-ANNA ABRAHAM (Managing Editor)
Hitler’s Table Talk was written by multiple secretaries to Adolf Hitler on the recommendation of an advisor who believed what Hitler spoke privately and informally would come to be a treasure trove of knowledge for the future. In the book, Hitler speaks of war, foreign affairs and even of religion and culture. What struck me as I read it was his ideology on education.
“Nothing would be a worse mistake on our part than to seek to educate the masses there. It is to our interest that the people should know just enough to recognize the signs on the roads. At present, they can’t read, and they ought to stay like that. But they must be allowed to live decently, of course, and that’s also to our interest.”
This was in the context of the colonisation of Russia and the Baltic States. Strikingly, he also speaks of the virtues of England in controlling a population of four hundred million Indians with two hundred and fifty thousand men, including a mere fifty thousand soldiers. It is always a coloniser and power-hungry entity that ensures the population remains subdued, and information and education are denied. Dissent is then impossible.
India enjoys independence today, however, our public education system still seems to have ‘colonial’ written all over it. Our vision of being a world leader will never be realised without a good public education system in place. The privatisation of education further propels the phenomenon of education in silos and reduces accessibility as the fees at such institutions continually hike. Data from the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India says student enrolment figures in government schools show a dip from 19.9 crores in 2011-12 to 18.9 crores in 2016-17 and enrolment in private schools have seen a hike from 6.9 crores in 2013-14 to 8.3 crore in 2017-18. This has been attributed to the poor quality of education in public schools. In states like Jharkhand and Bihar, there has been a very sharp rise in students attending private schools from 5.3 lakh in 2013-14 to 17.2 lakh in 2017-18.
Last year, India introduced a comprehensive education reform titled Draft National Education Policy 2019. It has made its agenda the restructuring of the primary education system and places focus on vocational education, essentially skilling 400 million Indians. Since 2000, India has introduced two educational reforms, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and the Right to Education (RTE), both of which have failed to address issues with the quality of education. The new draft shifts the focus from quality education to vocational learning. The problem with a skill-based secondary education is that the opportunities available to such students will be blue-collared and will further increase the inequality between urban and rural learning. The development in our country has sadly followed a centralized pattern and people living in remote areas are forced to move to cities for employment and thus are unable to join the formal sector due to a lack of qualifications owing to vocational learning. This proposal of skill-based learning accompanied by centralized development is bound to further marginalise the marginalised.
Education is the only way to understand and ask for a better quality of life, and ironically to ask for a better quality of education, you require education. Politicians very rarely ever push an education agenda. It would mean a smarter voting population that cannot be lured with ration and cash. Politics continues to remain a dirty game because the ones with the power to elect don’t have the education to protest. Debarring a developmental education not only stops the flow of information but also hinders the attainment of jobs. Can the hungry protest, can they take on a hunger strike without it feeling routine? As Angela Davis once said, “The idea of freedom is inspiring, but what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what’s that? The freedom to starve?”.
We may be a free country but the tactics used by our governments have been age-old. Keeping a population dumb and obedient is in the interest of staying in power. Education is the very reason that most protests are student-led and originate in hubs of education. This does not simply mean learning in class, but also interactions with peer groups and interaction with people from different walks of life. There is a certain elitism in academia as well which hinders the dissemination of information, but the perpetrators of this phenomenon also happen to be the elite and powerful – the gatekeepers of knowledge, and to break through it’s important to embody the norm i.e. using the language they approve of, staying in circles they approve of and most importantly, working towards becoming like them. Our system is such that to succeed we must conform. The fight, however, is to ensure equality in education. We must speak up for the marginalised, as the “educated” ones today, so one day they might speak up for themselves.
REFERENCES :
- Hitler, Adolf (1951). Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations. Oxford University Press, 1988.
- Sharma, Kritika (2019). The Print [online]. Available at : https://theprint.in/india/sharp-rise-in-number-of-students-opting-for-private-schools-even-in-poor-states/264088/.
- Karunakaran, Gopal (2017). YourStory [online]. Available at : https://yourstory.com/2017/09/india-public-education-system.
- (2019). Economic and Political Weekly [online]. Available at : https://www.epw.in/engage/article/national-education-policy-why-education-reforms.
