I started off this essay with the question, “what does education do?” The further I wrote, I realised it was pertinent to instead ask the question, “whose needs does education serve?”. Is education a site for the generation of knowledge (pro-duction) or is it a site for the preservation of knowledge and experience from one generation to another (re-production)? This dynamic, ever evolving tension between these two facets helps us understand the role(s) education plays in society. However, society is not an easy term to describe, especially in a globalised world. I use the term education very broadly; when one thinks about education, the first thing that comes to mind is a school. While the school is a very important site of education, it is important to understand that there are multiple sites through which the production and reproduction of knowledge happen.
We are all affected by globalisation. I use the term ‘globalisation’ liberally as well, aware that the term is laden with many assumptions and ideas taken for granted, often as self-evident truths. We live in a very interconnected world where messages can be exchanged in a second, but walls and borders are built to keep people apart. Globalisation was meant to benefit everyone and integrate everyone into a global economy. However, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that globalisation and the forces of globalisation have contributed to new dimensions of inequality and stratification, and education plays a key role in it.
I would like to take the example of India here and lay out some key arguments on how globalisation and education intersect to contribute to newer forms of inequality and stratification. By the turn of the new century, the Indian state had achieved something phenomenal. Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in primary schools was almost 100%, which means that almost every child in India was going to primary school and this is now a given, with the GER being at a 100% for many years now. At the same time, India has a learning crisis like many other developing countries. One of India’s largest educational Non-Government Organizations (NGOs), Pratham, has been measuring learning outcomes in India’s schools for almost fifteen years now and the results are astonishing, as seen in their Annual Status of Education Reports (ASER).[1] In 2022, only 42.8 percent of all children in Class V in government and private schools in India could read a Class II level text. Moreover, there has been a steady decline in these reading levels from 2008 to 2018. In 2008, 53.1 percent of all children in Class V of government schools in India could read a Class II-level text, in 2018, that number was down to 44.2 percent and in 2022, the number is at 42.8 percent.
These numbers become worse when it comes to numeracy. In 2022, only 25.6 percent of all children in Class V of government schools could do division, and just like the literacy levels, these numbers have shown a steady decline as well. In 2008, 34.4 percent of all children in Class V of government schools could do division. Interestingly, this is not the case in just India alone. Many developing nations show abject levels of foundational literacy and numeracy, and in some cases developed countries as well, in a phenomenon the World Bank calls “Learning poverty”. This has allowed people who have access to quality private education to corner many benefits, be globally mobile and secure high-paying jobs that they later mask as meritocratic.
Clearly, there is a difference between access to education and access to quality education. In the words of Madhav Chavan, founder of Pratham ‘not only are we not creating a sufficiently literate population, but that most of our population is functionally illiterate.’ [1]
This data should also be understood in the context of a rapidly developing service sector in India. It is now a commonly accepted cultural notion that service sector jobs--or jobs in the “knowledge economy”--are the desirable, aspirational jobs, where effects and results are felt at a global level. An Indian software engineer can collaborate with his counterpart in Dubai to produce an important deliverable for their client in Germany or Australia. Upward mobility is understood to be moving “up” from manufacturing, blue-collar jobs to the service sector, white-collar jobs in front of a computer, or more importantly from the comforts of our home. But what about the people who continue to rely on their physical abilities as compared to their intellectual abilities to make a living? Do they deserve to be left behind? Increased access to poor-quality of education is not allowing for a large majority of people, not just in India but across the developing world, to access “aspirational” jobs.
It is becoming increasingly evident that these aspirational lifestyles and jobs in the knowledge economy across the world are dictating what needs to be taught in schools and how it is taught. By prioritising what we teach in schools and how we teach it, we, the purveyors of the knowledge economy, create a hierarchy of legitimacy. We decide what are the most aspirational and most “legitimate” jobs, and condemn those who haven’t been able to access these jobs as people “who deserve their fate.” As Michael Sandel, a Harvard political philosopher says, this is the “tyranny of merit.”
In India, and in many parts of the developing world, a transition to a knowledge economy has steadily happened and is happening. It is noted that almost half of India’s GDP comes from the service sector alone. But if only 25.6% of children in class V of public schools in India can do basic arithmetic and only 42% of children in Class V of public schools in India can read a simple sentence in English, then multiple divides are happening in society. Lacking credentials and legitimacy given by quality school education, and subsequently, higher education, which is asked to take on all the burdens of poor school education, a very large group of people must rely on their physical abilities rather than their intellectual ones to make a living. The divides, the inequality, don’t just become economical.
I go back to the questions I started this essay with - what does education do and whose needs are being served? Education achieves a lot of things; it pulls people out of poverty, it gives people the opportunity to be socially and economically mobile, among so many other important objectives. Education can bridge many differences, but in its current form, it creates a very important one—a new class of people; the smart and the dumb. The smart, who can stay ahead of the game in this complex, globalising world, while the dumb, who have to stay behind, because they ‘deserve’ their fate.
"The politics of education then becomes a politics of humiliation, antithetical to its original promise to provide dignity and recognition."
As the political philosopher Thomas Nagel once said, 'When racial and sexual injustice have been reduced, we shall still be left with the grave injustice of the smart and the dumb.’ Education as a process cannot be taken for granted where one goes to school or university, gets credentialed and then gets a job. There’s more to education and its politics and figuring out a way to classify people beyond “the smart” and “the dumb” would be crucial in a country where material wellbeing is increasing with no change in socio-economic rank.
The views expressed in this piece are solely those of the author(s) and do not reflect those of the Editorial Board, the Scholars’ Council, the Gates Cambridge Trust or the University of Cambridge.
Madhav Chavan, Rukmini Banerjee’s commentary can be found on page 15 of the ASER document. See Madhav Chavan’s article titled “Something is Changing” from the report: https://img.asercentre.org/docs/ASER%202018/Release%20Material/Articles/madhavchavansomethingischanging.pdf
Vishal ['23] is doing his PhD in Sociology on elites and their association with education. He’s the author of The Smart and The Dumb: Stories on the Politics of Education in India published by Penguin Random House India (due for release in July 2024).
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