Teaching in Unequal Societies 9789389812664, 9789388630900

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Acknowledgements This book results from a conference the editors organised at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in November 2018 on the theme ‘The Ethics of Teaching in Pluralistic and Unequal Societies’. The conference was part of the Shastri Institutional Collaborative Research Grant (SICRG) 2017–2019 awarded to John Russon and Siby George by the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, New Delhi. Four academics from Canada and thirteen from India read papers. Krishna Kumar, former professor of education at Delhi University and former director of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), who delivered a talk later at IIT Bombay as part of the SICRG, was kind enough to agree to include an edited version of his talk by way of a foreword to this volume. We recall the events and persons of the conference—those who read papers and the other participants from IIT Bombay, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) Mumbai and Homi Bhabha Centre for Science EducationTata Institute of Fundamental Research (HBCSE-TIFR) Mumbai who rigorously discussed the papers, the delicious lunches and snacks served by the campus restaurant Gulmohar, the kind assistance of staff and students of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), and of Sanjay Bhingarde and his team of caretakers of the Institute’s Guest House. The contributors were very obliging and finalised their chapters in quick time. Research assistants, especially Roshni Babu and P. Deepak, contributed their time and energy for the smooth conduct of the SICRG project. Several students and colleagues of the HSS department, IIT Bombay, contributed in various ways at different stages of the project. Functionaries and the concerned staff of IIT Bombay, especially of the Industrial Research and Consultancy Centre (IRCC), were very kind, helpful and professional when we approached them in matters pertaining to the project. Prachi Kaul, vii

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Director, Reshma Rana Verma, Programme Officer, and other staff of the Shastri Institute were always cordial, friendly and, above all, diligent in their assistance with respect to all matters concerning the project. R. Chandra Sekhar, Publisher, Bloomsbury, New Delhi, and his team have been most helpful and facilitative. Many thanks are due from the editors to all persons and institutions mentioned here for their contributions to making this volume possible.

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The Ethics of Teaching: In Place of a Foreword Krishna Kumar It gives me an unusual sense of pleasure and responsibility to be talking about teaching. One is overwhelmed by the sense of being in what remains one of the few enclaves of relatively undamaged excellence in the field of education in these times when so many institutions that one took for granted are no more able to sustain their status and health.1 As a topic to research and to hold up for examination, teaching is somewhat strange. It rarely gets the kind of attention in analysis and reflection on education that it deserves partly because it is always clubbed with learning. Teaching and learning go together, and that creates a very serious problem of pairing two ideas, which in fact are not similar in any way. Learning is so embedded in the trajectory of human life that you can approach it from so many perspectives about the journey of the mind, a journey through childhood, adolescence and youth. There is so much to think about in terms of the child or youth when we talk about learning. No wonder learning has been so heavily researched over the last one hundred years, even though, as Jerome Bruner (2004) claimed, we still know very little about learning a hundred years after research on it began in the late 19th century in a modern, systematic sense. But we definitely know a lot more about learning than we do about teaching. Teaching has been practised in all civilisations and societies for such a long time that the body of knowledge about it by now should have been a lot more impressive and voluminous than the knowledge about learning. But, that is not the case. Teaching is taken for granted. It poses a problem for analysis because teachers who analyse teaching require a considerable ix

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degree of self-awareness, and they must be willing to spare time for explaining their occupation to others, who look at teaching with a sense of awe. When teachers had a relatively better social status, teaching was looked at as a professional activity, which made the rest of the world, if not curious, at least a little more respectful of the profession. In modern times, teachers generated some interest about themselves. But, modern history has to be seen in a graded way. It has not been the same for colonised societies as it has for colonising societies and societies that did not come directly under colonial control. Hence, teaching, teachers, their lives and their occupation are surrounded by history. Teaching has not been examined to the extent it should have been under our particular circumstances in India. Teaching is an interesting subject to think about in terms of the kind of roles that teachers play in the lives of their students and in the lives of institutions. Teaching being so nebulous an activity, it cannot be as specifically defined as the activities of medicine, law or engineering. The physician attends to the sick body and mind, the lawyer assists a party in dispute by pleading for her in a court of law and the engineer designs machines and technologies. We cannot be so specific about the definite role of the teacher. As an activity, teaching involves diverse roles that teachers play. One can notice quite a variety of human types among teachers. If we think systemically about teachers in general, we would be overwhelmed by the difficulty of defining what exactly distinguishes them as professionals from doctors, lawyers, engineers or chartered accountants. The profession of teaching is more nebulous as it involves more than a professionally defined role. Sometimes one feels that the teacher’s role cannot be examined objectively because it is so wide and goes so deep into one’s personal life and development. Because it is so dependent on individual ways of engaging with the activity of teaching, and so many individual idiosyncrasies play their role in this engagement, it becomes much too challenging for categorisation and analysis. One can reflect on

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it in a general way and think about good and bad teaching, but even that becomes difficult when it comes to classifying and organising ideas systematically. Even arriving at a consensus on what is good teaching might prove as difficult as agreeing on what might be called bad teaching. We do not know for sure what the outcomes of either are; moreover, long-term consequences of good and bad teaching differ considerably from short-term ones. It is perhaps for these reasons that teaching has escaped the kind of attention it deserves. § There are certain common voices that are part of the history and the present of teaching. These voices can help us identify three types of teachers with their focus on the student, the discipline or area of knowledge and the institution respectively. If we carefully observe teachers, we see that the demands of these three foci shape their lives. These are competing demands and a teacher’s work involves negotiating these difficult demands. A significant part of the individuality of the teacher arises from the way she creates spaces for these different demands or how she lets these demands combine in her life. There are teachers who enjoy being deeply and constantly involved with their students and enjoy playing a very significant role in responding to them and shaping their lives. It is a very important aspect of the professional life of teachers who work with very young children that they relate to them and care for them. But even in higher education, or in secondary-level education, it is very important that a teacher’s life overlaps with the life of her student. Whether in individual or collective settings of teachers and students, there is a great deal of overlap, and it is in this overlap that the dynamism of education can be witnessed. Second, there are teachers who really have very little time for their students, or who pay very little attention to who is present in the class.

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They have something to offer, and they offer it in the best possible way and leave. It is the business of the student to pay attention. In fact, a lot of teachers at the higher education level don’t even think that it is very important for them to relate to students. They assume that it is the student’s business to relate to teachers and to what they are doing. This detached approach is certainly an element one finds in the lives of many celebrated teachers. There was this teacher who spoke in whispers and one actually didn’t know most of the time what exactly he was saying. But, students hung on every word that they could catch so that the rest of the words would occur to them somehow from guesswork and imagination. They tried hard to guess what he meant because he was so good and knew his subject so well. Such cases were many among the older generations of teachers. They put the onus of appreciation, understanding and response entirely on the students because they were committed somewhere else—to the knowledge of their field, to which they made a contribution partly in their act of teaching itself. They contributed by sifting the knowledge they had acquired from what existed as the body of knowledge in their times by making it available to the new generation. This is a task that teachers have performed in all societies, and many teachers perform it without worrying too much about who the learner in front of them is. Third, there are teachers focused on the institution. Every institution has teachers who are not all that concerned about being up to date with knowledge or in touch with the latest trends of their discipline, but they are incredibly committed to the institution. The institutional heads, in particular, depend on them to organise events, to represent the institution, and to get things done. They see the life of the institution as partly their responsibility. They quite often spend their whole careers in one institution and see the institution as an extension of their own personal lives. There are many such teachers, especially in schools and colleges. The history of certain institutions cannot be recalled without invoking the memory of some teachers

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whose personality shaped it, whose physical presence made it what it was, who sustained institutional life with personal energy and commitment, and who spent personal time so generously for the institution that very little time and energy were left for the discipline, knowledge or research. There are these tensions within the body of teachers in an institution, arising out of the demands that the institution makes on teachers. This has been the story of educational institutions in many parts of the world, and the question as to how institutions should be run is largely dependent on what kind of people are available to the institution to receive the benefit of their advice, direction and wisdom. Very often these demands come into conflict with demands that students and the field of knowledge make on them. § These three types of teachers represent key voices that we must listen to if we want to examine the ethics of teaching. To listen to them more astutely, I intend to historicise them, but before examining how specific contexts shape these voices, I will propose a broad classification of the functions that teaching performs in the hands of different kinds of teachers. In this classification, I wish to distinguish teaching as a relational activity from teaching as a transfer of knowledge. With the help of this distinction, we can hold up teaching for closer examination and further analysis, as a step towards studying the stamp of history on the Indian system of education. Let us look closely at teaching from a relational perspective. This relationship is generally between an older and a younger person. The younger person can be a lot younger if we are talking about school education or just somewhat younger if we are looking at higher education. Age is a very important factor in the relational aspect of teaching because the teacher and the student have grown up in different times, and the difference in their milieus implies

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that a certain degree of imagination is needed for teaching to take place. The older person, in order to be able to relate, has to be able to imagine what it is to grow up in the present, what it is to absorb the world in the present circumstances. To the older person, the presentday circumstances and milieu are no longer ‘formative’ because she has gone through the formative period of her life of institutionalised education in a different era. That the teacher has to relate to someone who was born in a different world is an important part of the relationship aspect of teaching. The child is born in a world different from the world the adult teacher is familiar with. The teacher, who is accustomed to the different means of making sense of the world, such as language and mathematics, must put herself in the younger person’s shoes. The relational view of teaching also reminds us of the intensity which the pursuit of knowledge necessarily brings to the act of teaching. The relational aspect involves being excited about knowing, about finding out things. The teacher already knows the content of the lesson, but only a rather poor teacher would not join the student in the excitement of getting to understand something new. If the teacher thinks that she knows the matter so well that it no longer excites her, that her excitement is stale now because she learnt it long ago from her own teacher, then she cannot really be a teacher in the relational sense. The relational aspect of teaching compels the teacher to be excited again and again, and keep up the excitement of sharing knowledge with students, which is quite a demand to make on someone. But this is what makes teaching a professional activity and what distinguishes it from other professional activities. A teacher who does not exude this sense of excitement in the pursuit of knowledge would be failing in a very major responsibility. The relational view of teaching reminds us of this responsibility towards the student and towards the student’s own effort to make sense of the world. The teacher is responsible for making the sense-making process sufficiently exciting in order to sustain the student’s interest over time.

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Teaching is not merely an induction of the student into the community of knowers or learners; it is also an act of sustaining the excitement of knowing. Induction is the beginning. The time span we are talking about regarding sustaining the student’s excitement concerning an activity which is not particularly rewarding in the immediate sense is almost two decades. It requires painful effort; in fact, the pursuit of knowledge is an arduous journey. The slogans of our time, such as ‘the joy of learning’, are deliberate propaganda to turn pain into joy. It is a great gimmick of modernity that we are allured into a long struggle by labelling it ‘joy’. Such is the magic of discourse. To be sure, it is the relationship aspect of teaching that makes knowledge worth pursuing. From a relational point of view, the teacher establishes the worth or the value of a life of knowledge. It is a rare thing to do in a world where there are so many pursuits that are far more exciting: the pursuit of power, money, other material gains, entertainment and the pleasures of life. Many of these pursuits are a lot more engaging and obviously more interesting to the young than the idea of pursuing knowledge. Thus, making knowledge look desirable is quite a challenge for the teacher. And, therefore, the relational aspect of teaching reminds us how much the teacher’s own example matters, and that if the pursuit of teaching is not something that makes her happy and excited, then very little can be actually imbibed by the student. A teacher who does not feel the kind of happiness that understanding something fully brings is very unlikely to strike a worthy and strong relationship with students. So this relationship that we are looking at is a very intricate kind of relationship, where two people—one older and one younger—are focusing on something and that object then comes to life. It can be any object: simply a paragraph in a book, a line of poetry from centuries ago, a tree, or it may be an idea. It acquires a life of its own because the teacher brings to it a certain kind of spirit which imbues that object and makes it so interesting that the young person feels drawn to it.

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She/he is then willing to invest time, energy and concentration in it, to go through the pain that arises from sacrifices of various kinds and the transfer of energies from other pursuits which are far more alluring or attractive. That is what the relational view of teaching reminds us of as a major responsibility of the teacher. It plays an important role in shaping what you might call the ethics of teaching. § The relational aspect of teaching, however, needs to be brought parallel to the other aspect of teaching before we remind ourselves of what we today regard as ‘tradition’ and ‘history’. Let us now briefly ponder over the somewhat instrumental aspect of teaching, namely that teaching involves the transfer of knowledge. In orally organised societies, teaching was a very major means of preserving or perpetuating knowledge—preserving in the sense that knowledge remained available to successive generations. The teacher performed that task, helping the student to consign vast amounts of knowledge to memory so that knowledge would not die out but be retained, not merely by the student but by the society itself and its culture. This preservational activity was a major responsibility of teachers in all orally organised societies, where the means of storing knowledge in written form were either not available or were not common or were vulnerable for some other reason. Written means of storing knowledge do have various kinds of vulnerabilities which are comparable to the vulnerabilities of orally organised knowledge. However, we know from the history of the world and of various societies, how important has been the preservation of knowledge through imparting the ability to consign vast amounts of knowledge to memory. This could be through the remembering of texts or through the remembering of ways of doing things. But, the transfer of knowledge to a younger generation was certainly a major aspect of teaching. Although we are here focusing on the instrumentality

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of the teacher’s role in enabling students to memorise or maintain a quasi-physical hold on knowledge so that it remains available after the teacher is no more, this role of the teacher also did involve some degree of relationship with students in order to convince them that the teacher was passing on authentic knowledge. The teacher had to ensure that the students learnt and consigned to memory that which was authentic. Although disputes and debates would arise, some approximation and competitive claiming of authenticity were necessary. If we looked at how knowledge in various competing schools of thought remained available for debate over its authenticity, we would notice the role of teaching. For example, what the Buddha preached, which was not recorded for several generations after his death, we know mainly because of these debates among people who claimed they had authentic knowledge of what he actually taught. Similarly, the fact that various other schools of knowledge could be remembered shows how important the role of the teacher was. This role became increasingly different, of course, when literate means of storing knowledge emerged, and certainly the role of memory, or helping students to preserve large amounts of knowledge in memory, gradually declined. But the role did not become irrelevant, even when it became possible to have large stores of knowledge in printed books or a library. The teacher’s role in the transfer of knowledge still remained relevant, partly because the teacher being older had had time to think about what was really important and what was somewhat less so. The teacher was supposed to know how to sift the knowledge available as heritage. In a way, in post-oral times, the teacher was adding to the transferof-knowledge activity the function of sifting or assessing the body of knowledge so that the student could engage with knowledge that had been sorted out by the teacher. The knowledgeable categorisation of what was essential knowledge and would be added to it was important in order that the time it took to make sense of the world with the help

