How selfie-smart education is destroying young India

I recently went back to the school in my hometown, where I had studied all through my childhood. Our school has installed smart classrooms now. These so-called “smart classes” are supposed to make education more efficient and help the teachers impart more knowledge.

Smart classes made me wonder if I didn't get a "smart" enough education. Probably, like the rest of my generation, I was dumb! Too dumb to choose the right career, too dumb to realise that money was everything, too dumb to hatch plans or understand political subtexts like today’s kids. We took selfies for fun. These kids take them seriously.

Don’t you know about the study that said India has the most number of selfie-related deaths?

Somehow, the technocratic millennial generation is as regressive as it is progressive. It is my observation that the education system today is turning the generation to a more absolutist, segmented and comfort-seeking materialism that is more problematic than ever.

Amidst all the political drama, factionalist ideologies and our ongoing struggle for a national identity, we forget how crucial our education system is for building a better world.

India is a country of more than a billion people, and there seems to be an effort to singularise our aspirations towards power and wealth. The education sector is increasingly becoming a playground of rich business houses, political parties or religious groups who want to run the institutions for their own interests.

Lately, politics has invaded our premier institutions in a big way and students are being lured away from the real academic purpose that should be central to education system.

Student politics

Recently, research scholar Rohith Vemula committed suicide in what seemed to be a culmination of many things. From politically charged arguments, institutional neglect to lifelong caste-based discrimination, the matter was swiftly appended by the media to the ongoing debate of intolerance.

We need to ask if students really need to be pawns in the political wrestling match.

Rohith’s suicide is neither the first nor the most publicised incident of political involvement in academia. Quite naturally, some element of learning involves the understanding of the socio-political situation of the nation.

However, students are not just votebanks and college-level politics should not become a playground of agendas. There may not be a solution to this institutionally, but personally, students must be cautioned not to get involved in politics.

Teachers have a role in protecting students from destructive influences, but they have their own limitations. In fact, political activities on campus sometimes take centerstage.

Employment scenario

Sociologists see fault in society. Economists see faults in economy. But both have no idea how to fix the education system.

Clearly, both education and its outcomes need to be refined. While we draw heavily from the western system of education, which is both socially and economically irrelevant to the needs of people, we can’t be expecting to create opportunities at the same pace as the West. It can be elaborated with an example.

About a decade ago, information technology witnessed a boom as companies built profitable businesses around work outsourced by Europe and America. Engineering became a trend. What we do good, we tend to overdo. A swarm of second-rate engineering colleges came up and every other student out of school started rolling out lakhs to become an engineer. Quite naturally, the time and money spent on achieving an engineering degree raises the expectations of students and parents. Then the economy shifted and clients started switching to countries with cheaper labour, diluting job prospects.

However, more engineers kept graduating from colleges and many started struggling to get decent jobs. A big chunk of engineering graduates don’t have any marketable skill. This factor along with job expectations renders most engineers unemployable. Today the value of an average engineer has fallen below a diploma holder's - as is the case with MBAs now.

Teachers

The community of teachers consists of a diverse set of individuals. There are good, bad and average teachers, dedicated and opportunistic teachers, as well as rigid and adaptable teachers.

However, education policies do not discriminate among them. They are all considered the same when it comes to implementing new technologies, issuing new rules and introducing teaching methodologies.

Private schools don’t really care if the faculty is capable. Instead, efforts are always made to gratify parents - who themselves are too busy to pay attention to their child’s studies. As a result, good teachers have lost their worth and are now reduced to being salespeople, who know that they must tolerate unreasonable demands, lest their students complain against them to their parents. Students, on the other hand, don’t care what’s good for them and no one in the system wants to be the bad person. What’s next? Teachers who take advantage of this simply get on with private tuitions for extra cash. In today’s entitled generation, the student is a customer and the customer is always right.

Technology-induced laziness

A couple of years ago, Jeff Bliss, an American student, met with notoriety because of a viral video. The footage showed him getting expelled from the class. It was what Jeff spoke out about that made the headlines.

While quitting the classroom, he rants about how his disinterest in the class arose from the teacher’s apathy. He goes on about how he and his fellow students are subjected to studying handed out “packets” that are basically predesigned notes and that the teacher puts no effort in developing a learning environment.

“They need to learn face to face,” Jeff points out while his teacher keeps on repeating “bye”.

The ongoing debate in US over this viral video points to a very complicated issue. To understand all of it, you will have to look deeper.

The kind of instructional learning that is sold as smart class management has issues and no one is willing to talk about it categorically. We have a tendency to follow American ways blindly. We have already bought into this kind of smart classroom solution and it’s a matter of time before we see Jeff Blisses here.

Well, we need to inspect if “smart” education is all that it promises to be. No matter what the advertising suggests, essentially it is meant to make teachers irrelevant or at least lazy. Are we ready to embrace such an education?