A girl walks through the agriculture lands in a village in the north of India to her school. Happily she sings as she walks. Little does she know about the men lurking in the shadows, waiting to pounce on her?
They do, and as the helpless girl battles the men four times a strong than her, one of them films the struggle and her defeat as she is raped again and again. The film is then edited and sold with some men earning millions through it for there are thousands of men around the world who love to watch school going girls being raped in uniform. One rape and a whole village would stop the girls from school. The access to education is dead for the girls. They have no choice. Often personal abuse is heaped on people from minorities by other pupils and even teachers (Hannum, Park, & Butler, 2010). Another space is an urban set up where the girls are dropped to the schools in expensive cars by parents. They have security in the form of parents, money and reputed schools that they go into. They have access to all that they need and can go anywhere in the world to study and live. They have choice.
A child in southern part of India, born and brought up in native language, struggles to understand the math textbook written in English.
The child speaks and writes only the native language, Tamil. But the textbook by the state government is the one used nationally, irrespective of the native language spoken or the issues within the state. Books ignore the history or culture of minority groups. Schooling is often only available in the dominant, official language rather than in mother tongues spoken by minorities (Curtis, 2009). While children studying in the English dominant urban set up can move through the English language textbooks freely and move on to a self sustained lives, those in native speaking spaces struggle as they try to bridge the language they speak and the language considered privileged in India.
Caste system is abundant in my country.
There is low, middle and upper caste. The upper caste is free to move around while the lower caste is bound by rules. They are the minorities, protected by the government but not safe in the social milieu. Educational discrimination against minorities perpetuates poverty, depriving people of playing a meaningful role in society (Curtis, 2009). In India, around 41 per cent of those out of school are from the minorities (Curtis, 2009).
Education in my set up hence, is Marxian, fulfilling the legacy of conflict theory, which is a view of society in a state of conflict due to competition for limited resources (Barnier, 2020). The social structures are not equal for all. Education as a basic human right is not available to all (Curtis, 2009). It is restricted to those who can afford to buy the best.
The backbone of a society is education, that is, "bring out potential".
Education is an experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one to another (Sikhauli, n.d.). Keeping this in mind, what else can bring about a change in society than education? An education that makes one aware of and draws out the best in a person, one that forces us to look at our own hidden conditioning is what would make us question the age old help views that do nothing but bring out the worst in us. It would also equip individual with skills that would help them be empowered financially and face the world with confidence.
But this is not Is Education as transmission of knowledge.
This is education as the fostering of inquiry and reasoning skills to develop individual autonomy (Sikhauli, n.d.). The aim is to use education as a tool for social integration (Theoretical perspectives on education, 2010). If we say that the aim of life is to develop in oneself a state of autonomy, then education is the vehicle for it. By crafting carefully experiences that build harmony among the children, education can be the crucible into which a new India can emerge.
References
- Barnier, B. (2020, October 26). Conflict Theory Definition. Retrieved December 06, 2020, from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/conflict-theory.asp
- Curtis, M. (2009). A world of discrimination: Minorities, indigenous peoples, and education. Retrieved March 5, 2018, from http://minorityrights.org/wp-content/uploads/old-site-downloads/download-655-A-world-of-discrimination.pdf
- Sikhauli, S. (n.d.). Human rights and education. In MA.Edu.Philosophy (pp. 191-197). Retrieved March 3, 2018, from https://www.academia.edu/34327764/M.A._Edu._Philosophy.
- Theoretical perspectives on education. (2010). In University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing (Ed.), Sociology: Understanding and changing the social world. Retrieved March 3, 2018, from http://open.lib.umn.edu/sociology/chapter/16-2-sociological-perspectives-on-education/
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