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of knowledge would remain manageable within a human life. It was the teacher’s responsibility to make sure that not all knowledge, but only knowledge that had been sifted, was transferred. This assortment of knowledge was performed by the teacher, who understood that it was her responsibility to mark certain bits and aspects of knowledge as ‘significant’. Knowledge is always a growing body or, as we say today, knowledge is exploding. But if we look at the history of knowledge in relation to the history of the species, then it is certain that knowledge has always been exploding. It is merely in storage terms that we can claim an explosion of knowledge in our times; since we have no time to figure out what is worth storing, we end up storing everything. This tendency creates numerous problems for curriculum designers and teachers. The inauguration of storage systems relating to print did not reduce the teacher’s responsibility; in fact, it added to the problem because all knowledge could now be consigned to print and, therefore, it was even more important that there was someone to first process it in her own mind before transferring it to the young. And if we were worried about the ethics of teaching in this context, then we would be even more worried about the teacher today rather than the teacher in the oral world because the modern teacher has to put in considerable effort to ‘prepare’ to stand before a group of young people and be able to distinguish what still matters in the older deposit of knowledge as against what has been added. The idea of preparation means basically that you will not present knowledge or transfer knowledge before processing it in your mind so that the student will not just see it as a list of items in a diary (as happens quite often nowadays with the convenience of PowerPoint presentations). The problem of organising knowledge in a living way is something like creating a raga for the occasion, as creative Indian musicians are wont to do. That is where the teacher’s life comes into its most exciting play—reorganising knowledge by capturing the mood of the moment. We might visualise the lives of many great teachers who literally did that. They reorganised knowledge in a manner that

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was different from the way a book might reorganise it, and that is why they became such good teachers—they did not decide before starting to teach how exactly a class would take shape. There was a certain freshness about it, and that is where a very important aspect of the ethics teaching arises—the responsibility not only to keep knowledge authentically available, but also to touch and imbue it with life. We can call this ‘contextualisation’. It is equally important in the relational aspect of teaching, but in the transfer-of-knowledge aspect too, this idea of creating a context is important. It is as important in our times as it was in older times when teachers were in charge of preserving knowledge by ensuring its transfer from generation to generation without damage or loss. Let us now historicise and plunge into deeper questions concerning the ethics of teaching in unequal societies. § That is to say, let me turn to historicising this analysis in the context of a colonised nation. It goes without saying that colonialism can hardly be treated as a period from date ‘x’ to date ‘y’. That is hardly a good way to understand either what colonialism is or what it means to be colonised. The world as we see it in our times—we call it the ‘modern world’, ‘modern’ in the sense of ‘the new world’—is very much a product of coloniality. In terms of dominance, distribution of wealth and distribution of knowledge, the particular shaping of the world we witness today carries a clear and deep stamp of colonial history.2 To be aware of our colonial past is no embarrassment; rather, it is an act of responsibility as it helps us make better sense of our times. Even as we imagine futures that do not carry the stamp of coloniality, it is important for us to recall the impact of colonial ideology on large parts of the world that came under colonial control. Colonisation shaped both the colonised parts of the world and those from which the colonisers came. In the context of education, colonialism has had a significant impact on both the relational and transfer-of-knowledge

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aspects of teaching. Both these aspects carry the stamp of colonialism, and that stamp has been handed down through language. The language in which teaching is to be pursued in Indian society carries the stamp of colonisation more deeply than any other aspect of teaching because teaching, like many other professions such as law, is an activity carried out with the help of words. Words are devices we use for making sense of the world. Naming the world was a major activity in which colonial control exercised its power. A play by the Irish dramatist Brian Friel, Translations (1981), has two male English characters who go about renaming the lakes, hills and roads of Ireland. The old Irish places get renamed, but it is not just about renaming. Once a language becomes a symbol of dominance, societies begin to appear radically different. When that happens, issues of authenticity of knowledge become even more elusive than they might have been otherwise. To every new generation, knowledge presents a challenge regarding its authenticity and relevance. Education implies that the young must see meaning and worth in knowledge. When knowledge acquires the cover of a different and alien language—a language that enabled dominance to be established in history—it acquires a different kind of power. This situation makes the relational aspect of teaching difficult because of the responsibility of relating to students in a language learnt for the special purpose of gaining knowledge. In this way, knowledge gets yanked out of its larger developmental life and living social context. In a former colony, the language in which knowledge is pursued in a relational frame of teaching paradoxically has to be taught, whereas the relational aspect of teaching should be ideally embedded in the lived life of the community’s language. A language thus taught for the sake of gaining knowledge and relating with learners acquires a life of its own, whereas language is essentially a means of knowing and thinking, a role deeply rooted in our own lives as children. Thus, when knowledge becomes available through a language which is not the language of the larger life that is being lived, but one that has a specialised role in the context of knowledge itself, then it presents a very different kind of challenge to education.

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In terms of the transfer-of-knowledge aspect of teaching too, the function of language is central as knowledge and language are inherently related. On account of colonisation, the transfer of knowledge has acquired a new character due to the role of an alien language. It is no more the worth of knowledge and its meaningfulness that the teacher establishes in order to encourage the young to pursue it; rather, handing over a certain amount of knowledge to students becomes a quasi-physical act when it is done in a different, specialised language for making the access possible. Knowledge then loses its capacity to create energy and excitement in the learner. That capacity has to be then injected into it, so to say, after the language in which it is accessible has been mastered. This is not simply an addition to the task of pursuing knowledge; it is much more than that because language also means creation. Language is something very flexible; it is a highly liquid kind of a product of the human mind. The creative aspect of language becomes difficult to pursue if the language of knowledge is not the language used by a vast number of people in society. It ceases to be a participative kind of platform and instead becomes something which has its own limited kind of world, in which it has to be carefully utilised with labour-demanding correctness for the pursuit of knowledge. What happens to the contribution that language makes to the growth of knowledge? It suffers under coloniality because colonialism essentially means that large bodies of knowledge, which developed and grew elsewhere, have to be transferred first to the colonised country before any addition can be made to them. Hierarchies of knowledge emerge, some of which can be reasoned out, while others are simply imposed. It is very difficult then to avoid the politics of knowledge. The colonised parts of the world become consumers of knowledge; the colonising parts of the world become producers of knowledge. Once this hierarchy is formed, it is very difficult to disrupt it or find a historic break in it because knowledge becomes commerce. A certain responsibility of ‘catching up’ comes into being as a result. So the transfer-of-knowledge function loses a number of its facilitating aspects, one being the promise that knowledge will

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be useful in making sense of life. This becomes difficult to sustain because the knowledge that is transferred may not help the student to make sense of life. It may simply help him make a living. Therefore, the pursuit of knowledge acquires a much narrower kind of relevance. § At this point, it is important for us to recall an interesting distinction, which is hard to make in English. The goddess Saraswati, who is often—rather more often these days—invoked in Indian educational institutions, is associated with the terms gyan and vidya. The first term can be directly translated as knowledge, but the second term is not so easy to translate. However, both words are popularly used to mean knowledge and learning. Is there a difference in their meanings, and is Saraswati the goddess of both gyan and vidya? A student of mine once raised this question with Professor Radhavallabh Tripathi, a writer and scholar of Sanskrit. His answer was revealing. Saraswati’s real domain is vidya, which helps create gyan. The difference between the two terms is that the pursuit of gyan or knowledge does not entirely depend on the teacher, whereas the pursuit of vidya does. Vidya conveys the craft of pursuing knowledge and one depends on a teacher to learn that craft. So, vidya is the pursuit of knowledge in the company of a teacher. When we are in the teacher’s company, we learn not just knowledge, but also—to use the closest term in our modern discourse that conveys the sense of vidya—the ‘methodology’ of pursuing knowledge. The concept of vidya reminds us that if knowledge comes to us through a teacher or in relationship with a teacher, then that knowledge is rather different from the knowledge that we might acquire by selfstudy or by various other means of pursuing knowledge. When a teacher is a part of the act of learning, that is when we can say that we have acquired vidya, which is knowledge along with the right way to pursue it. Buddhism also recognises the idea of right knowledge and the right way of pursuing knowledge. In Buddhist thought, this distinction is a part of a reflection in which the metaphor of

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catching a snake in the correct way is used.3 The right way is to hold the snake down with the help of a forked stick—not killing it, but not letting it retaliate either. The knowledge of this way of catching snakes comes along with the injunction that once you have acquired it, you must practise it by catching more snakes. Knowledge brings the responsibility of remaining in touch with it. It is said that unused knowledge becomes harmful. And so, vidya is that aspect which keeps knowledge alive. Knowledge by itself becomes rather dangerous, not just because it might get stale, but partly because it might encourage negative dispositions like arrogance which entails excessive confidence. It is important to recall the notion of vidya because, in our times, knowledge is said to be good for some people, and skill for many others. Such a claim serves to justify an existing hierarchy in society between castes and classes. Vidya can hardly be regarded as a skill, which is now considered a major goal of education. Imparting skills is presented as something distinct from imparting knowledge. So we have in India a National Knowledge Commission and a National Skill Development Mission. These are two different institutional expressions of the great fracture of the policy-making mind in our times. This approach to education is fractured because, according to it, knowledge is not something worth pursuing for everyone. We are, of course, committed to education for all, but not necessarily knowledge for all. Knowledge for some and skills for many is how the matter is perceived today. In fact, skill is what the nation is believed to be deficit in, not knowledge. And so, skill becomes by itself a goal, devoid of and in dissociation from knowledge. § There can be little doubt how this false distinction will play out socially. Ours is a highly unequal society, and our system of education in India carries the legal responsibility to create space for equality in the narrow sense of equal opportunity, while the system’s own wherewithal is limited. If the knowledge/skill distinction grows into an

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institutionalised dichotomy, it will sharpen the entrenched inequality between the opportunities available to the higher castes and classes forming the upper strata of society, and those forming the lower socio-economic strata. In the specific context of teaching, its relational role is already facing the challenge of inequality. The expansion of elementary schooling to nearly universal enrolment has meant the presence of children from the full spectrum of socio-economic and cultural categories in the classroom. Teachers who are used to a monochromatic classroom are finding it tough to relate to children from social backgrounds that were not represented in the school until quite recently. This is not an easy issue to face, especially considering how poor and neglected teacher training is in our system. As time passes, the expansion of elementary education will cause a similar tension in secondary and higher education, bringing the relational aspect of teaching under strain and encouraging teachers to seek a paradoxical relief in the purely instrumentalist role of teaching considered merely as the transfer of knowledge. The relief is paradoxical because the transfer of knowledge is taking place more and more in a language that is tightly linked to colonisation and is, therefore, limited in its instrumentality for the specific purpose of transferring knowledge. Indeed, we have entered an area of pure instrumentality, in which many legacies get distorted—legacies of pre-colonial times as well as legacies of colonial times (see Kumar 2014). Both get distorted under the regime of a present-day dominance. This dominance is a late product of colonialism itself, but it has acquired a new form. It forces the teacher to lose what little claim to authenticity teaching might have had, especially if you are a schoolteacher. During colonial times, the schoolteacher’s status suffered greatly. In fact, out of all the modern professions that arose which required induction, training and so on, no profession was humbler and less attractive than school teaching. The teacher training colleges started by the British from the late 19th century onwards, with considerable investment and hope that a large number of people would want to become teachers, remained the least competitive of professions to enter in the early 20th century.

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The trend set in early and remains intact to our day—nobody really wants to become a schoolteacher; you become one under compulsion of circumstances. This point was captured by a student of mine in a college for teacher training when she asked teachers to recount from their own lives a teacher they considered good and inspiring. One of the teachers said: ‘Yes, I had a very inspiring teacher in my primary school who taught me mathematics.’ The next question was: ‘Do you still keep in touch with her?’ The answer was: ‘No, I don’t. What will I tell her? That I could only become a teacher?’ Now, this statement gives us volumes of insight into the emotional content of what has happened to teaching in our times. ‘Our times’ does not mean 2019. ‘Our times’ began in the late 19th century and we are in the afternoon of that day in a sense. The status of teachers in India has further declined since the 1990s. Very little concern was invested in how liberalisation of the economy would affect teaching. But now it is very clear that neoliberal policies have seriously affected and reshaped teaching. The culture of corporate business has cast its shadow on education. Teaching as a profession has entered a yet lower level of social prestige. Teachers have little control over their professional lives in the new era of convergent curricula, technologically controlled pedagogy and the regime of surveillance with the help of technology. At the school level, the teacher never had much autonomy, certainly not intellectual autonomy, because the colonial teacher was essentially someone who transferred knowledge from the textbook, which is where knowledge was officially verified and approved. But the present incarnation of the colonial teacher can’t even do that. She is serving in a smart classroom, playing her part in a pre-designed pedagogic theatre under CCTV cameras. Progress in pedagogy now means further limiting the teacher’s autonomy, subjecting her to a regime of testing and outcomes shaped by wealthy corporations and powerful states, themselves keen to keep up a competitive edge in standards. In the area of transfer of knowledge too, teaching has been greatly affected, and virtually reshaped, by further consolidation of the

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technological hold over popular conceptions of knowledge and over systems of knowledge storage. Even though it looks as though the new technology of storage has brought a certain level playing field, it is also paradoxically true that the storage systems are now controlled by very few global-level controllers. The three most powerful companies involved in both storage and dissemination of knowledge are located in a single American city. What we call the ‘knowledge economy’ is itself a symbol of global control, and participation in that knowledge economy requires a great deal of regimentation, and consignment of students to radically different streams and futures.

Notes 1

2 3

Editors: This foreword is an edited version of the talk, ‘The Ethics of Teaching’, which Krishna Kumar delivered at IIT Bombay on 28 March 2019. A transcript of the talk was initially prepared by P. Deepak, Research Scholar, HSS Department, IIT Bombay. For a global view of colonialism, see Bayly (2004) and Oesterhammel (2019). This is further explained in Hanh (2009).

References Bayly, C.A. 2004. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914. Oxford: Blackwell. Bruner, J. 2004. ‘A Short History of Psychological Theories of Learning’. Daedalus, 133(1): 13–20. Friel, B. 1981. Translations. London: Faber and Faber. Hanh, T.N. 2009. Cultivating the Mind of Love. New Delhi: Full Circle. Kumar, K. 2014. Politics of Education in Colonial India. New Delhi: Routledge. Osterhammel, J. 2019. Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Princeton: Markus Wiener.

