By Subhasis Chattopadhyay –
My kid has done well!
“My kid is a good kid.” Oh, really? You mean your kid has never taken risks & is a mama’s boy. Wow.
“Don’t mix with that girl; she is bad company.” What kind of a creature are you, that you judge children?
“Your son is careless in class.” Who is perfect except God? Were you always perfect? Watch the movie Gone Girl.
“Stop singing, stop wasting your time, stop reading useless storybooks and see how well he has done in his boards.” Just because the world has hardened you and you no longer enjoy reading, relaxing or just doing nothing, you want your kid to become a money-making machine like you? You are in a rut, so you want your kid to slog it out compensating for your failures as an adult. To boot, you dare to teach kids jealousy.
“Just get lost since you are a nincompoop.” You are a fool to think anyone else is a fool. After all, you got no Nobel Prizes man, nor do you earn as much as Bill Gates. Neither have you written anything even to be considered a footnote to Plato or Einstein.
Christians and Hindus run some of the most coveted schools in India. The women and men who run them know philosophy and theology over and above their secular degrees. All Christian and Hindu celibate wo/men who run these educational institutions know the difference between say, Hindu eschatology and Christian eschatology. Very few people reading this blog post know the exact meaning of ‘eschatology’. The administrators of these schools know how soteriologies affect the teleology of the individual jivatman.
The point here is that they know that to be human one must be more concerned with eschatologies, soteriologies and teleologies of the jivatman. But in the schools that they run, very rarely are students encouraged to concern themselves with philosophy and theology. These schools are normatively Christian, or Hindu and parents are coached (sic) by play-school teachers to ace interviews in these schools. Why? The average Indian paterfamilias is fixated with studying medicine, computer science in the IITs, management in the IIMs and clearing the Civil Services examinations.
Any other academic pursuit is looked down in our society. It begins with the schools’ administrators who publish the names of their so-called good scorers. I had once pointed out to an administrator of a school that doing so tantamounts to snubbing those whose academic prowess lies in other fields. Or, possibly in the failure of the teachers and the school in mentoring those students who need mentoring. Further, when one knows that salvation qua mukti is more critical than any other pursuit then why teach students that acing competitive exams is the way to self-actualisation? After all, which teacher or administrator will publicly say that s/he is a rat in a rat race. Nonetheless, we treat our kids as rats. It follows that we are adult rats who have ratted to our kids.
What is important at 16 years of age does not seem important at 40. At 90, one’s entire past seems unimportant if one’s memory functions at all. The ICSE, ISC, the various local boards and the CBSE results are either out or are in the process of being declared. I wonder where do the toppers vanish in the long run? Why does India not have original thinkers in any field despite students scoring 499 out of 500? Hindu theologising has stopped during the Middle Ages; Christian theology in India is derivative of European and South-American models; we have no stalwarts in the basic sciences, and our IITs have not produced any Nobel Laureates ever though we worship the IITs. (The value of an IITian rests in earning tonnes down the line and serving American interests after having received a subsidised education here in India at the cost of the ordinary tax-paying law-abiding Indian citizen.)
Christian seminaries were meant to be places of deep introspection (which is called philosophy); they were not meant to be places where degrees in philosophy are earned for the sole purpose of priestly ordination. Hindu pedagogy is rooted in Hindu praxes, not in merely acquiring expertise in Sanskrit grammar. What avails that I can recite the Upanishads without having the brains to make them relevant to the here and the now? How does it help anyone to know either New Greek or Pali just to get professorships in these subjects? Very few Hindus know Hinduism at the levels of Georg Feuerstein or Fr. Clooney SJ. Had they been within contemporary Indian systems of rote-learning, we would have forgotten about the splendour of Hinduism. Christian studies in India is threatened by reductionism and qualitative degradation because Christian exegetes in India are not engaging with the Bible as say, Walter Brueggemann is engaging with the Old Testament.
When our schooling is at fault, we cannot have a meaningful higher education, therefore we cannot hope for a fruitful research atmosphere. It is simply not possible. Our pedagogy is geared to bluffing the system through cram notes and tuitions and other short-cuts; while it should have been a process of Socratic inquiry. We are taught to NOT question what is taught to us. This is the bane of our education system. Our doctors have not discovered or invented any new cures in the recent past; our techies live in constant fear of being deported from the US. Where have all the toppers gone?
Unless credential fetish is gone; nothing significant is going to happen to our nation. Our children will have to keep committing suicides due to the social stigma of being low scorers and the high scorers will have to escape to the First World where they will be demeaned today or tomorrow for their skin colours. An Indian in white-land is neither a Catholic, nor a Hindu, nor a Muslim. S/he is just another Third World immigrant who is hated by Trump’s vote-bank.
India will progress when our kids are taught to question their teachers, our traditional institutions, and only when the bogey of marks is annihilated. The idolatry that plagues India is that we bow down to power which derives from marks which give us tickets to settle abroad.
I wonder, if one has the money and the power too, will one be able to wear two shirts at one time? I wonder why many doctors eventually drink themselves to death in spite of having a lot of money? I wonder what prompts a person to become a teacher and then forget that one’s duty is to teach students about the hard questions that haunt us: will we be happy learning facts year after useless year? Will we be content scoring 100 out of 100? What methods will bring our students that peace which Jesus brought to this earth? Will our students ever experience the contentment that the Buddhas talked of or santosha that Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutra speaks about? As things are; never. Educational satraps have taken the joy out of the lives of little children in India.
Cram, cram, cram and die like rats in little boxes:
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes
Little boxes
Little boxes all the same
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the sameAnd the people in the houses all went to the university
And they all get put in boxes, little boxes all the same
And there are doctors and there are lawyers
And business executives
And they all get put in boxes, and they all come out the same
And they all play on the golf course and drink their martini dry
And they all have pretty children and the children go to school
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university
And they all get put in boxes, and they all come out the same
And the boys go into business and marry and raise a family
And they all get put in boxes, little boxes all the same. (Malvina Reynolds, 1962)
How doing well in various examinations makes someone a good human being or makes life worth living, beats me. The hypocrisy of educators running schools, conducting internal assessments and keeping children on their toes 24*7 nauseates me. How is it either a Hindu or a Christian education which teaches children neither prayer, nor meditation, nor renunciation but incessant one-upmanship, hold inane debates continuously which are far from the ancient art of rhetoric or even Buddhist (Tibetan) forms of philosophical debates? How running management institutes where the values of bottom-lines are discussed constitute any kind of ethics escapes me? Mammon and God do not go together. Jesus said this, and so did the Hindu seers say this.
Subhasis Chattopadhyay is a blogger and an Assistant Professor in English (UG & PG Departments of English) at Narasinha Dutt College affiliated to the University of Calcutta. He has additional qualifications in Biblical Studies and separately, Spiritual Psychology. He also studied the Minor Upanishads separately. He remains a staunch Hindu. He had written extensively for the Catholic Herald published from Calcutta. From 2010 he reviews books for the Ramakrishna Mission and his reviews have been showcased in Ivy League Press-websites.The author blogs at liveinletters.blog and along the way, he has picked up other qualifications funded through various scholarships.