What’s real education?

Was it Mark Twain who said “Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education”? Training, you could say, is everything. It can turn you from one vegetable to another, of a slightly higher order. Unless, of course, you decide that it’s knowledge you are going to pursue. Which is the whole point about Rajkumar Hirani’s 3 Idiots, starring Aamir Khan, R Madhavan, Sharman Joshi and the delightful Boman Irani.

But the film shows two students committing suicide (one succeeds, the other fails). In both instances, it’s not really the pressure of education, but the rigidity and treachery that lies within one fictional character — the principal. However, parents are afraid to show the movie to their children, what with exams coming up, pressure building up and the way out — suicide — that the movie appears to depict. This is a dodgy truth. If anything, 3 Idiots suggests that all can be well; an IIT education isn’t the be-all and end-all of life; and it’s perfectly okay to find your true calling, whenever it comes, well, calling. The question is: Do we want education or do we want to create productive people?

The correct answer to that question is — we want education because it leads to socially acceptable behaviour, upright morals, the ability to play, read, write and solve polynomial equations of the second degree. And, in the process, be productive. But today, you can’t trust education itself. You can’t trust it to teach you Euclidean geometry, you can’t trust it to help you translate Milton, or understand why Romila Thapar only wrote A History of India and not The History of India, you can’t even trust it to tell you what is wrong with Donald Duck’s name (OK, we’ll tell you: logically, Donald can’t be a duck, and has to be a drake. Get it?).

Education’s primary objective is to help you like the world through knowing and understanding it. All good things flow from this tremendous connect that education can help you make: innovation and poetry, the urge for adventure, the love for photoelectron spectroscopy, exobiology, music and ultimately the need to leave behind an improved world for the next generation.  

There has never been a bigger need for education than now. But everything that can go wrong with education is going wrong — and more. The latest is the fact that deemed universities are below the set standards in the education they impart and will be derecognised. Of the 44 institutes the Union HRD ministry has identified for derecognition, six are in Karnataka, ranking the state just below Tamil Nadu which tops the list with 16 institutes. Bottom line, the system is about to produce even fewer students with an ‘education’ putting pressure on industry, government and society itself.

Amidst this we have one man in Bangalore, Sunil Savara, who is moving towards an ideal where six million Indians who could never go to school — ever — become productive within the next 12 years. Whoa! Stand back. Can this be real? Savara, who is the founder of a company that realigns an organisation’s business processes using content and workflow technologies, and is recognised as one of IBMs best partners in this space, says that he wants each of these six million to earn a minimum of $2500 per year. That doesn’t appear to be too much — but if you add the numbers, it could increase the national GDP by $15 billion. You want to sit up and take notice of something like this.

How will he achieve this? He wants to take European or American backoffice work to the villages of India. He plans to teach people in who have never been to school to read and write English and perform simple tasks on the computer. He calls this the Village BPO. It’s not a dramatically new concept — running a BPO from a village that has low infrastructure costs. But what is path breaking is the fact that his focus is on people with zero education.

In the last two years, the Village BPO has created the required processes to reach its objective. It has been working hard in rural Karnataka — parts of Koppal near Hampi — and today has 120 people who never went to school, didn’t know English and who can now speak, read and write English, use computers and are productive. The Village BPO has a long way to go in terms of funding, business acquisition, and even its ability to scale processes to ready (note the absence of the word ‘educate’ in place of ‘ready’) the next 1,20,000. But it is showing the way to productivity at the bottom of the pyramid rather than flawed education at the top.