to be living in a world where economic growth were an indicator of individual happiness and social wellbeing. George Monbiot, the author of “Out of the wreckage; a new politics for an age of crisis” captures the sense of cynicism of the average citizen living in a consumerist society, when he says, “Defined by the market, defined as a market, human society should be run in every respect as if it were a business, its social relations reimagined as commercial transactions; people redesignated as human capital”. The idea of ‘employable graduate’ should not be thrown out with the noxious bathwater of extreme competition and individualism.

The low estimation of humanities and social sciences in higher education is not an indication of their so-called irrelevance. The discriminatory attitude cannot be easily got rid of since it is the corporate interests that decide their ‘value’ in a competitive society. It is due to this that the disgruntled voices about arts stream subjects being neglected continue to fall on deaf ears. It would be an uphill task to raise them to the level of the subjects favoured by the business world. So far as the economic growth of a country remains to be just impressive statistics on paper without them reflecting the physical and mental wellbeing of the common people, the humanities and social sciences are going to look lacklustre in the eyes of those who call the shots.

Questioning, researching, analyzing and critical thinking that are often marketed to assert the importance of the so-called ‘soft subjects’, as against hard sciences, are not likely to cut much ice with those who want education to simply spawn workers, including professionals, to keep the economy going and huge profits flowing into their hands. In such a setting that workers, both skilled and unskilled, are not paid for their questioning or critical thinking skills cannot make headlines.

Among the whole gamut of worrisome issues in education are: resource-depleted rural schools, heavy workload for both students and teachers, obsolete teaching methods, long school hours, dependency on tuition industry, lack of opportunities for students for recreation, disproportionate homework, tedium, teachers burdened with redundant paperwork, obsession with continuous testing and crippling exams, insufficient scope for creative work, aesthetics, sports, soft skills, segregation of schools on ‘ethnicity’ and lack of timely upgrading of content and teaching methods., etc. All these problems cannot be separated from economy and politics. It would be a hard job for those who are sincerely concerned about using education’s many capacities for promoting good and eliminating vice, because education cannot be prevented from being putty in the hands of those with personal and political agendas.

Obviously, those who are ensconced in power and affluence cannot be expected to suffer education serving in any way to undermine their positions. Prof. Alvin Toffler in his book “The Third Wave” (sequel to his book “The Future Shock”) writes, “schools produced, just as factories do, employees who could fit into the slots of the hierarchical structure of industrial societies by programming them through a ‘covert curriculum’ to be compliant, dutiful and diligent”. This may not be far from the truth, because greedy politicians and business magnates who control the economy will always want the prevailing system to go on with the least resistance. They wouldn’t want to tap the full potential of education to prompt students to question and challenge anything established including the present economic order favouring the elites.

The fact is, our education system primarily appeals to the individual’s sense of self-aggrandisement in a society, in which being educated is to become humiliated if what you have studied has no market value. Unlike the students of science, IT and commerce streams, the graduates of history, sociology, literature, etc. cannot help business magnates to fatten on their profits. Therefore, education in humanities and social sciences, which doesn’t equip students to find their convenient niches in a profit-oriented economy, wouldn’t be favourably viewed at all by the major players.

Therefore, it would be futile to think that enhancing the quality of education will bring about a just society unless the natural desires of the student are aligned with education’s capacity for uncovering the essential link between individual happiness and social progress. In other words, the more ambitious the student is to realize his dreams, the more momentum it should give for social advancement.

The present situation of arts stream subjects inexorably receiving stepmotherly treatment cannot be changed until there remains a strict division between arts and science subjects. And, it is only when the so-called economic growth is made to serve all the people and not a lucky few that the society will be able to create meaningful space for humanities and social sciences to play a role in society as important as the hard sciences. It goes without saying that the economy should be made people-friendly instead of remaining self-serving and profit-friendly. In his book “Ruptures in Sri Lanka’s Education: Genesis, present status and reflections”, Prof. Panduka Karunanayake correctly points out that “when local industries pick up and overseas ones open up to our workers, qualification inflation will ease – educationists can then fruitfully focus on the broader issues in education, including the inculcation of civic values, etc.” Although he is optimistic that the growth of economy, in its present form itself, will pave the way for educationists to step in to play a broader and more important role in education, the point he emphasizes here, among other things, is the importance of harnessing education to realise full human potential instead of it being woefully underutilised to providing livelihoods. However, what is undeniable is that what role we get our economy to play – whether we leave it in the hands of those VIPs for money making or use its massive potential to primarily serve society – will have a lasting impact on the whole education system.

It is only within a humane model of governance, which makes economic interests subservient to human interests that education can be made to foster social cohesion rather than furthering division and estrangement.