Pause, think, explore

             The philosopher Martin Heidenberg’s reputation was tarnished for his association with Nazism. However, one of the concepts which he popularised was the concept of being ‘thrown into the world’. Among the many aspects of the world that we are thrown into, one is acquiring an education. Given the vast inequalities in society, education remains a privilege which few enjoy to its fullest. Therein lies a great contradiction in how to approach education. Consider it a fundamental right and distribute it like food grains to the hungry, irrespective of whether the food is palatable or not? Or let young adults choose whether they want to pursue education or take their time to figure out what they want?

            As a teacher in a mid-ranking undergraduate college in Kolkata, I roam past the empty classrooms and corridors. The experience is not unique across the vast education landscape of India. I hear young schoolboys discussing in my swimming pool changing room that ten percent of their class turns up on Saturdays. I hear computer science professors in the top-ranked state university in India discussing the ten percent attendance in the fourth year of undergraduate studies. I read online posts made by students of one of the top-ranked private engineering institutes in India that since students who study there did not make it to the IITs and that they pay hefty course fees, the institute takes a lenient view of student attendance. As an examiner of undergraduate answer scripts, I often serve as the head examiner of exams in which eighty percent of the students fail to pass, which would not have been the case had these students actually turned up and listened to what the teacher was saying. As an invigilator, I am often surprised at the end of my invigilation period when I see that the attendance sheet is only half full.

            What causes this disinterest in studies? When I was an undergraduate student at the top-ranked English department in India, attendance was more than eighty percent in all classes. What ticked for my classmates back then which students fail to find in their classes nowadays?

            Galileo’s idea of inertia may be useful as a metaphor over here. Some of my work colleagues who are new parents talk about the excitement that their children felt on initially going to school but they felt disenchanted soon after. As colleagues who are also parents, they speak about the anguish that they feel over their children’s educational progress, and that the career trajectory that they foresee for themselves in their school years is not how it turns out later in life.

            Being thrown into the world, we are thrown into the educational system and thereafter the inertia of motion continues till we complete our studies and start looking for a job. This inexorable motion of the educational process frowns upon pauses and breaks. University admissions often accept applications from students who have graduated within the two preceding years. Gap years are considered a sign of waywardness. In the employment circuit, we are often asked to explain our career breaks and it is often seen as one more reason to reject an applicant.

            The Finnish public school education system since the 1990s has been well-lauded (and taken out of its context and tried to be copied in India, most egregiously by extremely expensive private schools, thereby rendering it nonsensical). The Irish gap year system since the mid-1990s has been less well-lauded and copied across the world. In Ireland, there is a gap year between what is class ten and class eleven in India. In my opinion, there should at least be two gap years, one between class ten and eleven, and one between class twelve and choosing to apply for higher education.

            If we look at the ‘Education Statistics at a Glance’ report which used to be brought out by the Indian ministry of education (when it was called the HRD ministry), we will realise that the gross enrolment ratio does not decline gradually throughout. There are sharp drop-offs after class ten and after class twelve. The school meal programme ends after class eight. Some students and families decide they have had enough. Given the mismatch in skills required for jobs and the education imparted in schools and universities, unemployment and more importantly under-employment (working in jobs which require a far lower skill-level than the ones which people possess) are rife in India. Official statistics about how happy the population is and how low unemployment is tell a story which the story tellers echo but few read or listen and fewer believe in.

            The new education policy envisages a dropping in and joining in mechanism with an academic bank of credit. Yet, the admission policies of universities often do not even encourage many years of gaps, let alone having got their heads around the new policy.

            What could a student do in a gap year? Is it an incentive to roll back the gross enrolment ratio? Quantity over quality may be the story of modern India’s growth trajectory.  In gap years, the privileged and the self-motivated can learn various skills and explore many aspects without the pressure of being assessed. For the less privileged, it may mean the lack of access to a safe space outside the dangers, if any, of the home. On the other hand, if there is a high rate of absenteeism, despite the school space, it may mean that it is not enough to attract the student. Peer groups often dictate our life choices. Juvenile criminals are often those who spend time outside the school. Hanging out with such groups, instead of being in school, pre-disposes one to pick up their ill habits.

            Despite the 1968 Kothari’s commission’s six percent GDP spending on education never seeing the light of day even after more than half a century passing by, a little more spending would ensure the relevance of the school in the gap year and retaining the school’s association with the students. Teachers usually know a few things beyond their subjects. Learning to ride a bicycle, learning to swim, learning to cook, learning to sew, learning music, theatre, painting, sports, dance, taking one’s own sweet time to actually re-read the textbooks of earlier classes and learn the concepts in greater detail than when one barely managed to pass by finding out the quickest route to ace past the standard questions – all these activities can be performed without hiring extra teachers, if teachers are allowed to come up with their own programmes which they can teach students in the gap year and students have the opportunity to choose to learn all this at either their school or at an accredited non-governmental organisation which may be reimbursed for imparting the skills. It may go a long way in training and providing a sense of direction to young minds. One of the pitfalls of a heavily centralised model is that it leaves little room for individual endeavour. The Irish transition year system is voluntary, though supposedly ninety-nine percent schools offer it and eighty percent students opt for it. With the commodification of education happening worldwide, the Irish system has degenerated and deviated from its original plan. The gap year activities have also been seen by parents and students as activities to bump up the CV rather than learn about oneself and the world.

