Comment

The directors of IITs across India are very worried that if they have to include more and more quota reservation students into their institutes, they will have to drop their standards and their admission cut-offs. Meanwhile, the Central Board of Secondary

Education has announced that it will be ranking schools based on their performance in science and maths.

The first example speaks straight to a prejudice which is intrinsic to humanity — some other human is codified as “lesser” on some irrational and unscientific premise. The IITs produce engineers —not scientists — so they may be forgiven their lack of understanding of race, gender, evolution and so on. Or should they be?

We as a country take great pride in our IITs. Huge numbers of highly qualified engineers being sent out into the world to bring shock and awe into the minds of observers.

Going by the reactions of engineering and medical students across the country every time the issue of reservations for the less privileged comes up, this respect they command becomes questionable since they display an appalling lack of knowledge of history, humanity, science or even compassion and good manners. Clearly, the idea of education lies in the eye of the beholder.

The implication of allowing Scheduled Castes and Tribes and now Other Backward Classes into institutes of ‘higher learning’ (interesting that this tag applies only to engineering and medical colleges) is apparently that ‘undeserving’ students will be allowed in.

I write this on the birth anniversary of BR Ambedkar and it seems all the more cringe-making that we can still, with such sweeping impunity, stick to our guns about some Indians being deficient in ability, talent or intelligence because of birth.

For thousands of years our culture stuck to the idea that education was the privilege of a few ‘high-born’. Whatever the reasoning or the advantages, it kept us back as a society. We cannot go there any more.

The problem really lies in another failure: of not managing to educate the whole country from the bottom up. We say the words, but we do not really care. We do not spend money on education andget overly excited about the plight of engineering, medical and managements students and the possible falling standards of those courses if lower caste students are allowed in.

Letter writers to this paper possibly do not even realise what they are saying when they declaim, “Let X politician go and get treated by Dalit doctors if they care so much.” All these writers tend to be high caste and one feels for their friends and families if this is the extent of their horrific bigotry.

As a result, our standards of education in primary and secondary schools are dismal. Because children are not taught properly, and government teachers spend half their lives in census, election, pulse polio and god knows what else duties, results are poor.

With such poor results, the scramble to get into colleges becomes more intense and hence all this heartburn and hysteria. This problem is magnified in households where traditionally access to education has been denied or is limited. Hence the continuing need for quotas. The failure is all of ours.

We have done one thing over the years: we have dumbed down the standard of education in schools, so that whether we produce doctors, engineers or journalists, they come to their first day at work ill-informed and partially educated.

Which brings us to the second example of CBSE schools now being rated only on the basis of performance in science and maths. This effectively means that all other subjects have been downgraded.

We will not concentrate on the humanities because they will not make us into doctors and engineers. And we will continue with this newly created myth that all intelligence rests in these two or three streams of learning.

It does not make for a very well-rounded or even intelligent society.
Email: b_ranjona@dnaindia.net