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Introduction: The Unequal Classroom John Russon, Siby K. George, and P.G. Jung All societies are unequal, but the devil is in the detail. According to Oxfam’s ‘The Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index 2018’ (Oxfam 2018), India’s overall rank among 157 countries is 147, and its rank for spending on health, education and social protection is 151. Canada ranks 18 and 32 respectively on the same parameters.1 India’s inequality situation is compounded by its colonial history, its sheer cultural diversity, and the social hierarchy of caste. Furthermore, homogeneous societies are increasingly on the wane in the modern age, leading to inescapable social diversity or plurality. Canada, as a colonial nation subsequently built up by generations of migrants, has a long history of dealing with, and pondering over, cultural diversity. India has sustained a long encounter with diversities of religious, linguistic, ethnic and caste-based communities, which has, in turn, become definitional for the very idea of the modern Indian nation. Since the modern classroom typically is the microcosm of society, inequalities and diversities of social, economic and cultural character that typify modern societies are bound to be reflected in the average modern classroom. If such diverse and unequal classrooms are so inescapable, the primary concern is—how must teachers respond to this situation, assuming that teaching is not merely a matter of filling another’s mind with information but of igniting in her the desire to learn and to transform herself? This question concerning the unequal classroom is the point of focus in this book. At the same time, teaching involves an inevitable double bind. On the one hand, the very ideal of modern freedom and equality, as it were, makes it incumbent on the teacher to enable the young person to emerge as a free and equal being, capable of self-determination; on the other, the very act of ‘enabling’, embedded in the extensive formal-informal structure of xxvii

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modern education and its techniques of disciplining, seems to reproduce the young person after the image of the teacher and the social mould of the times. The critique of modern education seems inherently wedded to this predicament. Critics like Ivan Illich are convinced that the school, rather than creating a level playing field for all, reproduces inequality. The ceremonial formalities of modern schooling, Illich remarks, have a hidden curriculum, which ‘serves as a ritual of initiation into a growthoriented consumer society for rich and poor alike’ (2002: 33). When Foucault’s (1979) critique of the modern techniques of disciplining and subjecting human beings is considered alongside the liberal necessity of educating citizens in submitting to the social contract in order for them to be autonomous persons, ‘then it would appear that such persons would be governable and not “free”’ (Marshall 1990: 25). Krishna Kumar’s critique of India’s divisive public and private school system (1992: Chapter 3), and of Indian education’s neo-colonial, globalising and consumerist agenda (Kumar 1996: 76), has a similar tenor. The violence of teaching and educating seems ineluctable, at least at the most fundamental level—a necessary violence for there to be free and equal beings. The ‘violence’ of education never seems to stop after school, at college or as one gets on with life, for as each night falls, the day has had something to teach. What seems to be crucial is the degree and effect of the ineluctable educative violence and therein rests the very possibility of addressing the question concerning unequal classrooms. Why is the question concerning unequal classrooms an issue of vital importance? When we consider the democratic principles of freedom and equality, the ‘violence’ of teaching respect for oneself and others as free and equal persons seems unavoidable. As we have seen, critics rightly point out that this legitimate and desirable goal is contradicted by the very technocapitalistic structure of modern democracies.2 That apart, as Dewey argues, democracy must not be considered only, and narrowly, as a form of government that encourages education merely because it depends for its success on the reciprocal voluntary cooperation of citizens and their mutually

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intersecting interests. More basically, for Dewey, democracy cannot evade education, both spontaneous and formal, because it is a form of community life, where ‘each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own’ (2004: 93). Ambedkar follows his professor—Dewey— closely in this conception of democracy (see Mukherjee 2009) and adds that democracy involves ‘social endosmosis … [i]t is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellow men’ (Ambedkar 2014: 260). Ambedkar vehemently opposed nondemocratic forms of political systems for India, fearing that they would not be apt for annihilating the occupational and social exclusiveness of caste, and thereby of inequality. Such governmental schemes, he cautions, are sure to educate some into masters and others into subjects … The growth of personality is the highest aim of society. Social arrangement must secure free initiative and opportunity to every individual to assume any role he is capable of assuming provided it is socially desirable. (Ambedkar 1979: 251)

Democracy for Dewey and Ambedkar intrinsically works against social divisions of class, caste, gender, race, language, religion and nation. Hence, as Ambedkar never ceased to stress, political democracy without social democracy is imperfect and flawed. Philosophers like Derrida radicalise this notion of democracy and wean it further away from all allusions to relationships of blood, birth and nature. Democracy, for Derrida, is a matter of relating to others without alluding to ‘hierarchical difference’ (Derrida 1997: 232). Ambedkar maintains with Dewey that democracy is not a natural sentiment, but a form of associative life, a cultural competence, learned by citizens through various mediums that have a formative influence on the development of the person. If so, classrooms and teaching must be recognised as perhaps the most significant mediums through which the democratic sentiment of the equality of persons and non-hierarchical associative living might percolate among citizens, whether or not democratic capitalism is increasingly defeating this salutary aspiration.

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As critics argue, the tendency common among teachers and in textbooks is precisely to reproduce the dominant social opinion and the prevalent status quo in the classroom, unless there is deliberate ethical or political intervention. Recent writings on education in critical race theory emphasise the need for appropriate teacher response in the multiracial North American classroom (see Picower 2009). Similarly, Shailaja Paik (2014) documents Dalit women’s struggle against ‘double discrimination’ in modern Indian classrooms. Analysing Indian textbooks in the 1980s, Krishna Kumar argued that Dalit and tribal students of India could be learning in school to internalise stereotypical descriptions about themselves prevalent in society (1983: 1571), and that textbook lessons could be sometimes reinforcing the view that what causes poverty is the ‘defective and disabling culture of the poor’ (Kumar 1989: 20). In the context of the widely held view that the prevalent system of education in India— and other excessively unequal societies—‘is not conducive to the aspirations of a democratic/egalitarian society’ and that it ‘reinforces/ reproduces the existing inequality’ (Pathak 2013: 120), the question concerning the unequal classroom is particularly significant. The university is the place where critical questions are raised before they can become political proposals. Noam Chomsky argues that the university must be free from State control and must fulfil its role of social criticism with respect to public policy and current ideology (1968: 7). Terry Eagleton (2015) recently warned that the contemporary university is pandering to the status quo, to the State, is losing its autonomy and is dying as the centre of critique. With the recent upsurge of right-wing ideologies and governments in many parts of the world, teachers and classrooms are ever more under surveillance; teachers are roped in to perpetuate hegemonic world views and to make fashionable the most abominable of ethnocentric prejudices and obscurantist opinions. That is why the university must reclaim its place as the centre of critique. The essence of the university as the seat of reason and critical thinking must rise when the attempt to tame, co-opt, subdue and make it docile intensifies.

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This is, therefore, the right time to talk about unequal classrooms— the stubborn persistence and vicious endorsement of inequalities in the classroom. In this book, academics raise the question concerning unequal classrooms in relation to the ethics of teaching. § The book is divided into three parts. The first part, ‘Education: Philosophy and Context’, lays out a general perspective, both theoretical and historical, on education, global and specifically Indian. If anything general can be garnered from this part, it is that education is a fraught debate and that teachers need to work in full awareness of the contested meanings and questions that the field of education provokes, rather than reductively seeing the classroom as homogeneous and uniform. Referring to John Dewey’s argument that education must be both a response to cultural context and a transformative growth out of it through rejection of its debilitating trappings, John Russon discusses why sciences, religion, art and philosophy are all important for a holistic education, and why canonical texts of Western philosophy, which are depositories of essential insights of the contemporary global civilisation, are important even to understand and respond to something like the technomodern capitalism, just as philosophical texts from various other contexts and traditions are important for critical and creative thinking. Similarly, P.G. Jung and Roshni Babu survey philosophical theorisations of education and argue that educational policy and theory are driven either by the Nietzschean (Socratic, Freirean) ideal of the individual’s right to self-determination or by the Kantian ideal of the social cultivation and disciplining of the self. They accentuate the danger of the latter approach in all conceptions of education as a civilising mission, a known justification for colonialism, seen strikingly in the infamous Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Education’, which became foundational for the Indian education system, both colonial and postcolonial. Without the preoccupation

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with the philosophical underpinnings of the context of education as in the first two chapters, dhārā k. chotāi plunges deep into the colonial Indian context of education itself and, more specifically, into what the initial Gujarati textbooks in the middle of the 19th century demonstrate. She argues that the translation of European knowledge into vernacular Gujarati, hailed as the moment of modernisation and egalitarian reform by upper-caste native intellectuals, was an instance of co-optation of the colonial ideology, which under the humanist philosophy, represented the Indian mind as ‘debased’ and uncultivated. The chapter also examines the contentious positions of native elites in the making of the reformist programme elitist, which under the garb of liberal education, instituted and reinforced the inequalities already existing in society. § The chapters in the second part, ‘Ethics of Teaching: Principles and Cases’, have a narrower focus; each of them deals with specific ethical complexities in relation to the profession of teaching in unequal societies. Apaar Kumar’s chapter contends that dispositions such as self-respect—vital for dignified human existence and considered as something that is spontaneously learned in childhood, something that one grows into experientially rather than intellectually, and, therefore, unteachable through consciously rational methods (the position of care ethicist Robin Dillon)—can, in fact, be taught, learned, corrected, repaired and enhanced in adolescent and adult life. He emphasises that moral training in the classroom and through participation in socio-political life at large is important for teaching self-respect, for which resources, constructs and arrangements made on the basis of rational, conceptual or intellectual reflection must at least be considered helpful (the broadly Kantian position of Barbara Herman in opposition to Dillon’s). Referring to her experience as a professor of Greco-Roman studies in multicultural Canada, Patricia Fagan reasons in her chapter that the aim of undergraduate education

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may be taken as enhancing citizen competence to participate responsibly in shared human activities anywhere, broadly in line with the ancient Athenian idea of democratic education. She then argues that in multicultural classrooms in general, one may deploy a methodology of teaching which does not valorise culturally specific content such as Greek classics, but use it critically to teach students skills and values important for citizen competence. The other chapters in this part of the book are based on two highly charged case studies—the personal experience of teaching a university credit course in the prison for a mixed batch of regular students and inmates as part of Canada’s Walls to Bridges programme, and an analysis of the method of teaching in schools set up by Brazil’s wellknown MST or Movement of Landless Rural Workers—attempting to draw from them philosophically pertinent ethical lessons for teaching. Mixing descriptions of her classroom strategies with philosophical reflection, based on the writings of Plato and Sartre, Kym Maclaren argues that it is possible to break down walls or barriers that emerge in classrooms, such as the differentiation between ‘us and them’, the tendency towards self-insulation from others and the serialised consideration of individuals as isolated abstract entities, through carefully calibrated strategies like icebreakers, group discussions on texts and generally dialogical rather than monological approaches, which can lead to the transformation of the classroom as an affective space of community, solidarity, reflective learning and self-realisation. Bruce Gilbert argues that the MST creates farming cooperatives, along with the educational institutions that facilitate them so as to encourage its members to be agents of their own emancipation. The fact that the MST builds, staffs and designs the curriculum for its own educational bodies means that it avoids the ways in which public, State-funded schools can be complicit in precisely the structures of domination that the MST seeks to surpass. Gilbert also argues that the pedagogical structures of the MST are rational, in so far as the kind of non-statist socialism created by the movement answers to the specific demands of the historical situation in Brazil. Not surprisingly,

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this also includes drawing on Brazilian Paulo Freire’s insights about education for liberation. § In the third part of the book, ‘Ethics of Teaching: Indian Perspectives’, discussion of the ethical aspects of teaching is continued and broad principles and focal cases are analysed philosophically and anthropologically. The chapters specifically attend to the Indian education situation, either broadly while discussing theoretical conceptions as the first two chapters in this part do, or as an attempt to reconstruct, connect and reinterpret the educational ethos of an Indian tribal community as attempted in Chapter 10, or referring more pointedly to aspects of problematic social relationships demonstrated in the classroom, such as exploitative ecological and casteist attitudes, especially in societies with grave inequalities, as discussed in the last three chapters. Kanchana Mahadevan’s chapter shows how the Habermasian dialogical perspective of communicative rationality, though Eurocentric and not connected to educational thought and non-Western contexts originally, can prove valuable for rethinking pedagogical practices in critically unequal contexts such as India’s, provided its exclusive attention to the formal-rational conditions of an informational account of dialogue is tempered with affective, material, cultural and storytelling angles, which must be constitutive to dialogical reasoning, as feminist care ethicists argue. Mahadevan contends that such an approach can make the Indian classroom hospitable to the previously excluded stories of Dalits, women and others. In the next chapter, engaging Hannah Arendt’s provocative 1958 question in relation to the American conditions of education—‘why Johnny can’t read’ even though the most scientific and sophisticated methods are used to teach him—and aptly relating Johnny’s predicaments in detail to the Indian situation of gross inequality, Ranjan Panda argues, referring to Krishna Kumar and other theorists, that teaching must be an art that centres on the child/learner. He emphasises that the teacher must be an autonomous,

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caring and involved figure, who goes beyond the textbook and structural delimitations of the system of education to relate with the learner, in order to make learning a joyful/playful activity for her, and to instil in her a sense of being included in the learning activities of the classroom so that she becomes self-confident to learn independently. Amrita Banerjee and Karilemla bring together care ethics and the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire and bell hooks by means of a philosophical reconstruction, arguing that teaching is a caring profession and a relational activity, which involves cultivation of hope and social transformation, and that learning is not merely a mental activity, cut off from social reality and burdened with the baggage of ontological atomism, epistemic non-reciprocity and abstract impartiality. They extend this attempt of philosophical reconstruction further by demonstrating that the idealised role of the teacher (Tzükibutsüla) in the traditional girls’ dormitories (Tzüki) of the Ao Naga tribe of Northeast India can be read in the dual mode of teacher and caregiver for Ao children and the community as a whole. Züki/ Tzüki is conceptualised as an intriguing kind of a blended space of care and learning, in which one may emerge as an individually and socially transformed and hopeful person. Rinzi Lama’s chapter addresses the question of teaching ecologically sensitive dispositions in schools, referring specifically to her sociological studies in Darjeeling region of West Bengal in India, where the curriculum and the textbooks are not factors conducive to environmental education. She contends that ecological sensibility can, in fact, be taught, and a transformed sociality and subjectivity can be formed if individual teachers and NGOs show initiative and approach the subject from a direct experiential and interactive mode of teaching by engaging students with particular, culturally specific and relatable ecological problems, rather than through the invocation of universal principles and global problems. The last two chapters of this part and the book address, in relation to the ethics of teaching, the question of caste, the historically specific and conspicuous problem of social inequality in South Asia. Kesava Kumar’s chapter retraces the domain of critical pedagogy and relates it

