IMAGINE a hypothetical situation. The ruling regime, not particularly known for the art of listening, has taken the demands of the Cockroach Janta Party seriously.
Imagine the Union minister concerned has regained his conscience, and chosen to resign. Imagine officials of the National Testing Agency have begun to work honestly and sincerely. Imagine the recurrence of paper leaks has become a thing of the past and standardised tests like NEET are conducted smoothly. Does it then necessarily indicate that in such a hypothetical scenario, everything will be fine with the dominant discourse of education? The answer is a categorical ‘no’.
In fact, we need to go deeper to understand that the sickness that characterises the prevalent culture of education is not merely about the recurrence of paper leaks, or the irresponsibility of the authorities concerned.
First, it is high time some of us began speaking boldly that the very logic of the MCQ-centric standardised tests like NEET, JEE or CUET is highly problematic. In fact, the very act of preparing for these standardised tests, I have no hesitation in saying, conditions one’s mind and limits one’s intellectual horizons. As you open your eyes, you can see, for instance, a student of physics refusing to go to the physics lab in his school as he prefers to be taught by a coaching centre strategist and trained in the technique of ticking the ‘correct’ answer on the OMR sheet as quickly as possible.
When education becomes merely a training for standardised tests, schools as sites of rigorous learning become increasingly irrelevant. Everything that could have made school education vibrant and joyful becomes irrelevant — the curiosity that science experiments in physics and biology labs generates; the joy of reading and touching new books in school libraries; the rigour of classroom discussions; and the thrill of sports, music and theatre.
Instead, what remains is the harsh reality of ‘dummy schools’, the tyranny of coaching centres, and the angst of physically exhausted and spiritually wounded teenagers who get hardly any time for playing football, reading a good novel or going for a long walk.
Moreover, the recurrence of mock tests through which coaching gurus continually measure students’ speed and skill destroys their wonder years. No wonder, they exist with the never-ending anxiety of proving their worth before their parents, for whom the success of their children is their prestige value. In fact, this mode of training, creates a highly mechanised and regimented mind that becomes completely incapable of living with ambiguities, complexities and subtleties.
Not only that. All sorts of mental health issues — depression, loneliness and suicidal tendencies — confront this anxious generation. Meanwhile, India’s shadow education system — I mean coaching factories — continues to do a pretty good business.
Second, the fact is that a standardised test like NEET or JEE is never neutral. In a class- and caste-divided society like ours which is characterised by all sorts of inequalities based on social, cultural and economic capital, there is no fair race. One need not be a social scientist to understand that unlike a poor or lower middle-class girl from a rural government school, a student from a privileged family who could afford special training from a branded coaching centre has already won the race. Even if occasionally, you and I hear the extraordinary tale of the son of a cab driver or the daughter of a poor farmer cracking a high-stakes test like NEET or JEE, the naked truth is that all these examinations, far from being value-neutral, continue to reproduce the prevalent social and economic inequality.
Accept it: the idea of a perfect race is a myth, and hence, there is no reason to legitimise this system through the logic of meritocracy.
And finally, this entire pathology cannot be adequately understood without looking at the way the instrumental logic of neoliberalism has robbed education of its emancipatory potential. Education has been reduced to a kind of training for jobs that enhance the economic productivity of the techno-corporate machine. Not surprisingly, we are witnessing the constant devaluation of liberal arts and humanities; we have almost taken it for granted that a nation doesn’t require good historians, anthropologists, philosophers, artists, journalists or film-makers. It seems the nation needs only docile engineers or techno-managers who can serve their corporate bosses without the slightest trace of critical thinking or greedy doctors who can join private super-specialty hospitals and sell health or healing as a costly commodity.
No wonder, the unidimensional importance the aspiring class attaches to these profit-making careers (often measured in terms of placements and salary packages) has reduced tests like NEET and JEE into a life-and-death issue.
Well, it is good to see that the Cockroach Janta Party, far from existing as a mere virtual sensation, has made its physical presence felt. Yet, youngsters who constitute the backbone of this party need to go deeper to understand the gravity of the crisis that characterises our education system. They ought to think politically and sociologically and realise that Gen Z, far from being a homogenised media-savvy/ English-speaking group, also constitutes a Dalit boy from a slum in Mumbai or a tribal girl from a remote village in Jharkhand, and they could never think of even preparing for tests like NEET or JEE.