            In India, a gap year may prove to young minds that the world is not their oyster. Their aspirations and their skills may meet earlier than they do so now. They may also find some breathing space in the world that we are thrown into and get rid of some of the heartbreak they find themselves in later on in life when they rue the educational path that they embarked on many years ago.

An essay on equality

 

The idea of equality and equal rights has changed throughout the ages. Protesters have pointed out that rights deemed equal somehow or the other leave a gap through which some group or the other finds itself disenfranchised of some rights. As a brief survey of the most major documents proclaiming rights will show, the idea of equality keeps changing. What these documents do not claim is that inequality is a fact of life beginning from birth. Instead of explicitly trying to create a state of equality, which try as one might, can never be achieved 100%, a method of acknowledging inequality and then trying to ameliorate it by positive discrimination or affirmative action should be adopted, as it is in various countries across the world.

                The earliest human writings are from roughly 5000 years back. The earliest human rights’ documents are from the Mesopotamian civilisation from roughly 4000 years back. Thus, as long as people have written, people have roughly written about equality. Yet, history shows that there is always some other right to strive for. Among documents which have had a major impact on modern human rights’ documents, one may mention England’s 1215 Magna Carta which proclaimed: ‘To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice’ (Clause 40). The ‘one’ in this line and in the document referred to ‘freemen’, a term which excluded slaves and women.

                The 1776 Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America in its preamble stated ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [italicisation mine] are created equal’.

                The 1789 French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man [italicisation mine] and of the Citizen’ claimed ‘Men [italicisation mine] are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good’ (Article 1). This provoked Mary Wollstonecraft to write the 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman signalling that the agitating group had left out half of the human population.

                The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights began: ‘recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’.

                The Indian constitution adopted on 26 January 1950 mentioned ‘equality of status and opportunity’.

                The 1848 Communist Manifesto, though not a document of human rights, recorded that ‘the “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.’ In other words, it drew attention to the fact that human rights’ activists had not secured much rights for ‘the “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass’.

                Ferdinand Lassalle, in 1862, said: ‘The constitutional questions are in the first instance not questions of right but questions of might. The actual constitution of a country has its existence only in the actual condition of force which exists in the country: hence political constitutions have value and permanence only when they accurately express those conditions of forces which exist in practice within a society.’ He also drew attention to the wide disparities between de jure rights and de facto rights.

                In the 1936 BR Ambedkar versus MK Gandhi debates following the publication of Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar pointed out that ‘the Mahatma says that the standards I have applied to test Hindus and Hinduism are too severe and that judged by those standards every known living faith will probably fail. The complaint that my standards are high may be true. But the question is not whether they are high or whether they are low. The question is whether they are the right standards to apply. A People and their Religion must be judged by social standards based on social ethics. No other standard would have any meaning if religion is held to be a necessary good for the well-being of the people. Now I maintain that the standards I have applied to test Hindus and Hinduism are the most appropriate standards and that I know of none that are better. The conclusion that every known religion would fail if tested by my standards may be true. But this fact should not give the Mahatma as the champion of Hindus and Hinduism a ground for comfort any more than the existence of one madman should give comfort to another madman or the existence of one criminal should give comfort to another criminal.’ Ambedkar’s politics was instrumental in creating the positive discrimination system in electoral, educational and employment opportunities in the government sector in modern India.

                The concept of positive discrimination or affirmative action acknowledges that unlike what the 1776 American Declaration or the 1789 French Declaration state, equality is not ensured at birth. People (men, women and intersex people) are born in a specific geography, in a specific family with some or no religious affiliation, some or no sub-community identifiers such as caste or tribal identity, speaking one or many languages (including non-vocal languages such as sign languages), having certain physical characteristics including the presence or absence of some senses or organs, with a set of neurological characteristics which may or may not be as diversely spread as in the rest of the population, and in a family with its own unique economic position. Thus, people are as far removed from equality at birth as is possible the stretch of imagination. How to ensure the 1948 ‘equal rights’ of the UN Declaration so as to achieve ‘equality of status and opportunity’ as envisaged in the Indian Constitution?

