In the throes of a disassembling world order and in the intense resignification of life, what terms hold meanings for us? This occasional series of book reviews, Terms for Our Times, will initiate an engaged review of terms, ideas, concepts and precepts with which scholars seek to forge new pathways for our collective human condition. Drawing on some seminal books, each review will focus on one book and its central idea, and interrogate its significance and contribution. Reflecting on the significance of these ideas for a contextualized understanding of India’s realities, these reviews will act as guidelines for engaged readership and academic engagement. Key terms that may be considered over the coming year: Commons; Honour; Recognition; Sociality; Altruism; Convivial/Conviviality.
Terms for Our Times
From the scholar who postulated the idea of the ‘precariat’ as an emerging form of worker comes another body of work, this time arguing for an urgent reclaiming of education to serve common people. Guy Standing, economist and public intellectual from the UK, calls for recognizing the ‘commons’ as what should be held in common and as belonging to all, and as based on ‘education commons’ as an ‘idea that education is beneficial not just for the individual student or learner but also for the community. Education is about sharing, about communing or collective activity with a community’ (p. 64). With this broad definition, Standing goes on to make a cogent and detailed argument for constituting education, its institutions, administration, orientation and content, to serve a larger public good. In doing so, he unpacks the key trends by which education, which in ideal terms should be about thinking, learning the values of empathy, compassion and humility, has now been rendered into becoming a source for enabling ‘human capital’. In this, the shift away from the possibilities of ‘education commons’ has been towards facilitating education to serve the needs of industry and a larger economy in which the learner becomes primarily a worker, an employee, and a subject of the larger capitalist system. Human capital, now accepted uncritically in most international circuits and policies (including India), focuses on enabling ‘money-making, employability, competitiveness and the fetish of the age, economic growth’ (p. 62). In this shift, Standing highlights the loss of the key foundations of what liberal, classical Western education once stood for: Paideia (search for truth); Arete (moral virtue); Schole (learning with public participation in the life of polis); Praxis (practice as an end in itself); Parrhesia (speaking truth to power); Matthesis (moral or ethical thinking skills); Isogoria (equal right to speak and equal right to be heard). If these were the foundational principles, Standing elaborates on how education, especially since the establishment and administration of mass education, has shifted to becoming the source of rentier capitalism’s low risk but high profits. Subsequently, what we are witness to in much of the world (perhaps, China, Cuba and Russia being exceptions) is the gigantic restructuring and reorientation of education, from primary to higher education levels, to becoming part of the larger financial, investment, and rentier capitalist reckonings.
The impact of such reorientation and restructuring has resulted in what Standing labels as the ‘enclosures of the education commons’, a process by which state abandonment has meant the promotion of education as an enterprise or as an industry, attendant with the rise of ‘edu-business’ and ‘edu-providers’ as ancillaries of this new system. The processes aligning with such reorientation are those of the commodification, managerialism, and financialization of education at all levels. The results are not only evident in ‘distortionary education’ (p. 206) that is emerging the world over and are now manifesting in a wide range of problems such as high teacher-pupil ratios, contractualization of teachers, administrators accountable to edu-investors, promotion of tech-based education, cult of tests and exams, the privileging of STEAM (science, technology, engineering and maths) over liberal arts, degree factories, and a vast network of ‘shadow schooling’ (tuitions and the test preparatory industry). What in popular and educationists’ circles is now bemoaned as the loss of learning is elaborated by Standing as the demise of ‘deep reading’ which has led to superficial understanding of concepts and ideas, devoid of complexity and nuance. Guy Standing unpacks the range of strategies by which the edu-industry, increasingly led by plutocrats or religious fundamentalists in the US, has deployed various education programmes and infrastructure. These include the promotion of tech and IT-based education, which while seeking to promote mass and accessible education has not met the criteria of quality including meeting JS Mill’s of education as enabling the growth of ‘capable and cultivated human beings’.
Mass education, including those of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), the world’s biggest online university (US-based University of Phoenix with enrolments of six hundred thousand students and sold for 1.14 billion dollars), Khan Academy, and a range of other online universities across the world testify to the techno-financialization of education where the idea of education as a commons is eroded. More specifically, what these techno-financialized education networks provide is the possibility of supporting ‘education commons’ which should be able to provide ‘stable non-market regimes for managing shared resources in fair ways for the benefit of participating commoners’ (p. 337).
