Beyond false debates

In almost any situation one can safely say that the eruption of violence marks a setback for education. I am not hinting at the chronic shortage of funds for education and the common justification given for it by referring to the weightier competitive claim to scarce public funds that the crisis of internal security or threat of war has. War represents a setback for education in a more fundamental sense. Education has to do with teaching, which is essentially a relational activity dependent on words. Together, with the help of words, teacher and child make sense of the world and impart a sense of purpose and passion to this endeavour. No matter how inadequate words prove to resolve conflicts, education aims at enhancing our faith in words as a means to create cohesion and to motivate us to hope that better use of words can make a difference when there is a crisis caused by an unhealed discord. Education is a future-oriented activity which makes us concentrate on learning from experience and improving our capacity to engage with the next occasion of the kind in which our words might have proved inadequate the last time.

From this perspective, education all over the Himal region is in a dire state of struggle against violence. Forms of violence differ, but its growing spread and depth are so evident that it must be recognised as a major symptom of the failure of education. I want to register this point in a general sense, cutting across the familiar divide between private and government schools. Current debates on quality in education tend to focus on this divide and ignore the larger failure of education as a social institution in charge of nourishing peace and controlling discord. There can be no satisfactory definition of quality in education which overlooks this role of education. Private schools and their admirers perceive privatisation as a means to resolve the problem of poor quality in state-run schools. Let us also recall that a substantial proportion of private schools in India consciously propagate revivalist and separatist religiosity.