What do examinations prove?
--> Posted on 2009-08-06 11:19:43 By Gurpreet SeeraMarch, April is time of the year when examinations completely fill the horizons of majority of the youth of India. The usual stories of distress, anxiety and panic fill the papers/ parents fearful lest their children take their own lives, follow every one. Occasionally a boy of a girl is found hanging from ceiling fan or near death situation from having consuming insecticide, and all this in the name of education. Surely it is time to ask more searching questions about the nature of this education, which, like some unappeasable monster, each year takes its sad tribute to young flesh.
But education, it will be argued, is preparing them for the “real world”. What real world is this? We regularly read descriptions of the competitive environment of work as being ‘a rat race: and there is a”cut throat competition”. Is it possible that those incapable of cutting other people’s throats would rather cut their own?
What in any case do examinations prove? Is it the ability to memorize by rote enough facts and figures to be able to transcribe these one fine morning in March or April? Surely we have computers to do that. Is it the mechanistic capacity to get down on paper certain basic ideas regarded as indispensable to the production of an educated person? What is the point in the levels of measured numaracy and the literacy, if these do not alert the imagination of magic of numbers or enhancement of words? It seems that education is increasingly detached from any creative spirit and has been cast in the image of the industrial production line.
It is clear that the economy doesn’t exist to serve humanity, but human beings are being pressed more and more firmly into the service of economy. And education is simply the anterior process to this happy state of affairs. Education which technically means a leading out of young has been transformed into a “leading into”-into unquestioning, obedient if they are lucky, gilded, servitude.
It is clear that this real world is itself a manufactured object of fantasy into which human beings, the most lucrative cash crop the world has ever seen, must be processed to make things, to buy more, at some distant date, will lead to happiness and fulfillment.
An education which knows only data, facts and limited forms of knowledge creates a shunted and incomplete humanity. What a strange paradox that education should have come to represent a narrowing rather than a flowering of humanity. Myopic, obsessive and deep flawed, those who lose their minds or even their lives, through its savage necessities perhaps have more to tell us than all the sagacious pedagogy that adds and subtracts marks and tells some individuals the have passed, while others are committed to utter darkness of failure.
Education has, in any case, been used as for too long as an inducement to good social behavior. The pressure on the young to conform, to follow the prescriptions offered with promises that a good salary, recognitions and security will be theirs have never been greater, and the ability of society to fulfill the expectations it has aroused has never been more slender.
Education, instead of asking questions, seeks only readymade answers, already cooked up by a multi choice monoculture. We stitch veils for the eves of the young and fill their minds with data that clouds their perception. We numb their alert energies and enquiring sprit and declare them ready to take their place as citizens, but in what an ugly and deformed society we are creating.
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