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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  Education and marketing
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Education and marketing

Education and marketing

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One of my bright young colleagues referred to the teacher being in the front line of “service delivery". This surprised me. His understanding and sensibilities in education should not have permitted him to use that phrase, but he did.

Learning happens only when the child engages and constructs meaning from various stimuli (books, observation, discussions, experiences, etc.). For real learning, the teacher can’t deliver anything; she is there to facilitate and guide the process—methodically and purposefully; which is why the teacher’s role is very complex and demanding.

I am not saying anything new. This is the overwhelming consensus in the field of education and psychology, about learning. The mechanical one-way process of “delivery" is fundamentally at odds with learning and, therefore, education.

This flawed notion is one cause of the “rote" education system that we have. Only “rote" can be “delivered". Conceptual understanding, abilities of critical thinking and analysis, problem solving, learning-to-learn, etc., cannot be delivered and our education system does fail on all these real measures of learning and education.

And these are only the cognitive dimensions of education. The more comprehensive view of education (e.g., National Curricular Framework, 2005) includes social, emotional and ethical dimensions of development of a child. If anything, these can be even less “delivered" as a service.

There are many other such notions that arise from viewing education primarily from the framework of markets. Led by this, policymakers and analysts get preoccupied with the economic dimension of education and practitioners are led to a mechanical-industrial model of educational practice. The economic dimension may be significant from a fiscal point of view, but the really important dimensions from a social and educational point of view are the issues of quality of learning, social justice and the impact of education on well-being. We need to be cautious about excessive use of “market terminology", which often clouds the key issues and diverts the focus of debate and action.

While our national curricular goals and directly related policies do not fall in to this market trap, the actual implementation on the ground and practice of our education is distorted and stunted because of this kind of thinking.

In the way education is organized, in the form of schools as organizations, it may seem to be like a marketable service—but it is not. I have already mentioned one fundamental reason why this is so, let me list a few more.

First, the role of the teacher rests on her relationship with the child. It is the foundation of the process of learning. This is an emotional and social issue. Thinking of it in terms of a service is the beginning of the problem. It’s like looking at parenting as a service, deriving from a market view of child-rearing. That does sound preposterous, as is a market view of teaching, despite its attractive simplicity.

Second, the impact and effect of education is seen only over very long periods of time. The causes of any such effect are also confounded by a host of other factors, for example, socio-economic background, parents’ time with the child, the cultural context. This is like saying “let me buy a product, but I will see the effect of it only 15 years later, and by-the-way I won’t know whether the product caused the effect". How can any market value be discovered in any reasonable way for something like this?

Third, the child at the centre of this whole thing has no capacity to see what is good for her. Most often the parents also have no (or little) ability to discern whether the child is going through effective education. This is true for most parents, including even the upper middle class. Parents simply trust the assessment done by the school through exam “marks" and other superficial markers (e.g., “rank", admissions) on how “well" the child is doing.

Fourth, parents really have no choice in the matter of schools. Locality is destiny for children. The vast majority of parents may choose between two or three schools, if at all. This is a false choice. First, they have nowhere to go but those two schools. Second, they can’t keep switching schools—since that has definite detrimental effect on a child. Third, in the absence of visible, reasonable time frame measure of effective education, their choice is largely determined by non-educational social factors (e.g. “do they teach English?", “they wear ties").

Fifth, education has a definitive social-ethical purpose, that of developing a good human being and building a certain kind of society. For example, our vision of our society as enshrined in our Constitution, is the societal goal of our education. This encompasses the goal of equity, of justice and of humaneness; and market frameworks don’t lead there.

Market fundamentalism shows it hand in all parts of life today, but few as pernicious as invading the quest to develop and nurture goodness (cognitive, emotional, social, ethical)—which is what education in essence is.

Anurag Behar is chief executive officer of Azim Premji Foundation and also leads sustainability issues for Wipro Ltd. He writes every fortnight on issues of ecology and education. Comments are welcome at othersphere@livemint.com

Also Read |Anurag Behar’s earlier columns

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Published: 02 May 2012, 07:14 PM IST
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