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to the Ambedkarite conception of education; he recounts the extent of caste-based discrimination on Indian campuses and the coexistent and necessary struggle for democratising education in India. Referring to personal experiments with teaching and formulating syllabi, he argues that critical pedagogical methods in the classroom and an inclusive curriculum, wherein Indian experiences of marginalisation and stigmatisation are unambiguously present, especially in such subjects as Indian philosophy where counter-hegemonic narratives against caste hierarchy stand excluded, are essential to undo the damage of caste hegemony as a part of teaching. Considering prejudice or prejudgement as essential to human understanding but always renegotiable, and democracy as the subversion of prejudice and artificial exclusions, Siby George analyses from a Foucauldian perspective how caste-based prejudices can be countered by a democratically oriented teacher in an average Indian classroom even by repeating the performance of her failure, as the entrenched framework of power-knowledge within which teachers operate often denies even acknowledgement of covert operations of the social logic of caste in a typical Indian classroom. § These chapters, disparate in their specific concerns and orientations, are held together by at least three overarching points of agreement. First, the chapters are responding to the social sphere of education and the ethos or ethical spirit that must hold this sphere together. They are either laying out the social sphere of education broadly, both in general and concrete-historical terms, as the chapters in the first part do, or are deliberating on the ethically justifiable responses of teachers when the classroom is marked by inherited inequality. Second, the chapters are resolutely in agreement that oppositional social forces and unequal power structures have a viciously stifling impact on learners and on the classroom, whether teachers are mindful of it or not while performing their role. That the powerful social pull of extreme inequality can have a dragging, deforming effect on the learning process is a tacit assumption

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that animates the ethical discussions of the chapters. Third, the chapters of the volume also work with the positive conviction that the classroom as a formal space of learning, which is a constitutive feature of modern societies, can potentially renegotiate and rectify the vicious power of the social structure on the subjectivity of learners. That the teacher is an agent who can contribute to the self-formation of learners and to social transformation is a presupposition that the various, otherwise disparate chapters of this book share. This book is committed to the claim that the profession of teaching—an underpaid, unsung and unappreciated profession, faced with the threat of extinction in the face of unsparing competition from professional coaching, digital learning, teacherless classrooms, robot teachers and online tutorials—will survive and is indispensable as long as teaching is not merely about coaching and filling the mind with information, but is more essentially about mentoring, enabling and transforming persons and societies.

Notes 1

2

The India–Canada comparison is evidently illustrative, but it is also a reminder of the fact that this volume results from a conference (see Acknowledgements for details) attended by Indian and Canadian academics. Questions regarding the suitability and soundness of political systems, and the possibility of reforming the technocapitalistic facade of modern democracies radically, are important in relation to the culture of teaching, but these larger political questions are not taken up for discussion, except in passing, in the chapters of this book on the ethics of teaching in unequal societies.

References Ambedkar, B.R. 1979 [1919]. ‘Evidence before the Southborough Committee’. In Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 1,

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edited by Vasant Moon, 243–278. Bombay: Department of Education, Government of Maharashtra. Ambedkar, B.R. 2014 [1936]. Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition, edited by S. Anand. New Delhi: Navayana. Chomsky, N. 1968. ‘Philosophers and Public Philosophy’. Ethics, 79(1): 1–9. Derrida, J. 1997 [1994]. The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins. London: Verso. Dewey, J. 2004 [1915]. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. Delhi: Aakar. Eagleton, T. 2015. ‘The Slow Death of the University’. In The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 April. Available at: https://www.chronicle.com/ article/The-Slow-Death-of-the/228991 (accessed on 21 September 2019). Foucault, M. 1979 [1975]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin. Illich, I. 2002 [1971]. Deschooling Society. London: Marion Boyars. Kumar, K. 1983. ‘Educational Experience of Scheduled Castes and Tribes’. Economic and Political Weekly, 18(36–37): 1566–1572. Kumar, K. 1989. Social Character of Learning. New Delhi: SAGE. Kumar, K. 1992. What Is Worth Teaching? Hyderabad: Orient Longman. Kumar, K. 1996. Learning from Conflict: Tracts for the Times. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. Marshall, J.D. 1990. ‘Foucault and Educational Research’. In Foucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge, edited by Stephen J. Ball, 11–28. London: Routledge. Mukherjee, A.P. 2009. ‘B.R. Ambedkar, John Dewey, and the Meaning of Democracy’. New Literary History, 40(2): 345–370. Oxfam. 2018. ‘The Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index 2018’. Available at: https://oxfamilibrary.‌openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/ 10546/620553/rr-commit‌ment‌-‌‌reducing-inequality-index-2018-091018en.pdf (accessed on 21 September 2019). Paik, S. 2014. Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination. Abingdon: Routledge. Pathak, A. 2013. Social Implications of Schooling: Knowledge, Pedagogy and Consciousness. New Delhi: Aakar. Picower, B. 2009. ‘The Unexamined Whiteness of Teaching: How White Teachers Maintain and Enact Dominant Racial Ideologies’. Race Ethnicity and Education, 12(2): 197–215.

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The Importance of a Philosophical Education in Contemporary Society: Dewey and the University Curriculum John Russon John Dewey’s 1916 book, Democracy and Education, is a rich and detailed look at many aspects of educational experience. I will draw on two central points made by Dewey to establish a framework for thinking about the unique demands our contemporary society puts upon both the form and the content of education in general and upon university-level education in particular—I will use Dewey’s notion of ‘interest’ to reflect on the content of education and I will use his notion of ‘growth’ to reflect on the objective of education.1 I will use these two points to identify, first, the distinctive significance of the fact that each of us occupies a cultural perspective that cannot automatically be presumed to be shared between teachers and students, and, second, to determine the goals and the curriculum of a responsible education. Overall, my goal will be to map out the range of issues that define the project of education in a multicultural and unequal society, and ultimately to identify the importance of philosophy within this project. Education, of course, comes in many forms. Children sitting in a government-administered classroom using standard textbooks and carrying out formal assignments is no doubt the image that we most immediately associate with the word ‘education’, and there is a good reason for this, since the public-school system reflects that society’s basic commitment to the healthy formation of its citizens. It is important to remember, however, the many other forms that 3

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education takes. There are systems of education, for example, that those who do not have access to these regular institutions must cobble together themselves, whether in workers’ collectives like the MST in Brazil, in initiatives like the Inside-Out programme for prison inmates in North America, or in community-based organisations like the Anarchist Free University in Toronto, Canada. Again, there are the institutions of ‘higher learning’—colleges, technical schools and universities—that serve adults who are already highly educated according to the broader standards of society and who participate in these institutions voluntarily (unlike the children for whom school is compulsory). And there are many other forms of education, such as religious training, professional apprenticeships, community programmes, private music lessons, informal studies and so on. To address the philosophical and political issues of education properly, one would need to be attuned to this very broad range of educational practices, for each of these pedagogical situations has a distinctive cultural and educational significance and presents its own unique pedagogical challenges. Though the general pedagogical points that I will initially make are indeed relevant to education in any context and at every level, my ultimate focus will exclusively address issues that arise within the very narrow and specialised context of the university. The university offers education in highly refined matters, and it is an education that is usually only open to a select population of relatively affluent individuals who have already had substantial access to formal education.2 In my view, however, this exclusivity, narrowness and specialisation do not imply that university education is merely a ‘special interest’ for the privileged few; on the contrary, I believe that what happens at the university has tremendous significance for what can happen at all the other levels of education. Consequently, the form university education takes should be a matter of great concern for those who are concerned about education for children, workers, prisoners, women, outcast groups and so on—a concern for those, in short, who are committed to what the Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire called a ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ (Freire 1993).

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Interest: Scientific Facts and Their Context In Chapter 14 of Democracy and Education, entitled ‘The Nature of Subject Matter’, Dewey (1916) considers the nature of what we study in our educational system. In our schools, we study chemistry, engineering, calculus and so on, and these subjects are typically presented as facts about reality that we are to assimilate. What we must remember, though, according to Dewey, is that all of these ‘facts’ are the products of human study. Over the centuries, human beings have encountered various puzzles and then devoted great time and energy to solving these puzzles. It is those solutions that are passed down to us as the assembled body of learning that is ‘chemistry’ or ‘engineering’ or ‘calculus’. However, when we study these subjects the human context of problem-solving is typically ignored—usually, we are simply required to memorise the formula for finding the derivative of a mathematical function or to memorise that water is H2O, and then apply this knowledge to our own studies, without investigating how and why earlier researchers were led to discover these facts. We take the results, that is, and generally disregard the process that produced them. Now, on the one hand, this disregarding of the process makes sense, for the value of these results really is their ability to be removed from the specific context of their discovery and to be used in radically different contexts not even dreamed of by the original discoverers. This removability of the result from that contingent context and its repeatability in other contexts is, indeed, what makes it worthy of being called ‘science’, and hence worthy of inclusion in our educational system. On the other hand, however, there are problems with this de-contextualising of these scientific ‘facts’. What is lost in removing the historical context is the recognition that these results are valuable because they address human problems and that they ‘exist’ because they answered to human struggles and human methods of inquiry. When seen in the context of their emergence, what is put on display is precisely the relevance of these

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‘facts’, that is, the context allows us to see why we have an interest in studying these things. Without this context, the facts become just meaningless details to be memorised. As Dewey writes, Numbers [for example] are not objects of study just because they are numbers already constituting a branch of study called mathematics, but because they represent qualities and relations of the world in which our action goes on, because they are factors upon which the accomplishment of our purposes depends.… [T]he act of learning or studying is artificial and ineffective in the degree in which pupils are merely presented with a lesson to be learned. Study is effectual in the degree in which the pupil realizes the place of the numerical truth he is dealing with in carrying to fruition activities in which he is concerned. This connection of an object and a topic with the promotion of an activity having a purpose is the first and the last word of a genuine theory of interest in education. (Dewey 1916: 134–135)

Given the de-contextualised way in which subjects are commonly taught, it is not surprising that many students are bored by their studies and others who stick with them come to ‘possess’ a large quantity of information without any deep understanding of what it is they have, why it ‘works’ or why it matters.3 For all students, the apparent irrelevance of education is a huge issue and, consequently, the fundamental pedagogical imperative is to demonstrate to students the importance for their concerns of the materials being taught. To do this, we as educators must ourselves grasp those ‘results’ as answers to human questions and our teaching should be oriented to help students to find those questions alive within their own experience. What we might call the ‘top-down’ education simply passes on ‘facts’ as virtually sacred objects; it essentially worships the subject-matter and denies any weight to the perspective of the student. The ‘bottom-up’ pedagogy that I am advocating, on the contrary, is an educational process that inherently attests to the central worth of the student’s perspective. ‘Bottom-up’ pedagogy does not deny the importance of the received learning, but it recognises the value of that learning to be contingent upon its ability to speak to

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the living perspectives of the students. Dewey writes, ‘When engaged in the direct act of teaching … [the instructor’s] attention should be upon the attitude and response of the pupil. To understand the latter in its interplay with subject matter is his task’ (1916: 183). This principle, the first principle of all education, is especially pertinent to the context of a pluralist and unequal society.

Growth: Education and Cultural Specificity In pluralist and unequal societies, effective education must begin with two assumptions. First, it must be recognised that the students do not share with each other or with the teacher a uniform cultural background or a uniform set of cultural expectations. Second, it must be recognised that the students do not share with the investigator whose results they are studying a uniform cultural background and set of expectations. In culturally more uniform situations in which that background and those expectations are more generally shared, communication of the results may well seem easier, but there is an essential critical distance from the material being studied that is lost. This is because the question—‘why are we studying this?’—does not need to be addressed, with the result that, along with whatever positive content is learned, a great deal of cultural presumption— prejudice—is also reinforced. The study, we might say, has an explicit narrative—which is, for example, learning the facts of chemistry or engineering—but it also has an implicit meta-narrative, that is, its presentation is a kind of gesture of reinforcement, affirming that ‘the way we see things is the way they are’—in the case of chemistry or engineering, the operative presumptions being the perspective of modern, Western science and technology.4 Consequently, in any educational context, cultural homogeneity poses a problem, always threatening to turn the educational experience into a form of cultural reinforcement that has nothing explicitly to do with the particular subject-matter under study. Educationally, therefore, the pluralist

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and unequal environment is ultimately pedagogically superior, even if it can often be practically more challenging. If we bring our theme of relevance together with our two pedagogical assumptions, then we can say, first, that the material to be studied must be able to demonstrate its worth within the cultural perspective of the students, and, second, in doing so, it almost certainly must reveal its own distinctive cultural context. I will return to this point, especially in relation to the study of Western philosophy, but for the moment I want to step back from consideration of any particular subject-matter and reflect further on this theme of effective education within a culturally specific context. I said earlier that good pedagogy affirms the centrality of the student’s perspective. This issue of allowing the student to see herself in the study is a rich point, and, rather than being a burdensome imposition, it affords great resources to the educator. In order for students to feel included, they should find their gender, their age, their race, their religion, their language, their culture, their history and so on in the classroom, and so materials by women, for example, materials by trans individuals, materials by Hindus, by Muslims, by Jews, materials from Italy, Algeria, Brazil, India, Japan, and materials from every conceivable domain of humanity should be brought into the curriculum wherever possible. This serves both to affirm to those from different cultures that they belong here and simultaneously to affirm that those from other cultures belong here too.5 This simple practice of including materials from various different cultures and communities radically changes the ‘meta-narrative’ from what we considered previously, for this is a gesture expressing our need to find room for each other rather than expressing that ‘how we see it is the way it is’.6 If education stops at this multicultural endorsement, however, it has not gone far enough. While it is important to include students, affirming that ‘it’s okay that you are who you are’, education is only education if it is challenging the student, affirming on the contrary that ‘how you are is not okay’. In other words—and this is the