Much of this has resonance for India. Since 1991, restructuring the larger economy into the neo-liberal fold has had its most significant impact on health and education sectors. Yet, even prior to assessing the erosion of public and state-based education, a key question for us to ponder is: Was there an education commons in India? Historically, caste-based exclusion denied and defied any form of literacy to low-ranked castes. In addition, contrary to European guilds that forged an integration between knowledge and skills, classical caste-based occupations reinforced education exclusion through the divide between formal knowledge, which required writing abilities (reposed with upper castes) and skills (that were endowed among low-ranked castes). Such in-built and reinforced education exclusion has marked ancient, medieval, and modern India and our contemporary conundrum of having vast arrays of knowledge in various domains, but being a largely non-literate nation can be traced to this. Subsequently, despite the otherwise democratic Constitution, the failure to ensure that education opportunities are equal in access and quality has meant that we are a nation with a highly differentiated education system: one in which there has been no ‘education commons’ at all. Education policies have failed to ensure education as a social-leveller and have, instead, built on differential caste/class abilities. Over the decades, India’s education system has involuted to become one with multiple barriers of language, access, quality, and links to the world of opportunity. Post-1991 policies have encouraged state withdrawal and the once state-based education has now devolved into two streams: mass government school education that caters primarily to low-caste, rural-based citizens, mass state universities that are increasingly being railroaded by inadequate funding and politicized administration, and on the other hand a handful of elite, specialist institutions (IITs, IIMs and AIIMS). The latter institutions are celebrated as being sites of meritocracy promoted by the state, but which in reality are institutions that again cater to those able to afford the competitive preparation-entry process and the cultural capital to engage with them. What Guy Standing identifies as the ‘shadow schooling’ system, in which tuitions and exams preparatory support are delivered by private edu-service providers, is most visible in India. From Kota, which is a hub and model for professional education exam preparation, to the range of tech-based edu-providers testify to the failure of India to have an education commons. The demand and market promotion of such tech-based shadow schooling is evident by trends and impact of many of the new edu-players. For example, Byju’s, an online tutoring and exam preparation company, went from a celebrated unicorn (with a billion-dollar investment) in 2018 to a decacorn (ten billion dollars) in 2020 with 150 million students enrolled in its various primary to professional education support programmes. Yet, state failure to regulate such gigantic networks, and the blind depositing of funds into such ventures by venture capitalists, meant that by 2024 the over-ambitious and largely unaccountable Byju’s went bankrupt, its 4000 plus staff were left unpaid, and the impact on the enrolled students and their learning levels remains an unresearched issue.
Recent trends in philanthro-capitalism have seen the rise of new private universities, some claiming to provide scholarships and endowments to cater to the economically disadvantaged. As these new private universities mushroom across India, there is now a new enclaving of higher education. Plush, private campuses with state-of-the-art facilities vie for students while state universities (largely underfunded and poorly administered) are in conditions of moribund existence with enrollment declining in many of the departments. Competition for professional education is so intense that the recent imbroglio with NEET exams encapsulates what the failure of the state to provision adequate educational opportunities, to regulate its functioning, or to decentralize it has meant to the large body of students many of whom choose suicide rather than face the results of entry failure.
Impact of the Loss of ‘Education Commons’: What, then, have been the implications for societies at large and nations of the loss of ‘education commons’? Focusing on the complex class formations and on the lack of new opportunities for the younger generation, Guy Standing extends his concept and description of the ‘precariat’ as also resulting from exclusionary, competitive, and financialized education systems. As in the post-industrial economy, the precariat are not merely exploited workers but are marked by insecurity, high risks and a fragile position in society and the economy. A combination of eliminating full-time teaching staff, reduction in payments and terms of employment, subjecting teachers to regulation and surveillance, and deploying packaged education programmes which erode the autonomy of teachers are ways in which the privately owned, tech-education systems have expanded. Even as these systems rake in profits for edu-investors, they place educators, teachers, and students into conditions of precarity with no guarantees for a life of satisfaction and achievement. The new education treadmills place them on tight regulatory processes and low remunerations which result in ‘expanding the precariat within its own ranks, and gearing schooling to prepare and habituate young people for a precariat life’ (p. 281).
