Our normative model on education would sug gest that the most significant issues are pro viding employment to ail and giving primacy in economic policy to the lowest deciles of the population.
As we assert this clearly and unequivocally and move beyond the phase of slogan-mongering towards a process of concrete decision-making, many other puzzles will fall in place. Instead of thinking of knowledge as part of a larger process of self awareness and self-transcendence, it has been perceived as a means of steam rolling the entire world into a set of uniformities and has reduced the rich diversity of both nature and cultures to predictable and predetermined states. This has been the thrust of modern physical science which has also greatly influenced the biological and social sciences which too, like the natural sciences, went for a methodology of validation that was based on verifiability and predictability.
It is not simply by altering the economic basis of rural-urban relationships that a more just social order will be created. We also need to alter the cultural underpinnings of the present patterns of dominance and disparity. An important source of the sharp duality of lifestyles and living standards found in most poor countries is the educational system, the aim of which continues to be to produce colonial type gentlemen, disoriented from the large society and constituting a class part. In most ex-colonial countries, formal education was initially meant to produce an elite, mainly to fill the ranks of the bureaucracy, the law and order establishment, and the technical positions in public administration and private enterprises. This orientation still persists in spite of the achievement of independence and in spite of the political eliteís commitment to democratic and socialistic ideals.
Education, far more than poverty or income, is the basis of privilege in our society. So, it is necessary
to emphasise strongly the importance of widespreadliteracy in generating massive social and economic transformation. Poverty is more than anything else, and if poverty breeds poverty and perpetuates itself, as corruption breeds insurgency, it is because it is located in a particular cultural milieu- a milieu of ignorance, isolation, segregation and an extremely low self-image of the poor classes who suffer exploitation without protest and indeed consider exploitation to be the natural state of affairs. This situation cannot be changed except by a basic cultural attack. And the primary pre-condition for this is literacy and minimum education. This point cannot be over emphasised and needs to be expressed continuously and loudly.
There is also need to give special attention to the education of women. In our country, as in most parts of the Third Worldí, women are less educated than men and within the depressed social strata and "ethnic minorities - the gap is even more pronounced. Meanwhile, the daughters of the rich are flocking to the universities and some of them are leading women's liberation movements, which in our country mean the liberation of the privileged. These gaps in education among women and between them and men are an important sources of the persisting duality of cultures, economic levels and consumption standards, the latter more often than not being a direct function of the perennial shopping to which the educated women are so addicted These differences also account for the wide divergences in the way the children of the rich and the poor are brought up, thus perpetuating sharp disparities for generations to come in the future.
Moreover, lack of education of women is an important cause of the exploitation of women, which is a
marked characteristic of our society. The main basis of this exploitation is economic, I suppose, and it is found at its worst in the lower classes among the schedule castes and tribes - but most of all for women. As a matter of social policy, there is need to pay special attention to raising the educational levels of women and mothers from the poor, underprivileged and conservative strata of society in order to achieve a major spin-off process of social reconstruction. Apart from the vulgarity of such ostentatious living in a society characterized by massive poverty malnutrition and apart from the creeping corruption to which it gives rise, the standard of the extraordinary consumption levels and material possessions of the richer and higher status groups undermine the whole fabric of economic policy, which perhaps is the most important and glaring contrast today. If massive programme of employment and social welfare is to be generated, only then a high rate of savings among those with large incomes as well as restraint on salary and wages increases among the employed classes, so that resources can be transferred to employing the unemployed and raising income levels of the poorly employed and the underemployed.
The writer of this Article is the eminent educationist and erudite scholar. Recipient of National and International Awards and Honours