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second point I want to take from Dewey, this time from Chapter 4 of Democracy and Education—education is about growth, and, therefore, it affirms the present situation only insofar as that situation is on its way to becoming something else. Dewey writes, Our net conclusion is that life is development, and that developing, growing, is life. Translated into its educational equivalents, that means (i) that the educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end; and that (ii) the educational process is one of continual reorganizing, reconstructing, transforming. (1916: 49–50)7

Education is not just informative (as the notion of subject-matter as ‘facts’ suggests), but is formative and, more importantly, transformative—its purpose is to facilitate our growth into richer and fuller human identities; this point is especially relevant in the context of culture. For better or for worse, cultures give to individuals and communities the ability to define themselves (and something analogous is true of family identities, genders, racial identities and so on, but I will limit my focus here to cultures). I do not mean by this the reflective attitude of thinking about themselves (although that is no doubt true too), but more basically the fundamental capacity to be something at all—they are educationally formative. It is as and through our cultural particularities that we, individually and collectively, get hold of the world, rather as for each of us our organic embodiment is our fundamental presence in the world as something that can affect and be affected by the world. Our cultural identities are not choices made or fashions adopted by an already formed individual or community, but are the very fabric out of which an individual or a community is formed, and they provide the individual and the community with the original terms for making sense of things. In this sense, then, cultural identity as such is inherently liberatory in that it is what initially frees us for participation in the world.8 These particular identities, however, can also be oppressive—to oneself and to others. The identity I have within a cultural system

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is my identity, to be sure, but within that identity is implied as well the relation to the rest of the ‘system’—whether the caste system of India, the system of family-centred traditionalism in rural Sicily, or the liberal-individualist system of America—and that system puts upon one many constraints. Indeed, the very specificity that defines any cultural system virtually guarantees some form of oppression in that the endorsement of a specific way of being is thereby necessarily exclusionary regarding other forms of living, and thus actually opposes others who live in different ways and implicitly opposes those within the system who might desire to live differently. The very feature that makes a culture liberatory is thus also the feature that makes it oppressive.9 The educational significance of this is that the endorsement of the cultural specificity of the student’s perspective must be coupled with a critical perspective on that very perspective. Precisely like the ‘facts’ of the scientific descriptions, cultures need to be understood as solutions to problems, not as sacred, eternal truths.10 We need, therefore, to understand the founding needs of our humanity that give rise to cultural identities—the universal question to which those cultures are answers11—in order both to appreciate how they are successes—how they are liberatory—and then to see in turn both that other cultures likewise successfully answer those same questions and, indeed, that there are limitations in how our own culture answers those questions. The endorsement of the student’s perspective in its specificity, then, must be at the same time an empowering of a critical perspective on that perspective.12 Here again, though, it is unsatisfactory if this critical perspective, like any other educational ‘content’, is simply an alien imposition. Like any other aspect of learning, if it is to be meaningful, the critical perspective must be something that arises in response to a need already felt within the student’s own perspective. The critical perspective itself, then, must be a response to a human striving that intrinsically seeks to go beyond the parochialism and insularity of

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cultural life and to establish a bond with others who similarly strive.13 Of course, one can never force a student to embrace this or any other perspective. Indeed, individuals—individual students—can take almost any form imaginable, and they, as individuals, will require different, specific pedagogical relationships if they are to grow. I am imagining here, though, how to take up our institutionalised form of education, and so, as teachers, we must presume some baseline of development within our students. We can never adapt ourselves precisely and uniquely to the individual demands of each and all of our students, but what we can do, in this context, is orient ourselves towards those human attitudes of striving and experiences of bonding in the hope and expectation that, because they are intrinsic human desires, students will identify with them. Our goal, then, is to make the subject matter relevant in a way that endorses the legitimacy of the differing cultural perspectives of different students, but at the same time holds those perspectives answerable to values that transcend cultural particularity. With this general structure in mind, I want to return now to my main focus, which is the content of education.

Criticism and the Question of What Is Absolute Education first is cultivating in students the basic skills that will allow them to function effectively in the world. Thus, reading and adding, at the most basic level, and engineering and medicine, at a more advanced level, are essential routes into empowering individuals to engage in a meaningful and effective way of interacting with their worlds. An educational system must attend to these concerns without which a form of social life cannot even maintain itself.14 Forms of learning such as engineering and medicine, however, only allow the individual to deal with her world within the terms it presents, that is, they take the existing way of life for granted. These forms of learning are resources—very important resources—for working within this world, but not for challenging its terms—not for

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getting ‘behind’ them, so to speak, and recognising that these terms are not primitive or absolute: not sacred. That job of challenging the terms of the everyday world is the province of endeavours other than engineering and medicine—it is the work, rather, of art, religion and philosophy.15 Art, religion and philosophy exist in this space of addressing the absolute and primitive to which the everyday answers and, thus, if our education is to encourage a (self-)critical perspective in the student, they are essential elements of responsible education. Let me briefly consider the pedagogical place of each in turn. At its core, religion is precisely the way a culture or an individual affirms the need to acknowledge the primitive and absolute to which the everyday answers. For this reason, the cultivation of a religious attitude is in principle one of the most fundamental routes into developing the very critical perspective that I have here been identifying as a central goal of education (and, to be sure, religious development has undeniably had exactly this effect on many individuals). But though this is true of religion in principle, in fact, it is more commonly the case that what gets taken up as ‘religion’ is really just another form of specialised cultural practice, with the result that religious ‘development’ tends more commonly to encourage rather than challenge the kind of parochial ‘this is how we do it and it is right’ attitude.16 Consequently, actual attempts to bring religion into education are typically conservative efforts and, when implemented, they typically have the opposite effect to what I am here defining as the goals of education.17 Art, on the contrary, is pedagogically much more promising. Art is exceptionally powerful educationally, in part because it speaks to us ‘below’ the level of our rationality.18 An artwork grips us affectively— emotionally—with a vision that, precisely because it thus grips us, proves itself to be meaningful to us, even if it is not what we expect or otherwise accept. Art, in articulating a perspective on the world, precisely speaks to that in us that is not exclusively bound by the terms of our actual world but is open to seeing things otherwise.

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Artworks speak to this openness in us and good artworks educate this openness in us. Works from other cultures, contemporary or historical, can lead us into those other worlds, and works from the cutting edge of art—from whatever culture they emerge—can encourage us to envisage a world that does not yet exist. Artworks thus allow us to find ourselves already in a world that we otherwise find ourselves outside of. In so doing, these works simultaneously broaden our perspective and afford us a critical distance from our own cultural perspective. There is thus every reason to incorporate works of literature, painting, dance, sculpture and so on into our teaching, for these works precisely cultivate our human sympathies and help us to cultivate a critical perspective. Philosophy, finally, is pedagogically distinctive and important because it explicitly addresses the question of ‘the absolute and primitive’ as such. Here, though, it is important to distinguish different senses of philosophy. Philosophy, as ‘the science of the ultimate’, is, first, not the arbitrary matter of individuals forming opinions about things (which is how philosophy is often naïvely construed), but is the history of the revolutionary insights into the nature of things that have been of a piece with the cultural transformations of our world. It is history itself that tells us which are the essential insights, and studying philosophy in this sense is learning to understand the world we have come to inhabit. Philosophy is not just this history of world-shaping insight, however, for it is also, second, precisely that individual matter of learning the skills of careful discrimination between and evaluation of differing perspectives, the skill of relating claims to evidence and learning to justify one’s beliefs, and so on. And, third, philosophy is also a matter of thinking creatively about one’s current situation, which is always necessarily uncharted territory. But philosophy in all of these senses—the history of insight into the ultimate nature of things, thinking rigorously, and thinking creatively—is precisely the ‘science’ of that critical reflection on human perspectives that education calls for and, consequently, philosophy is at the very heart

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of a responsible education in pluralist and unequal societies. Like art, then, philosophy should be as essential a dimension of the curriculum as are the fundamental matters of reading, adding and engineering. In reflecting now on how to accomplish this, I want to conclude by arguing that the method of incorporation of philosophy into the classroom admits of tremendous flexibility with respect to some of its aspects but almost no flexibility with respect to other aspects.

On Teaching Philosophy When it comes to developing the skills of critical reflection and rigorous thinking, traditional texts of philosophy, whether Western, Indian, Chinese or from other traditions, can surely all be effective, in that all of these traditions offer profound examples of rigorous thinking, and consequently the formal study of philosophy in contemporary societies should always include materials drawn from these different cultural traditions; in many cases, though, officially ‘philosophical’ texts may actually be pedagogically poor choices and the skills of good thinking may well be better encouraged through engagement with literary or historical or other scientific texts, for example. In other words, none of the different histories of philosophy is privileged here against the others, and indeed, as a whole, they are not obviously privileged as against texts from other areas of human endeavour. Consequently, if we truly want to cultivate the philosophical skills of critical thinking, it is incumbent upon us to do more than simply force students to read texts from our own philosophical tradition. With respect to thinking creatively, there is again no obvious reason why texts from the history of philosophy are pedagogically of the most value. It is always a challenge to encourage creativity rather than conformity in any field of study, and so there is no obvious answer to which materials would be most valuable here, though one can imagine that practical experiences of problem-solving, on the

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one hand, and engaging with explicitly creative work, perhaps from art or politics, might be especially valuable educationally. Here again, if we are truly motivated to cultivate a philosophical attitude in our students, we must do more than repeat the long-standing tradition of simply ‘teaching’ the same old philosophy texts. Philosophy in the second and third senses that I have delineated previously, then, admits of considerable pedagogical flexibility when one imagines trying to encourage their development; it is in these areas that matters of pedagogy and ‘relevance’ are most pertinent, and it is here that making the issues alive within the perspective of the student should precede the engagement with the work in an alien form; indeed, exclusive reliance on texts from the history of philosophy might be a markedly poor choice in these matters precisely because of their characteristically alien and uninviting character.19 The matter is different, however, with philosophy understood in the first sense that I identified, and this will be my final point. As the history of revolutionary cultural insight into the nature of things, philosophy, like mathematics or physics, is more or less a fixed discipline, and, as is the case with mathematics or physics, there is relatively little flexibility with respect to the content that needs to be taught. The ancient Greek philosophers, for example, are figures the study of whom is of continuing urgency because their writings give voice to the compelling insights that underlie the broader Greek world-view that gives rise to the revolutionary birth of politics as such and that continue to define the horizon of our contemporary reflections on social life.20 Similarly, the philosophical writings of the Early Modern European philosophers continue to be urgent matters of study because these writings give voice to the insights that underlie our distinctively modern world of experimental science and technology, liberal-democratic politics and global capitalism. Our world is multicultural, to be sure, but ‘culture’ itself exists at many different levels, and all of our modern cultures, however varied at many levels, live within the larger horizon of this capitalist, technological globalisation, and it—capitalist, technological globalisation—is

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thus the meta-culture that defines us all, whether we like it or not.21 Studying the history of Western philosophy in particular, then, is essential to each and all of us for understanding our own cultural perspective. Beyond this, even our attempts to transcend this cultural perspective depend on these historical, philosophical insights. When we think, we do not draw on some unique source of thoughts somehow given to us in advance of our participation in culture; on the contrary, we think with the resources that our historical human culture has bequeathed to us. Indeed, it is the very same tradition of Western philosophy running from the ancient Greek philosophers and through the Early Modern philosophers that has defined the very project of cultural criticism and articulated its terms. When we are critical of global technocapitalism—as we surely should be—we are nonetheless thinking with the cultural resources that our contemporary culture—Greco-European global culture—has afforded us. Education in this tradition is thus essential precisely if we hope to transcend it.

Conclusion It is through education that we develop the powers to engage effectively with the world, resulting in our flourishing in our own lives and in producing citizens that preserve and enrich their society. A healthy education is ultimately one that is directed towards understanding and critically responding to one’s own culture and its limitations, and, I have argued, an education in philosophy specifically and the humanities, in general, is at the centre of such an education. More specifically, I have argued that, while it is essential that we adopt a multicultural curriculum and that we resist the imposition of, for example, the traditional Western perspective in education, the canonical texts of Western philosophy remain irreplaceable components of that education. This is because these texts play a

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unique role both in the constitution of our contemporary cultural perspective and because they offer essential resources for challenging this perspective. In Book VIII of the Politics, Aristotle maintains that education is the most important function of the State.22 In fact, contemporary governments generally work against the careful development of education and especially work against education in the humanities in particular, which, I have argued, are at the core of what is progressive in education. We cannot, as teachers, change these governmental policies, but individually we can each do our part in the classroom to offer our students the educational environment that our institutions will not on their own supply.

Notes 1

See especially Dewey (1916), Chapter 10, ‘Interest and Discipline’, and Chapter 4, ‘Education as Growth’. 2 For an overview of the worldwide status of ‘tertiary education’, see Roser and Ortiz-Ospina (2019). 3 This is what Freire famously referred to as the ‘banking model’ of education. See Freire (1993: 53): ‘Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “banking” concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits.’ 4 Compare Fairbank and Goldman (2003: 217): ‘During the decades following the Qing Restoration of the 1860s, leading personalities, both Manchu and Chinese, tried to adapt Western devices and institutions. This movement … was posited on the attractive though misleading doctrine of “Chinese learning as the fundamental structure, Western learning for practical use”—as though Western arms, steamships, science and technology could somehow be utilized to preserve Confucian values. In retrospect, we can see that

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gunboats and steel mills bring their own philosophy with them.’ This broad theme of the implicit cultural meta-narrative that underlies an explicit narrative is the central focus of the discussion of the educational significance of art in Plato’s Republic (1991), Books II and III, and Laws (1988), Book II. 5 Compare bell hooks’s discussion of the significance of ‘Black Studies’ and ‘Women’s Studies’ in North American universities in Teaching Community (hooks 2003: 1–8). 6 Through a focus on the suggestive etymology of the ancient Greek word, sugchōrein, I have taken up the notion of ‘making room for each other’ in more detail in Sites of Exposure: Art, Politics, and the Nature of Experience (Russon 2017), Chapter 3, and Adult Life: Aging, Responsibility, and the Pursuit of Happiness (forthcoming 2020), Chapter 2. 7 Compare Dewey (1916: 48–49): ‘Above all, the intellectual element in a habit fixes the relation of a habit to varied and elastic use, and hence to continued growth. We speak of fixed habits. Well, the phrase may mean powers so well established that their possessor always has them as resources when needed. But the phrase is also used to mean ruts, routine ways, with loss of freshness, openmindedness, and originality. Fixity of habit may mean that something has a fixed hold upon us, instead of our having a free hold upon things.… Habits reduce themselves to routine ways of acting, or degenerate into ways of action to which we are enslaved just in the degree in which intelligence is disconnected from them.… Routine habits, and habits that possess us instead of our possessing them, are habits which put an end to plasticity. They mark the close of the power to vary. There can be no doubt of the tendency of organic plasticity, of the physiological basis, to lessen with growing years.… [T]he love of … new developments too easily passes into a “settling down”, which means aversion to change and a resting on past achievements. Only an environment which secures the full use of intelligence in the process of forming habits can counteract this tendency.’ 8 I have explored this issue more fully in Russon (1995). 9 On this ambivalence of cultural identity, see Jacobson (2016). I have explored this issue more fully in Russon (2017), Chapter 3. 10 For a rich description of the problems of imagining cultural forms to be eternal truths, see Ambedkar (2002).