                My readers must have read about some or all of these rights in their school history or civics or philosophy text books. As we grow older, we realise that equality of opportunity can never be ensured. The inequalities with which we are born at birth and the inequalities we accrue as we keep growing ensure that opportunities are never perfectly equal. Imagine two lines which are at just more than 0.1 degrees from each other. They make look similar and parallel but the longer one keeps drawing them, the more apparent it will be that the two are not parallel but are rather divergent.

                Think of identical twins. Their genes may share a high degree of similarity but with some differences. However, as they keep growing older, their epigenes keep changing differently based on their different lifestyles. If we start off with an inequality, however small, over time, those inequalities will only increase.

                Given that inequality exists, how best to make the world a fairer place for a larger section of the world’s inhabitants? Positive discrimination is one way. In India, positive discrimination is geared towards providing better electoral, education and employment opportunities in the government sector for populations which may be subject to negative discrimination. The point is to increase income-generating abilities and to have a fairer share in legislation. However, once income-generating abilities have been provided and the beneficiaries attain a level of income above the minimum wage, the positive discrimination system in education or employment for the descendants of those beneficiaries does not always end. Positive discrimination is not always linked with income (though in some cases, such as in the case of OBCs, it is). A move to introduce such a check is under debate in the judiciary and in the legislature. In the public education sector, an implicit check is already there in the form that even those who apply for positive discrimination in competitive entrance exams are denied that positive discrimination if their marks are already eligible for admission even without the added positive discrimination. Given that the government sector itself is only a minuscule portion (2%) of the employment sector and is increasingly overshadowed by the private sector in education, it is not the only forum for ensuring a fairer place for previously negatively discriminated against populations.

                The recent changes in affirmative action in the USA present an interesting counterpoint. Beginning from the late 1980s onwards, Indian software engineers started to migrate in large numbers to the developed world, and a large portion of such professionals went to the next largest country by population size, the USA. Such professionals, one may argue, represented those who had managed to reach higher levels of education despite their challenges or because of their privileges over their compatriots. When they reached the USA, their children, too, often tried to live up to the high academic standards of their parents and their fellow immigrants from India. (The USA national spelling bee competition is a good example of this trend. Whereas there were a few winners of Indian origin in the 1980s and the 1990s, there hasn’t been a winner of any other ethnicity since 2008). Chinese students often also followed a similar trajectory but their comparatively lesser grasp of the English language left the field for people of Indian ethnicity to find better opportunities in the USA. The top-ranked universities in the world, many of which are in the USA, often found that their incoming students were roughly 50% of Asian ethnicity (given that India and China have 35% of the world’s population and the other Asian countries have another 25%, it is not surprising). In order to ensure greater representation of other previously legally discriminated against populations such as Black and Latino, affirmative action in the USA set down limits for incoming students of certain ethnicities. This reduced the number of incoming students from Asian backgrounds, who went to court arguing that it was discriminatory against them. The court ruled in their favour for the time being in 2023. This case study highlighted several issues. One, that discrimination exists in several layers and is highly contextual. Thus, affirmative action should also take into account the existing status of the intended beneficiary and not go by historical precedent alone.

                Other than through such positive discrimination, what are the other ways? One way perhaps is to acknowledge that inequality exists. The 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and a sexist Bobby Riggs, which was dubbed as one among many ‘Battle of the Sexes’ did little to address the core issue of gender inequality. In competitive sports where physical prowess is a factor, men and women compete separately. In sports such as wrestling, weight lifting and boxing, even for each sex, there are categories for a range of weights in order to ensure that physical strengths of the competitors are not vastly different. It bears to mention here that in several sports where physical prowess is a factor, hormonal and chromosomal factors often work against some people who identify as women. The standard response of sports bodies is to ban those sportspersons. Instead, these sports bodies could create sub-categories for women at the higher end of the weight scale or for men at the lower end of the weight scale or any such similar proposal to ensure greater participation but also be less unfair in the process.

                This brings in the question of empathy. What is empathy? Empathy may be putting oneself in the proverbial shoes of another person to feel what that person feels. It is only when one acknowledges the other person as being as much worthy of respect as oneself can one be empathetic.

                Inequality exists among men and women and intersex people, people of different religions, race, caste, geography, class, language, physical ability, and intellectual ability. Rather than striving for equality of treatment which leads to not acknowledging the inequality and doing nothing by way of positive discrimination, one approach of dealing with inequality suggests first acknowledging inequality, then finding means of positive discrimination and finally developing the capacity to empathise with others, none of whom are our equal.