On the other side of the edu-business are the new plutocrats who decide, design, and deploy education as a process to produce and reproduce a precariat that is subservient to it. As Standing highlights, it is the forging of such an education system which combines with a co-opted media led and owned by tech-billionaires and Christian fundamentalists that accounts for the triumphant return of Donald Trump as President of the United States. What such an education system did was to not only dilute standards and opportunities for the working class but it produced and legitimized authoritarianism that now borders on an American form of fascism.
Reviving the Education Commons: With such detailed analyses of how the ‘education commons’ have been eroded and their impact on societies, Guy Standing makes a call to revive them. As he notes, ‘Education should be democracy in action. It should be about the learning of morality, ethics, empathy, compassion and respect for the pursuit of truth’ (p. 336). Teachers, the key transactors of education and learning, must be considered to be stewards, endowed and encouraged with supportive systems of autonomy and growth. Placing education into the framework of ‘deliberative democracy’ is to seek to enable equality of opportunities in which freedom of speech, respect for common knowledge, a sense of belonging, a love of justice are emphasized along with the non-negotiable goal of treating all citizens as commoners. Standing emphasizes the need for education ‘to be rescued from the education industry’ (p. 351) and for it to be de-financialized and de-commoditized.
Standing links the need to restore and strengthen the ‘education commons’ as also being part of the need to strengthen commons in the fields of natural resources, social domains, civic concerns and cultural practices. Such a perspective fits in well with the recognition of the exhaustion of the dominant industrial-financial capitalist system that has resulted in multiple crises; of climate change, decelerating democratic systems and increasing economic inequalities. Yet, as Standing astutely notes, it is in recognizing the multiple ways in which ‘commons’ are lost that we need to sustain those that are key. An alternative to the hegemony of perspectives which encourage privatization, encroachment, commoditization, colonization, and financialization of all commons is to assert the need for ‘consilience’. Such consilience calls for an integration of different knowledge systems and emphasizes nonviolence, harmony and just systems to be centralized.
A consilience for India would be to start with recognizing the myriad forms of knowledge and skills that have evolved in India, and which are not necessarily rooted in the Sanskritic and textual traditions. This requires us to recognize that knowledge systems embedded in practices, in crafts, agriculture, architecture, medicine, nutrition, and innumerable other everyday practices need to be retrieved and given new recognition. Languages that encode and which have sustained these knowledge systems need to be integrated into the larger body of ‘scientific’ knowledge. In a recent discussion on the importance of mother tongue education in India, the educationist, GS Jaydeva, has written about the extent to which the hegemony of English has created ‘language cruelty’ in India’s classrooms. The failure to develop and deploy a stable and relevant education language policy has led to the loss of languages and the wealth of cultures and knowledge they embody. As Ganesh Devy has highlighted, education can be the guiding source to realizing ‘cheto-vistar’, an expansion of one’s mental horizon. More specifically, if the caste-derived and then class-enhanced forms of education deprivation are to be questioned, it is time for India to seriously consider making education the key source of equal opportunities for all and the resolution to the deep democratic deficits which now mark our society and polity. Only if the foundational premises of education exclusion and the great divide of mass versus elite education systems are challenged can we even consider the possibility of a new ‘education commons’. In the context of extant crises—of climate change, economic inequality, and decelerating democracy—there is every chance that a meta-crisis the world over is in the making. To address this, not only should there be a stronger assertion for commons, which Standing sees as the bedrock of any decent society, but there is urgency in seeking this in education. As Guy Standing summarizes and concludes this seminal study, ‘..the commons give structure to society, a bulwark against the excesses of both capitalistic market forces and bureaucratic coercion by a centralized state. We should all be commoners, as custodians for the commons in all its spheres. Those charged with being stewards and those charged with being gatekeepers should adhere to the rules of governance and do their utmost to apply the principles of justice that make the commons worthwhile. That is the transformative future that we should struggle to achieve’ (p. 433).
AR Vasavi is a social anthropologist based in Bengaluru.