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11 Compare Dewey’s summary of his discussion of the democratic ideal in education: ‘Since education is a social process, and there are many kinds of societies, a criterion for educational criticism and construction implies a particular social ideal. The two points selected by which to measure the worth of a form of social life are the extent in which the interests of the group are shared by all its members and the fullness and freedom with which it interacts with other groups’ (Dewey 1916: 99). Compare Dewey (2016: 174–175) on the democratic ideal. 12 See Russon (1995: 523–524). See also Hoff (2018). 13 I have discussed this in more detail in ‘Lesson 8: Indifference, Relative and Absolute’ in Russon (2017). 14 Compare Dewey (1916: 10): ‘A community or social group sustains itself through continuous self-renewal, and … this renewal takes place by means of the educational growth of the immature members of the group.’ 15 This is what Hegel calls the domain of ‘absolute spirit’. See Hegel (1971: 553–577); Hegel’s meaning is more clearly presented in his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (Hegel 1975: 92–104; especially 93–94). 16 Compare Dewey’s assessment of the cultural impact of a public school system: ‘Our [public] schools, in bringing together those of different nationalities, languages, traditions, and creeds, in assimilating them together upon the basis of what is common and public in endeavour and achievement, are performing an infinitely significant religious work. They are promoting the social unity out of which in the end genuine religious unity must grow’ (Dewey 1907: 807). For discussion, see Feinberg (2010). 17 See Dewey (1907: 807): ‘The alternative plan of parcelling out pupils among religious teachers drawn from their respective churches and denominations brings us up against exactly the matter which has done most to discredit the churches, and to discredit the cause, not perhaps of religion, but of organised and institutional religion: the multiplication of rival and competing religious bodies, each with its private inspiration and outlook.’ 18 See Schiller (1968) for the philosophical study of art in its distinctive relationship to human education and development.

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19 For a rich discussion of how texts from the Western philosophical tradition can be taught in a pedagogically effective manner, see Jacobson (2012, 2013). 20 I have more fully discussed the emergence of politics in ancient Greece in Politics, Money and Persuasion: Democracy and Opinion in Plato’s Republic (Russon 2021 [forthcoming]), Chapters 1 and 2. It is also the case that ancient Greek philosophy is the source of our basic understanding of plant and animal life as such. 21 I have discussed the emergence and the historical reality of capitalism more fully in Russon (2017), Chapter 3 and in Adult Life (Russon 2020 [forthcoming]), Chapter 4. 22 Aristotle, Politics, VIII.1.1337a11–12: ‘That the legislator must, therefore, make the education of the young his object above all would be disputed by no one’ (2013: 223).

References Ambedkar, B.R. 2002. ‘The Annihilation of Caste’. In The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar, edited by V. Rodrigues, 263–305. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Aristotle. 2013. Politics, trans. C. Lord. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn. Dewey, J. 1907. ‘Religion and Our Schools’. Hibbert Journal, 6: 796–809. Dewey, J. 1916. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: The Free Press. Dewey, J. 2016. The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry. Athens, OH: Swallow Press. Fairbank, J.K. and M. Goldman. 2003. China: A New History. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2nd edn. Feinberg, W. 2010. ‘Teaching Religion in Public Schools: A Critical Appraisal of Dewey on Religion and Education’. Philosophy of Education Archive, 2010: 266–274. Freire, P. 1993. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. M. Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum. Hegel, G.W.F. 1971. Philosophy of Mind, trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon. Hegel, G.W.F. 1975. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Hoff, S. 2018. ‘Hegel and the Possibility of Intercultural Criticism’. In Hegel and Canada: Unity of Opposites?, edited by S.M. Dodd and N.G. Robertson, 342–367. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. hooks, bell. 2003. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Routledge. Jacobson, K. 2012. ‘The Beginnings of Philosophy: Approaches to Introducing Philosophy and Metaphysics to Young People’. In Philosophy and Education: Introducing Philosophy to Young People, edited by J.M. Lone and R. Israeloff, 125–136. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press. Jacobson, K. 2013. ‘Philosophy across the Ages: Some Observations on Content and Strategy’. In Philosophy in Schools: An Introduction for Philosophers and Teachers, edited by S. Goering, N.J. Shudak and T.E. Wartenberg, 244–253. New York: Routledge. Jacobson, K. 2016. ‘Socratic Hospitality: Heidegger, Derrida and the Primacy of the Guest’. Studies in Humanities and Social Science, 33: 36–54. Plato. 1988. Laws, trans. Thomas Pangle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Plato. 1991. Republic, trans. Allen Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 2nd edn. Roser, M. and E. Ortiz-Ospina. 2019. ‘Tertiary Education’. Available at: https://ourworldindata.org/tertiary-education (accessed on 21 August 2019). Russon, J. 1995. ‘Heidegger, Hegel and Ethnicity: The Ritual Basis of SelfIdentity’. Southern Journal of Philosophy, 33(4): 509–532. Russon, J. 2017. Sites of Exposure: Art, Politics, and the Nature of Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Russon, J. 2020 (forthcoming). Adult Life: Aging, Responsibility, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Albany: State University of New York Press. Russon, J. 2021 (forthcoming). Politics, Money and Persuasion: Democracy and Opinion in Plato’s Republic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Schiller, F. 1968. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, trans. and edited by E.M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Waiting for a Socrates: Kant’s Educational Vision and Macaulay’s Civilising Mission P.G. Jung and Roshni Babu The last decade has seen a considerable rise in concerns regarding the lack of ‘original thinking’ emerging from the space of Indian academia. As of now, the Indian government is gearing up with a new education policy to address this lack. There has been a clear and unprecedented wave away from the ‘bucket theory’ approach to learning, alongside efforts to emphasise the cardinality of the growth of the ‘individual’ within a vision of education. There is, with the growing emphasis on thinking critically, the anticipation of a noticeable rise in the number of individuals flourishing with the help of an attitude that is ‘reflective’. Towards this end, even if there is a vagueness surrounding the term, there now seems to be an urgency to promote, among students, a sense of ‘critical thinking’.1 However, the idea of ‘critical thinking’ doing the rounds in educational policy circles is seen as indicative of a skill rather than an approach or an attitude. That is, it does not look at the label as indicative of a state of being, but rather as suggestive of a technological tool. Of course, critical thinking as a technological tool has its own uses that cannot be undermined in the present age of innovation worship. However, such an understanding of the label does not necessarily accommodate the idea of the ‘self-reflective’ Socratic individual that the liberal framework of education seeks to and, in our considered opinion, ought to promote through educational structures. After all, the issues 22

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of inequality and lack of respect for diversity that we seek to address within our classrooms today are clearly not matters that can simply be dealt with through ‘innovative’ thinking. The latter is necessarily market-driven and cannot be the ground for what we need, that is, ‘a Socratic self’.2 This chapter seeks to explore why the wait for such a Socrates must continue within the dominant framework of education in India, which, as we shall argue, is broadly Kantian. Camus’ (1956) pronouncement that ‘Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is’ aptly summarises the dominantly held justificatory basis for the necessity of the institution of education. Almost all of the philosophical reflection on education, beginning with Plato, can be fundamentally construed as an inquiry deeply rooted in the ontological commitment that our being demands an external apparatus to aid it in its becoming.3 The available discourse on education fundamentally assumes that, irrespective of the posited nature of this latent potentiality of our being, we are peculiar in that we lack the facility of a natural or involuntary unfolding of our being towards its ownmost potentiality. The structural means through which we are to propel ourselves towards the transformation of our being into its presumed potentiality is, in essence, what is sought to be captured by the term ‘pedagogy’. The question of pedagogy is thus cardinal to the humanist project and this accounts for the importance accorded to the institution of education within the Enlightenment project. However, what comes to be disputed within the discourse on education is the nature of this apparatus of pedagogy, and the mode of engagement within the sanctum of the institutional space of education. Reflection on pedagogy seems to oscillate between two positions. The first position is reflective of the Socratic insistence on the inherent capacity of our being to discover transformative truths in conducive environments, not merely concerning theoretical matters but even cardinal truths to guide one’s actions and conduct in practical matters. Thus, within the perspective of the Socratic ideal, the primary concern of pedagogy lies in the manufacturing

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of environments that are conducive to such self-discovery. It is this Socratic position that is later revisited and revised in Rousseau’s Émile and then in Tolstoy’s essays on pedagogy. It is also this Socratic vision that is reflected in the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, where the oppressed may not merely mimic the oppressor in pursuit of liberation, but must dialogically participate in the very apparatus of education. But its most radical form is found in Nietzsche’s AntiEducation (2016), where being is finally granted absolute autonomy in the determination of its own becoming. The opposing position to this Socratic pronouncement is most clearly articulated by Kant, who in contrast to the Socratic faith, evinces a fundamental distrust in the very nature of our being, when left to itself without any governing structures and guiding dictates. This position, which is reflected in Kant’s view on education, thus takes pedagogy to be the chief architect of a being’s becoming, and hence a necessary institution to act as the antidote to being’s selfdestructive tendency. Kant is a paradigmatic figure representing this position because his views on education clearly map onto his formulation of the ideal self—the moral being self-bound within the self-posited demands of duty.4 In fact, Kant’s lectures on pedagogy could be read as a workbook on how best to produce a particular kind of subjectivity that is essentially bounded by the universal rational norms dictated by the ideal of ‘humanity’.5 It is precisely on the basis of such an understanding that Kant insists on schooling or education as being necessary for the formation of character (Bildung), and thereby for culture (Kultur) itself (Kant 2007: 461 [9:472]).6 Needless to say, within the domain of education, the pendulum has largely remained tilted towards the Kantian side. After all, the legitimisation of this fundamental distrust in human nature, in turn, opens up the possibility of fashioning, through education, the very becoming of a being in particular moulds that are demanded by the exigent historical circumstances of the society or the state. Thus, in contrast to the Socratic perspective on pedagogy, within

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the Kantian framework, the scope of pedagogy is translatable into questions concerning the social technology of subject production. After all, within the Kantian system, equality is synonymous with uniformity. Thus, here pedagogy is fundamentally political in nature and the institution of education, thereby, ought not to lie outside the institution of the state.7 It is this merger between the state and education, and thus the opening up of the possibility of the formation of ‘state-fashioned subjects’, that renders the Kantian proposition to secure education as the sole duty of the state an attractive one, at least to the sovereign, in the service of nationalism if not cosmopolitanism.8 The much-celebrated German university system that later influenced many universities in Europe and America is clearly the poster child of a view that is in stark contrast to the Socratic vision.9 In fact, in our considered opinion, those who protest against the persistent and active interventions of the present Indian government in matters pertaining to institutions of education in the country must not read these interventions merely as arbitrary, sudden or vindictive moves on the part of the state, and consequently as impinging upon the autonomy of the educational space. Rather, such interventions must also be seen as being informed by the state’s realisation that it can, and must, harness the true power of educational institutions to produce a particular variety of subjectivity. As we argue, the educational space in India has historically never been an autonomous space at all. And though the modern-day Indian educational system was put in place by the colonial British, the Empire clearly saw, as we shall illustrate, a Kantian paradigm of education as one that was most apt for its colonies, instead of the more liberal Socratic one. Independent India, given its nationalistic charge in post-independence decades, has not changed this educational policy much, or its stance on the role of education.10 Further, the position on pedagogy that is reflected in Kant’s work clearly projects the curtailing of one’s individuality through the disciplining mechanisms of pedagogy as more palatable to the

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individual as well. After all, Kant holds that discomfort and the pain of constraints on ‘subjective freedom’ are a necessary aspect of the transformation of our being towards its actual potentiality, thus valorising the sacrifice of one’s individuality.11 For Kant, pedagogy has a dual aspect. Primary among these is the negative aspect of ‘discipline’, which is what prepares the ground for our transformation from a being that recognises its freedom as absolute and unconstrained, or, as Kant sees it, from a ‘savage’ being into a human being that recognises the necessity of constraints upon its subjective inclinations (Kant 2007: 439 [9:444]).12 Accordingly, Kant holds that the initial intention in schooling children should not be that of their learning through instruction, but ‘rather that they may grow accustomed to sitting and observing punctually what they are told, so that in the future they may not put into practice actually and instantly each notion that strikes them’ (Kant 2007: 438 [9:442]). It is precisely through the external apparatus of the educational institution that such a lawless, desire-driven ‘animal’ is made to recognise the constraints imposed by the ultimate telos of the ideal of ‘humanity’. For Kant, a being untouched by the routine of discipline of the educational apparatus is a being that is perennially trapped within its own natural disposition towards ‘unregulated freedom’, and consequently poses a threat to culture itself. The Kantian framework of education, unlike its Socratic counterpart, thus construes ‘discipline’ as an internal demand of our being, and thereby makes the notion of ‘authority’ indispensable to education.13 Thus, within the dominant perspective on pedagogy that is exemplified here by Kant, what can be safely asserted is that there seems to be a tacit belief in the necessity for the sovereign or the state to hold a paternalistic attitude in the interest of its subjects. Within this broad ontological commitment, the reflections on formal education, especially in the late 18th and 19th centuries, therefore, centred around the nature of the subject that was to be produced, and the best structural means, or pedagogical approach, to attain