                Returning to de jure and de facto rights and treatment of inequality, two factors become clear. Rights proportional to population is a path bestrewn with danger. In India, there is an ongoing political debate about rights proportional to caste populations. This ignores the logic that if one were to extend that to religion or language or any other aspect, it would be highly politically unpalatable. Thus, reducing inequality is not always best achieved through political means. Empathy lies at the core of reducing inequality. As the history of human writing tells us, empathy ebbs and flows and garners enough public support to achieve some kind of reduction of inequality only at certain points of time in history. A host of factors allow that moment of radical change. De jure rights often lose their de facto prevalence owing to a loss of empathy. Human beings are not automata and are subject to emotions. As long as society exists, inequality will persist because of factors beyond the control of any system. The point is to continually strive to reduce inequality by allowing empathy to develop within us. Rights are not given, they are seized; but rights are maintained not by State control but rather by empathy. If one were to look at various societies across the world, one would realise that various kinds of empathy in different degrees exist in society going beyond juridical laws. The answer to inequality is within us, rather than out there in the world. How best to bring it about requires educating ourselves about empathy and learning to see the various inequalities that exist around us. Learning to know and learning to see are more important than political struggles.

               

 

Similar poems: Set 03

 Henry Wotton (1568-1639), The Character of a Happy Life

How happy is he born and taught

That serveth not another's will;

Whose armour is his honest thought,

And simple truth his utmost skill!

Whose passions not his masters are;

Whose soul is still prepared for death,

Untied unto the world by care

Of public fame or private breath;

Who envies none that chance doth raise,

Nor vice; who never understood

How deepest wounds are given by praise;

Nor rules of state, but rules of good;

Who hath his life from rumours freed;

Whose conscience is his strong retreat;

Whose state can neither flatterers feed,

Nor ruin make oppressors great;

Who God doth late and early pray

More of His grace than gifts to lend;

And entertains the harmless day

With a religious book or friend;

—This man is freed from servile bands

Of hope to rise or fear to fall:

Lord of himself, though not of lands,

And having nothing, yet hath all.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), If—

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Similar poems: Set 02

 Francis Beaumont (1584-1616), On the Tombs in Westminster Abbey

MORTALITY, behold and fear!

What a change of flesh is here!

Think how many royal bones

Sleep within this heap of stones:

Here they lie had realms and lands,

Who now want strength to stir their hands:

Where from their pulpits seal'd with dust

They preach, 'In greatness is no trust.'

Here 's an acre sown indeed

With the richest, royall'st seed

That the earth did e'er suck in

Since the first man died for sin:

Here the bones of birth have cried—

'Though gods they were, as men they died.'

Here are sands, ignoble things,

Dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings;

Here 's a world of pomp and state,

Buried in dust, once dead by fate.

James Shirley (1596-1666), Victorious Men of Earth

Victorious men of earth, no more

Proclaim how wide your empires are;

Though you bind in every shore

And your triumphs reach as far

As night or day,

Yet you, proud monarchs, must obey

And mingle with forgotten ashes, when

Death calls ye to the crowd of common men.

Devouring Famine, Plague, and War,

Each able to undo mankind,

Death's servile emissaries are;

Nor to these alone confined,

He hath at will

More quaint and subtle ways to kill;

A smile or kiss, as he will use the art,

Shall have the cunning skill to break a heart.

PB Shelley (1792-1822), Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Similar poems: Set 01

 Josuah Sylvester (1563-1618), Love's Omnipresence

Where I was base as is the lowly plain,

And you, my Love, as high as heaven above,

Yet should the thoughts of me your humble swain

Ascend to heaven, in honour of my Love.

Where I as high as heaven above the plain,

And you, my Love, as humble and as low

As are the deepest bottoms of the main,

Whereso'er you were, with you my love should go.

Were you the earth, dear Love, and I the skies,

My love should shine on you like to the sun,

And look upon you with thousand eyes

Till heaven wax'd blind, and till the world were done.

Whereso'er I am, below, or else above you,

Whereso'er you are, my heart shall truly love you.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), I Cannot Live with You

I cannot live with You – 

It would be Life – 

And Life is over there – 

Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keeps the Key to – 

Putting up

Our Life – His Porcelain – 

Like a Cup – 

Discarded of the Housewife – 

Quaint – or Broke – 

A newer Sevres pleases – 

Old Ones crack – 

I could not die – with You – 

For One must wait

To shut the Other’s Gaze down – 

You – could not – 

And I – could I stand by

And see You – freeze – 

Without my Right of Frost – 

Death's privilege?

Nor could I rise – with You – 

Because Your Face

Would put out Jesus’ – 

That New Grace

Glow plain – and foreign

On my homesick Eye – 

Except that You than He

Shone closer by – 

They’d judge Us – How – 

For You – served Heaven – You know,

Or sought to – 

I could not – 

Because You saturated Sight – 

And I had no more Eyes

For sordid excellence

As Paradise

And were You lost, I would be – 

Though My Name

Rang loudest

On the Heavenly fame – 

And were You – saved – 

And I – condemned to be

Where You were not – 

That self – were Hell to Me – 

So We must meet apart – 

You there – I – here – 

With just the Door ajar

That Oceans are – and Prayer – 

And that White Sustenance – 

Despair –