Editorial
Incurring debt from Nagaland’s loss of education-capital
The politicians and bureaucrats governing the people today were students once upon a time. The current breed of policy makers and administrative leadership – tasked with the welfare of Nagaland and her citizens no less – were school and college students when younger.
Stating by a comfortable margin of certainty, almost all of them were reminded by someone, somewhere at some point of time thus: You are the leaders and futures of tomorrow. The society will rest on you.
Today, majority of these politicians and bureaucrats are the ones upon whom society’s most caustic disillusionment and resentment rest. They have come to represent corruption, incompetence, and failed governance. But the most profoundly unfortunate of their displacements is these: the current breed of political leaders and administrative officers has come to represent failed moral leadership.
In their prime, they may have been brilliant students, young leaders fired by genteel aspirations for a better society. They left the harbour as society’s noblest investment. Today, they have reached the shore as society’s most unfortunate liabilities – from prime capital to bad investment. Nagaland today is a tribute to a reorganizing confraternity of tribal peoples struggling to understand new world economics, rights, and just governance.
In essence, they are also victims of the very system they created to manipulate. Education holds clues about possible solutions to the problem. Education – contextualizing Nagaland for now – is breeding corrupt leaderships and imbeciles because the system itself is corrupt.
Differentiating intellectual enterprise from academic activism
Academic movements do not suffice when it comes to addressing issues that demand redress. The angle of engagement though which solutions can be engineered are many. Yet, each of these angles is linked to a rudimentary form of economics: the conditioning of a person by past economic environments, his concurrent economic environment, and his future personhood by accomplishing economic goals.
Hence, in today’s highly privatized market movements, the experience of a student in Nagaland comes out translated primarily as a seller. His academic ambitions are that of a seller. The targets he comes to set are the goals of a seller. He has become a seller—a seller selling degrees. Translated: He has become an automated, unthinking appliance with neither functional values nor egalitarian sensitivity.
Why and how did he become a seller? The network of instruction and information his school and college fed him for the first 20 years of his life revolved around degrees, grades, and success, but never standards. Hence, his definition of success became interpreted in terms of cars, a good house, and perhaps an obscenely obese bank account.
That is why most Naga youths today are dependent – they are economic vegetables surviving on polluted air even when they stand planted on sodden, fertile soil. Only a few emerge from their classrooms with intellectual depth and functional values. Academic activism is not enough. The system demands intellectual enterprise.
‘Market trends’
During 2007-2008, this author reported a one-week series of investigative stories about economic displacement and unemployment in Nagaland. Its data remains relevant even if one were to compare it to the current fiscal’s. During 2006-2007, in one year, Rs. 480 Crore went out of state because 7 out of 10 persons in Nagaland working in the unorganized sector was a non-Naga. Another series of investigative reports about agrarian crises and economic tensions in the NE region this author published in 2010 also suggested that in Dimapur a larger portion of agriculture lands in the district were owned– not leased as previously believed – by non-Naga farmers and illegal immigrants.
The average so-called “educated” Naga still views state employment as the only portal to fulfilling his economic goals and to earn him social capital in the community. He still would not engage in any work that was not “government service.” Our educational system is breeding inane, fallow, and knotted minds.
That trajectory is forcing the educational system to breed
- corrupt leaderships and corruptible policies
- failed welfares conduits
- failed administrative systems
- (Summarized) failed democratic ethos
Academic activism is an expensive silk suit. Because academic activism is purely a process that defines a set of scholarly parameters, the outcome often takes the shape of economics: degrees, employment, salary, pension, income, and such economic subsystems.
In that context, the current brand of education has lost its relevance because that relevance stops once the learner had accomplished his economic objectives. This author is honoured to mentor a number of university scholars and researchers. Without meaning to condescend, he still encounters master’s students who still cannot communicate a fluent synopsis about their chosen subjects. What kind of education, and from where, did they receive?
Similarly, the minds of our politicians and community leaders – if their public speeches and press statements are anything to consider – shows that education has failed to gift them functional academic perceptions or intellectual depth.
Hence, for instance, Nagaland has:
- Politicians fighting vehement court cases over educational qualifications but they have no time for the lawlessness in the state; the killings, extortion, widespread institutional corruption, and arrested development. These diseases are gradually pushing the state back to the economic and developmental margins of the ‘70s-‘80s yet the people remain orphaned and rudderless
- Education departments that retained thousands of teachers whose academic qualifications were found dubious, or that they were appointed illegally and – originally – were to be ejected from service
- Instances when even politicians and government officials have exploited their positions to manipulate the system into accommodating vested interests, including academic benefits and developmental funds
This power-and-money section, 1% of the society, blamed by citizens for the ailing system today, were students once, school and college students, and even teachers too. One can confidently say that almost all of them were reminded by someone, somewhere at some point of time: You are the leaders of tomorrow and will carry the welfare of the people.
Education: information or reformation?
Contextualizing the state of education in India today, the primary reason why education struggles to bear fruit, is because we have come to view education only as an instrument of information. We do not see education as a tool for reformation. We squint at education though the eyes of literary accomplishments, but never as a standard of intellectual activism.
Intellectual enterprise, on the other hand, ennobles academic activism with the rules of engagement about survival, not achievement.
Hence, no truly educated person is unemployed and no working (any work) is ever uneducated. The rules of engagement taught by intellectual enterprise are also the rules of survival, rights, and respect for democratic institutions, democratic behaviour, welfare and accountability, and of truth, peace, and of justice.
Education should be a tool of reformation that a student can use to chisel out an outline of the myriad aspects of living, intellectual growth, productivity and values.
The author has no solutions to offer, except to offer insights about what and who we have become today because of what was. The failure to examine what was because of what is, will decide what our future would be.