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this. On this, there seems to be hardly any dispute.14 However, Kant problematically assumes that ‘in the long run’, the interests of the subject and those of the sovereign are predestined to be in harmony.15 Consequently, the mismatch, if any, between the interests of the two parties involved is merely temporary, if not ellusive. The function of education within such a perspective is clearly acknowledged to be the production of a subject rather than an individual, since the process of becoming, within a formal educational apparatus, evidently involves subjecting ‘being’ to certain regulative and formative norms, both tacit and explicit, in order to draw the contours of one’s being in the light of a pre-established interest. Such a perspective on education seems to pronounce, as the task of education, the harnessing of our being towards a particular formation of the subject which then negotiates social-moral-political-personal spaces along particular and predictable trajectories. Consequently, we see within the Indian context, and rather blatantly under the present regime, the explicit recognition that educational spaces are not neutral spaces of knowledge production and dissemination, but the very ground from which particular subjects with particular orientations are produced. Thus, to bring about change or reform demands active intervention in the sites, and within the apparatus, of education itself.16 In the light of this, we can clearly see the poverty of the vision of education within the Kantian framework in its failure to accommodate the ‘individual’ as such. In other words, there is a clear manifestation of distrust for the unbridled unfolding of the individual.17 Analysing the institution of education in India demands that we look at it precisely through this Kantian frame, rather than the Socratic one, since the foundations of the Indian educational system are Kantian.18 More importantly, this enables us to clearly discern the necessary tension between, on the one hand, the constitutive relations between the institution of education, subject formation, and the regulative role played by the apparatus of discipline, and, on the other, the clichéd demand for the production of ‘free-thinking’

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individuals. In other words, it helps us understand that the paradox we face within the Indian teaching space is precisely that of producing a Socrates within a Kantian paradigm. In fact, as Eric Stokes (1990: viii) has argued, the insurmountable nature of the task at hand was evident early on to colonial reformers like J.S. Mill. The ‘Indian experience’ had exposed the paradox ‘between the principle of liberty and the principle of authority’ (ibid.). The response of the colonial state to this paradox was by way of rallying the educational paradigm based on utilitarianism around the principle of authority rather than that of utilitarian liberty.19 In other words, it was deemed legitimate to uphold the primacy of the subject over the primacy of the individual within the context of colonial India. It is this primacy of the subject that comes to ground the mission of civilising the ‘barbaric natives’,20 and is consolidated in Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Education’ in 1835. But we must also realise that Macaulay’s Minute represents the first attempt to legitimise the invocation of authority for the sake of liberty. The mission of civilising the natives is thus safeguarded by Macaulay in his adoption of the Kantian framework that demands the authoritative apparatus of discipline as an internal prerequisite for the realisation of freedom, and thereby as a prerequisite for the birth of an ‘individual’ in the true sense of the term. In other words, Macaulay legitimises authority while retaining the sanctity of liberty precisely by arguing for the necessity of ‘disciplining through education’ prior to the realisation of the ideal of liberty. Bluntly put, Macaulay is clear that the birth of ‘Socrates’ in India must wait. It is this insight that comes to the fore once again, though in different garb, in Macaulay’s advocacy of the view that it was the solemn duty of the government to educate the poor section of England’s population in the interest of the sanctity of liberty.21 As Macaulay puts it, the education of the poor is the state’s duty within the ‘narrowest view of the function of the government’, given that it concerns ‘the security to the persons and property of the members of the community’ since ‘moral distempers are inseparable from

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ignorance’ (Trevelyan 1903).22 He argues that vandalisation of property and riots cannot take place in a country in which the mind of a labourer had been opened by education, [and] in which he had been taught to find pleasure in the exercise of his intellect, taught to revere his Maker, taught to respect legitimate authority, and taught at the same time to seek redress of real wrongs by peaceful and constitutional means. (Ibid.: 442–443)

That is to say, Macaulay’s defence of education (for the poor population of England) as a duty of the government is precisely rooted in his faith in the educational apparatus as a technology for ‘civilising’ the poor. It is this extrinsic utility of the educational apparatus that legitimises education being held as a duty of the state.23 Macaulay’s ingenuity lies in articulating the latent aspect of the possibility of accommodating an extrinsic utility within the Kantian paradigm. It is for this reason that the distinction he makes between the role of the state in relation to the education of the rich and that of the poor is crucial, since surely, as a Whig, he had, at the least, to defend the liberty of individuality of the rich, and thus secure the legitimacy of the assurance of a minimal interference policy on the part of the government.24 Clearly, the realm of nobility could have a Socrates, but for the masses, the educational apparatus was not intended to produce Socrates; it was rather for generating a civilised population—subjects rather than individuals. Hence, in the case of England, Macaulay favoured a dual-tiered structure of education, a Kantian one for the poor and a Socratic one for the rich.25 Of course, in the context of India, though Macaulay is emphatic in asserting it to be a duty of the British government to invest in the reform of the population, such a dual educational structure is deemed unnecessary for the colony of India for obvious reasons (ibid.: 445). Further, in his insistence that the duty of education lies squarely with the government, Macaulay craftily weaves the notion of utility with the Kantian framework in a manner that makes it apparent that for a successful implementation of the Kantian vision of education as

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a technology for the production of a particular variety of subject (a ‘civilized’ one in the context of colonial India), the state must ensure that it is both the funder as well as the regulator or supervening authority of the entire educational apparatus. Macaulay clearly recognised that only in this way could the state control the content or the curriculum that was to populate the formal structure of education, ensuring that the extrinsic utility, in this case, ‘civilising the natives’, was, in fact, realised.26 This is in contrast to the then prevailing opinion of James Mill, who, during the administration of Warren Hastings, successfully advocated the funding of the education of ‘natives’ by promoting the existent ‘old systems’ of education, with minimal interference in the curriculum. Thus, the British administration funded education through the financial grant it provided to the age-old gurukulas, madrasas and viharas.27 This is what changes with Macaulay’s formulation, simply because the materialisation of the extrinsic utility demanded that educational content be geared towards the maximisation of this utility, and hence required complete control of the regulative mechanism of the educational structure. Macaulay is explicit in stating his reasons for the need to reform the approach adopted by the British administration with respect to the educational system for the ‘natives’. Arguing for the abolishment of the promoted ‘Oriental system’ of education, he holds: The grants which are made from the public purse for the encouragement of literature differ in no respect from the grants which are made from the same purse for other objects of real or supposed utility.… But to talk of a Government pledging itself to teach certain languages and certain sciences, though those languages may become useless, though those sciences may be exploded, seems to me quite unmeaning. (Macaulay 1835; emphasis added)

Macaulay’s crafting of a space for an extrinsic utility within the Kantian vision of education is precisely, therefore, what legitimises the assertive interference of the state as the regulator of education, rather than being merely its financer. This then suggests that one

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possibility for a fruitful revamping of education that promotes the emergence of a self-reflective Socrates within the Indian educational space is precisely to limit the role of the State to that of a financer; this, however, is not how the reality stands today.28 What Macaulay brings about is thus an educational apparatus befitting the production of subjects, wherein the very teleological motivation underlying this apparatus stands in stark contrast with the ideal of the Socratic vision of the flourishing of the self. Here, we may wish to pay heed to Nietzsche, who clearly sees the danger of an education that aligns itself with any extrinsic interest, especially if put forth by the state.29 Nietzsche brings to the table an alternative lens to examine the function of an extrinsic utility such as that of ‘civilising the natives’. For Nietzsche, the real function of any extrinsic utility attached to the educational apparatus is to aid the sovereign to sustain its power over the masses precisely through a ‘regularisation’ of their individuality. It is this process of regularisation that is labelled, to lucrative effect, as the ‘civilising mission’, and in turn justified by appealing to the alluring discourse of Enlightenment. The motive of subject formation, as Nietzsche sees it, runs alongside demands for generating a uniformity within the populace, ultimately rendering it calculable and thereby predictable. This, as Nietzsche emphasises, goes against true diversity and curbs ‘pluralism’ at its very roots. The pinnacle of such insistence on regularity is ‘control’. In other words, such an educational apparatus is a social technology of power retention by those at the helm of the power structure. Thus, as Nietzsche sees it, the very notion of ‘formative education’ runs counter to the formation of any genuine individuality, since the notion of individuality is incapable of accommodating any external demands other than its own. It is for this reason that Nietzsche, reflecting upon the state of education in Germany’s celebrated institutions of the Realschule, the gymnasium and the university, writes, ‘here, our philosophy must begin not with wonder but with horror, and no one incapable of such a feeling should touch pedagogical matters’ (2016: 21).

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As Nietzsche sees it, ‘classical education’ that seeks to encourage free thinking, which is what education in its true sense is for Nietzsche, must promote the ‘flourishing of the individual’s spontaneous creativity’. This, as Nietzsche wants us to realise, runs counter to the very notion of ‘academic training and formal education’ to the extent that ‘the academic and the truly educated man … belong to two different spheres, which may occasionally overlap in a particular individual but which will never coincide’ (ibid.: 28). Therefore, following Nietzsche, one may conclude that the dominant educational apparatus, as reflected in the works of Kant, is nothing but ‘anti-education’, if anything.30 What Nietzsche brings to the fore, in a most aggressive manner, is the view that it is impossible for individual freedom, and thereby the flourishing of individuality, to sustain itself within any education apparatus invested in the production of a predetermined subjectivity. The tension that Nietzsche brings to our attention is precisely what plagues Mill in his own reflections on education and its ideal, as we noted earlier, since Mill’s deterministic ethology, or the science of moulding human nature, ran counter to his stand on the absolute primacy of liberty. Macaulay, as we have seen, addresses this tension by compartmentalising the beneficiaries of education into two classes. The first of these is populated by those deemed to be already civilised and thus worthy of liberty, and the second by those whose liberty could wait till they were deemed civilised. Consequently, Macaulay unhesitatingly put forth the two distinct visions of education for the two classes in England. In the case of his 1835 ‘Minute on Education’, however, the demand for such demarcation is conspicuously missing. Clearly, we know where the Indian population were assumed to belong. What this indicates, however, is the simple but uncomfortable notion that if we intend to bring about an education that nurtures and promotes ‘free thinking’, cosmetic treatment of the educational apparatus and vision inherited from the colonial past is not enough. Rather, what is demanded, as Nietzsche highlights, is an overthrowing of the dominant educational ideal altogether.

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Before we dismiss Nietzsche’s analysis as being too fanciful, we must consider that Nietzsche seems to be on to something here—something that makes his reflections on education relevant to us in the present context. For Nietzsche, the intrinsic ideal of education as a mode of self-liberation saturates the telos of education, and thus education can never accommodate any other extrinsic telos than its own. Accepting the possibility of an extrinsic telos, as proposed by Macaulay, would amount to nothing less than the abandonment of the very ideal of selfliberation for Nietzsche. But, as we saw, Macaulay does not hesitate to abandon this ideal for the sake of the ‘civilising mission’. For Nietzsche, an educational apparatus in alignment with the Kantian vision is, therefore, inevitably bound to the ideology of the state, since education, subject formation and culture are so closely interwoven that only the state can truly act as ‘the guiding star’ in determining what constitutes ‘culture’ (Nietzsche 2016: 51). Anticipating Macaulay, Nietzsche argues that the state convinces the populace about the ideal of culture that it promotes by scrupulously projecting this ideal’s conformity with a notion of utility, which it presents as the precondition of one’s flourishing. As Nietzsche bluntly puts it, this utility is what goes by the name of  ‘vocation’ or ‘career’. Thus Nietzsche proclaims, ‘no course of instruction that ends in a career, in breadwinning, leads to true culture or true education’ (ibid.: 55). In other words, Nietzsche argues that education, with its ideal of ‘free thinking’, cannot be construed as the means to one’s very sustenance. In Nietzsche’s analysis, the promotion of the Kantian paradigm is but the promotion of a modality of survival within the particular Spirit operative at that historical point in time (Zeitgeist) that dictates what constitutes culture. As Nietzsche dramatically puts it, ‘there is only one true opposition: between institutions of education and institutions for the struggle to survive. Everything that exists today falls into the latter category’ (ibid.: 57). Nietzsche asserts with typical calmness, ‘the zeitgeist practically whispers in their ears: “… you are servants, assistants, tools, outshined by higher natures, never free to enjoy your own individuality; you are yanked around on strings, cast in chains,

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like slaves, like machines!”’ (ibid.: 67). In other words, following the Nietzschean analysis, the Kantian paradigm as appropriated within the vision of education laid down by Macaulay for the colony of India was most suited to producing mechanical beings who could cater to the services demanded by the Empire, rather than encouraging selfreflection that would be conducive to the emergence of a Socrates.31 As is now well accepted, the introduction of Western education in India was thoroughly informed by a utilitarian motive. We need not elaborate upon the well-established fact that the study of English literature was deemed the most crucial dose of medication needed to cure the ‘natives’ of India of their ‘uncivilised’ outlook.32 As Saikat Majumdar reiterates, we need to remember that the study of English literature was at the heart of this enterprise, not as a bid for liberal humanities, but to serve the administrative needs of Empire. Literary studies was one key subjects [sic] in which students were trained, tested, and certified so as to be declared suitable for government service. (Majumdar 2018: 33)

It could be argued that Macaulay’s proposal to utilise government funds to introduce English in India as the language of the civilising mission drew on the prevailing ideological understanding of English as a language impregnated with the modernising mission—in other words, the language of liberation and modernity.33 Nevertheless, the function that the introduction of the English language would perform in terms of service to the Empire cannot be overlooked. In fact, as Macaulay himself, invoking the notion of utility, states decisively, Why then is it necessary to pay people to learn Sanskrit and Arabic? Evidently because it is universally felt that the Sanskrit and Arabic are languages the knowledge of which does not compensate for the trouble of acquiring them. On all such subjects the state of the market is the detective test. (Macaulay 1835)

But there is more to the matter. We must once again pay heed to Nietzsche’s warning that matters of language must be handled with care. For Nietzsche, no genuine culture emerges in a language ‘other

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than its own’. Lamenting the negligence that the German language suffered within academic institutions, Nietzsche highlights their failure to recognise the essential relation between language and culture. ‘There is’, Nietzsche declares, ‘only one natural, healthy starting point for a so-called classical education: artistically serious, rigorous training in the use of the mother tongue’ (2016: 31; emphasis in original). Of course, we know that for Nietzsche, language is what codifies culture. Thus, to undermine language is precisely to undermine culture itself, or the possibility of its revision. This Nietzschean insight enables us to understand why many sincerely hold that Macaulay’s introduction of English was critical in the fight against the caste system.34 After all, we must acknowledge that it is through Macaulay’s intervention that the soil of the critical vocabulary of ‘liberty’, ‘secularism’, ‘equality’ and that of the natural sciences was prepared.35 It cannot be denied that one of the consequences of the introduction of English in India has been that it is now the standard language of graduate education in the country. However, at the undergraduate level, a majority of the population studies in state-run schools endorsing the ‘three-language formula’, where the medium of instruction in classrooms is often the dominant language of the state, which is obviously not English.36 And though the British might have left in 1947, what still remains is this belief that English is the language that holds the peculiar power of self-liberation because it is in language, not through it, that knowledge and culture find a resting place. Complementing this belief is the simple fact that, after all, English is the language of the ‘marketplace’. Thus, it is but a small step, as Macaulay shows us, to relate the utility of the language for the market with self-liberation, and to identify the market as the space where the self is finally liberated.37 The English language has thus brought about a different kind of inequality and diversity within Indian classrooms. Those without access to it are often rendered voiceless and are largely resourceless.38 Then, there are those few who have completely conflated their

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knowledge of the language with knowledge itself. Macaulay would have indeed been pleased with them. Then there are those others who by virtue of this very faith have come to believe that their poor linguistic skills have rendered them incapable of thinking itself. This diversity in the Indian classroom in terms of familiarity with the English language has to be experienced to be taken seriously. This is not a linguistic diversity, but rather a diversity that is created by virtue of a language. The task is then to carefully deconstruct this relation between language and the formation of a ‘voice’ that marks the flourishing of individuality without undermining the fact that English remains the language of the market.39 English, as Ambedkar as well as Nehru realised, is here to stay, at least as a link language for the market and economic progress. Anyone who believes otherwise has not been to the market at all, at least not to the market of academia.40 But, in the present age of commodification, to believe that catering to the demands of the market will take care of issues of self-reflexivity and promise the rise of a Socrates is surely untenable. When one thinks about it, perhaps Nietzsche is right to remind us that no educational structures can produce a Socrates. One can only create the space in which a Socrates can emerge (Nietzsche 2016: 43).

