Sanchari Bhattacharyya (Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Silchar, Assam, India)
In the midst of unrelenting statistics of positive cases and death tolls while the prospect of a better future seemed shrinking into a morose foreboding, my solitary confinement kept me engrossed in an unyielding dialogue between my emotional self and its rational counterpart. I felt semantically challenged in the “new normal”: fresh buzzwords like lockdown and quarantine had the vibes of arrested freedom under centralised surveillance; distancing and isolation still sounded repugnant, but became compelling practices; whereas positive embodied trepidation.
Formal education had already taken a sharp turn towards online modes under the pressures of the superimposed dates and deadlines of the academic calendar. The technical obligation towards completion of syllabus, examinations, evaluation, and tabulation had since reduced education into merely an official curriculum dissociated from the context, sensibilities of the time, relatability with the learners’ lived reality, and the psycho-sociological relationship between the knower and the knowable. With the abrupt mode-switch, India’s inchoate leap into digital pedagogy nonetheless earned a great deal of popularity among the urban middle classes. The upsurge in Online Teaching-Learning apps appeared one determined step towards the realisation of the political dream of “Digital India.” We apparently have no grievances; we are preconditioned to take classroom attendance for education and grade advancement for knowledge.
Until only a few months back, parents would dissuade their children from spending hours over mobile phones. Prolonged house arrest, however, turned the smartphone into a trusted companion. Moreover, smartphones/laptops/computers and uninterrupted Internet connectivity are necessary prerequisites in digital pedagogy. We forget that a large part of India is still in the pre-technological stage; that rural India is still the backbone of the world’s largest democracy; that the daily wage earners couldn’t afford the luxury of work-from-home; that many children would probably never go back to schools again—food and shelter are a greater need for survival than formal education. Basic education, however, is a free and compulsory Fundamental Right in the Indian Constitution. It’s an irony that access to education is not.
This thought triggered my bemused brain to resume the dormant dialogue and a crowd of disjointed questions emerged as a central quest. How to define a philosophy of education against a time so characteristic of indifference, alienation, and homophobia? Did the pandemic only necessitate a mode-switch from physical to virtual classrooms? Didn’t it also necessitate a total restructuring of the approach towards education, and thereby knowledge-production and knowledge-management as well? Should formal education not engage with the sensibilities of the “new normal” and help young minds cope with their unfamiliar experiential reality?
A large number of schools offer midday meals to their students, and the lure of one full meal appears to be, more often than not, the drive behind unfailing attendance for many underprivileged children. What appeal could digital pedagogy possibly have to these children and their parents?
Is it indifference or obsolescence—on the part of urban intellectuals, educationists, policy makers—or, simply the fact that we are so taken in by modernity’s techno-scientific rationality, its instrumental progress by constant objectification, mechanisation, and standardisation, that we have completely surrendered our transcendental critical insights to market-determined superimposed needs and choices? When shall the individual stop existing merely as an instrument for the machine civilisation and take cognition of the ontological crisis that the ecocidal modern civilisation has secured for us over half a century, in the name of development?
My frenzied brain, the growing discontent, and the ongoing internal dialogue somewhat intensified the quest for a transformative power that would emanate from educational sensibilities and liberate young minds to think freely and fearlessly. The pandemic too shall pass. Will education be released from its containment zone of mechanistic reproduction and become an instrument of hope for tormented humanity in the perceptible future?