Notes 1

‘Critical thinking’ is perhaps the most ambiguous of the terms in circulation currently. In the Indian context, it seems to be problematically equated with skills pertaining to either ‘problem-solving’ or ‘design thinking’, or even ‘lateral thinking’. In other words, innovative thinking, popularised as the craft of jugaad, or innovative thinking during times of crisis, is seen as synonymous with ‘critical thinking’. For instance, see the draft of the New Education Policy, which identifies ‘critical thinking’ as one of the objectives of the ‘curricular and pedagogical structure for school education’. Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, https://mhrd. gov.in/relevant-documents (accessed on 9 September 2019). 2 We choose ‘Socrates’, rather than any other name, say ‘Buddha’ or ‘Vivekananda’ or ‘Ambedkar’, as a representative shadow of the idea that

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takes the flourishing of individuality as the primary task of education, because the fact is that the pedagogical framework, as well as the vision of education in India, was and still remains largely informed by the discourse on education in the West. Those of us in the field of letters are aware of how often we turn towards the West. The Socratic dialectic is, after all, the first extensive effort in that tradition to reflect upon the truths held by the self, including those that it holds about itself. 3 There are, of course, the likes of Rousseau, who had unfluctuating faith in the givenness of what he considered the innate tendency towards a disposition of empathy, a force capable of leading humans to the natural fruition of their being’s potentiality, which he held was unfortunately lost in the fact of our transition from a state of nature to that of a pretentious culture. 4 We must remember that in the Kantian motto ‘Dare to think!’, thoughts must, however, be curtailed by the demands of the universality of reason and its a priori moral laws. 5 Kant taught a course on ‘practical pedagogy’ at the University of Konigsberg. Robert B. Louden informs us that Kant taught this course four times, during the winter semester 1776–1777, summer semester 1780, winter semester 1783–1784 and winter semester 1786–1787 (Kant 2007: 434). 6 Kant’s writings on pedagogy are unmistakably an attempt to lay out the broad modalities through which the complete actualisation of the pathological self (Willkür) might be arrested and, subsequently, one’s being propelled towards its potentiality of autonomy. Kant accords the former task to ‘discipline’ and regards it as being constituted by ‘those actions by means of which man’s tendency to savagery is taken away’ (Kant 2007: 438 [9:442]). The positive aspect of education that enables the movement towards autonomy, and thereby towards the universal ideal of ‘humanity’, is accorded to ‘instruction’. Thus, for Kant, the task of education is an organic whole constituted structurally of the two distinct though related aspects of discipline, which involves training to ‘feel the constraints upon the inclinations and desires’ and of ‘submitting oneself to laws’, and instruction, the former being the precondition of the latter. 7 It is obvious that Kant would vehemently oppose this. But this opposition makes sense only against the larger horizon of our faith

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8

9

10

11 12 13

Teaching in Unequal Societies in the universality of reason, and its ability to provide the same set of guiding norms to all rational entities, including the sovereign. Hence, Kant would argue that even if our being were to be fashioned through an external dictate of the sovereign, given the postulate of universal rationality, such a dictate would be in a pre-established harmony with our becoming even if this becoming had been self-determined by us under the power of reason. But that is Kant’s conviction regarding rationality being the fundamental mark of the state, while we are now largely Machiavellian and see power as the fundamental mark of the state. Notwithstanding the obvious differences between the two ideals, we would agree that both are, nevertheless, ideals, and that they can thus be manufactured through the institution of education. The effort to radically reform the educational apparatus in Britain after the Great War, or in Japan after the Second World War, was informed by the belief that education would produce a more carefully crafted subjectivity. It is also well known that the relation between the educational apparatus and the state was at the heart of the Progressive movement in the US led by Dewey, who took education to be inextricably related to the institution of democracy. This is now a well-received view that hardly needs elaboration. See, for instance, Agrawal (2009); Béteille (2010); Kumar (2015). However, this is not to say that the government has remained inattentive to the need for change. In fact, beginning with the University Education Commission in 1949, there have been other Commissions reviewing and recommending various changes at regular intervals. Further, from 1950, the Planning Commission prepared the road map for education every five years, until recently. Recommendations have been proposed and changes have been made. Notwithstanding these changes, the broad vision of education and pedagogy has remained the same. Quite clearly, it is along similar lines that Kant makes room for ‘respect’ for the moral individual in his moral philosophy. Kant explicitly writes that ‘savagery [Wildbeit] is independence from laws’ (Kant 2007: 438 [9:442]). However, Kant is quick to emphasise that in the act of disciplining, what must be ensured is that the child does not lose its ‘self-respect’, and that in the act of forming the ‘moral fibre’ or ‘moral character of the child’,

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one does not either resort to physical forms of punishment or indulge in any act of ‘shaming’. For Kant ‘discipline is needed in order to shape and direct the will of the child rather than being broken’ (Kant 2007: 467 [9:479]). A broken will enforced through punishment will merely, as Kant puts it, ‘bring about a slavish way of thinking (obedience)’, and this, as is well known, runs counter to the Kantian notion of acting in accordance with duty (Kant 2007: 468 [9:480]). Thus, Kant insists that moral culture ‘must be based on maxims, not on discipline’, the idea being to habituate the child to acting on maxims rather than ‘according to certain incentives’—maxims that must be given by parents or elders, which ‘in the beginning the child must obey blindly’ (ibid.). Thus, Kant is clear that the authority upheld within the structure of disciplining is not a relation of power, in the sense that it is not executed in order to manifest the extent of one’s status of power over another, but merely to cultivate a will that can then free the child from baseless desires (ibid.). Here one can only say that the British colonisers did not much care about this aspect of Kant’s notion of discipline. 14 In fact, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, in his article, ‘The University at a Crossroads’, while examining twelve basic challenges faced by the university in contemporary times, lists this Kantian basis of universities in Europe as the very ground for the first of these challenges or ‘strong questions’. He formulates the question thus: ‘Given the fact that the university was part and parcel of the building of the modern nationstate—by training its elites and bureaucracy, and by providing the knowledge and ideology underlying the national project—how is the mission of the university to be refounded in a globalized world, a world in which state sovereignty is increasingly a shared sovereignty or simply a choice among different kinds of interdependence, and in which the very idea of a national project has become an obstacle to dominant conceptions of global development?’ (de Sousa Santos 2012: 9). 15 Furthermore, the Kantian model of authority is primarily based on the notion of ‘duty’, and thus aligns itself in perfect synchrony with the ideal of nation-building as one’s solemn duty towards the sovereign. It is this aspect that made this German view of education a lucrative proposition for the then-emerging states around the world. 16 Take, for instance, the fact that one’s construal of the nation’s past is largely manufactured through what, and how, one comes to be taught

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history. Thus, the past events of the freedom struggle in India are taught through a process of selection, omission and emphasis of certain events, leading to a ‘freedom narrative’ that ends up producing individuals who are equally nationalistic. See Kumar (2001). 17 This demand for some sort of ‘guiding authoritative structure’ is so persistent that it appears even in the most reformative views on education, such as that of Dewey, who upholds the primacy of the individual. It is precisely this uneasiness with the complete negation of authority within the pedagogical framework that Dewey both cognises and struggles with when he writes that the rejection of external authority does not entail ‘that all authority should be rejected, but rather that there is need to search for a more effective source of authority’ (Dewey 2015: 21). Alfred Hall-Quest points out Dewey’s discomfort with the complete negation of authority within the reactionary extreme that upholds ‘excessive individualism and a Spontaneity that is deceptive of freedom’ (see ibid., ‘Editorial Foreword’). Other ‘progressive’ educational theorists like Humbolt, Freire and Chomsky are evidently also advocating for a revision, no matter how radical the suggested revision might be, rather than an abnegation of the notion of a ‘disciplining apparatus’. Though there is an unambiguous rejection of any form of ‘explicit indoctrination’ and promotion of the ‘securing of tools to form one’s own doctrine’, there is nevertheless a clear struggle to accommodate a form of disciplining apparatus, or training, with firm belief in the ideal of the irreducible value of the individual that is both primordial and inviolable. Kant, as we know, is on a quest precisely to legitimise this ‘authority’ on the basis of the rational categorical imperative, or the universal forms of judgement of practical reason, thereby arguing for compatibility between the primacy of the subject and the demand for authoritative disciplining, since the nature of our self is, for Kant, pathological. This becomes even more evident in Kant’s 1776 essays, written in appreciation of the Philanthropinum Institutes of Education established by Johaan Bernhard Basedow, where he clearly emphasises the formative role played by educational structures like the Philanthropinum in the inauguration of ‘an entirely new order of human affairs’. See ‘Essays Regarding the Philanthropinum’ (Kant 2007, [2:448]). 18 Of course, the dominant lens through which the system of education in India is largely analysed is that of utilitarianism.

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19 Stokes (1990) examines the history of English political ideas in the Indian context in the 19th century when British colonial rule in India was at its zenith. Analysing the political ideas that legitimised the British administration of India, Stokes suggests that this examination of political ideas in action provides an overview of the practical influence of utilitarian moral and political theory, otherwise regarded as an abstract theory when viewed solely within the context of its emergence and evolution in English/British history. Stokes’s reading of British history in India is squarely grounded on the conviction that this political history cannot be treated as an anomaly. And his account amply proves this if we look especially at the later writings of Thomas Macaulay with respect to his ideas on education, which expand considerably and gain lucidity post his administrative stint in India (ibid.: viii–xiv). 20 It is now well established that post the Industrial Revolution, there emerged in Britain a sense of urgency to revise the objective of the Empire’s political dominion over its colonies. Thus, what was earlier viewed purely through the lens of commerce, steadily transformed into a vision that was projected as an investment in the mission of civilising the ‘barbaric natives’ (Stokes 1990: xiii). 21 Drawing upon Adam Smith’s view on the nature of the relation between the education of the poor and the role of the state, Macaulay emphasises that ‘the state ought not to meddle with the education of the rich. But … that a distinction is to be made, particularly in a commercial and highly civilized society, between the education of the rich and the education of the poor’ (Trevelyan 1903: 441). He thus clearly demarcates the ‘rich’ from the ‘common people or the poor’, and argues not merely that the education of the latter is the duty of the state, but that the rich are at liberty to decide as far as the nature of their own education is concerned. 22 Referring to riots that took place in Nottingham, Bristol, Yorkshire, Kent and Wales, Macaulay argues that these riots had a single cause, namely lack of education. He argues that ‘if [one] leave[s] the multitude uninstructed, there is a serious risk that religious animosities may produce the most dreadful disorders’ (Trevelyan 1903: 441). Among the various arms of the government, Macaulay identifies the legislature and the judiciary as bearers of the responsibility of the educative mission. He asks, ‘Is it not strange … that the magistrate is bound to punish and at the same time bound not to teach? To me, it seems quite clear that

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Teaching in Unequal Societies whoever had a right to hang has a right to educate’ (ibid.: 443). He goes on to argue ‘that such a hell on earth as Norfolk Island need never have existed, if we had expended in training honest men but a small part of what we have expended in hunting and torturing rogues’ (ibid.: 444). Macaulay spells out the advantages of the ‘civilising’ effect of education in terms of the consequential reverence it might inculcate in the minds of the poor towards the legal and constitutional apparatus of the government. Clearly, for Macaulay, education (for the poor) has also to do with the economising mission of reducing the costs of the punitive machinery (Trevelyan 1903: 442–443). In other words, the utility of ‘civilising the poor’ is not intrinsic to education but extrinsic to it. Hence, the education of the rich need not have this utility as its driving sanction. It is with respect to this division that Macaulay first engages with the notion of privatisation of education. Macaulay is clearly not against the idea of privatisation, but is careful to uphold the distinction he outlines between educating the rich and the poor. He is open to the idea of government granting commercial benefits to those bidders who want to educate the rich, but he restricts the realm of education of the poor from such privatisation and holds it to be the solemn duty of government (Trevelyan 1903: 448). It is important to be cognisant of the fact that views regarding privatisation of education go all the way back to Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Education’, which was erected on the foundations provided by Adam Smith and David Hume. It is important to explore the ramifications of this concept of privatisation while discussing the newly emergent concept of ‘autonomy’ in the domain of the general and professional education system in India today, and the ensuing educational policies whose philosophical underpinnings would otherwise appear incomprehensible. See Kumar (2018). After all, what constitutes a ‘civilised subject’ is determined by the state. We must also note that the demand that it should be the duty of the government to promote education among the masses does not necessarily entail the adoption of the paradigm exemplified by Kant. After all, one could clearly promote the Socratic vision through state funds. One could imagine a genuinely autonomous state-funded institution, but then such an institution cannot accommodate the demand of producing a specific variety of subject.

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27 This, of course, sat squarely with the prevailing Orientalist mission of uncovering India’s glorious past by promoting the study of Arabic and Sanskrit languages and literatures as well as the codification of Hindu laws. In this manner, this project sought to uncover and enhance the human nature of Hindu civilisational values (Macaulay 1835). 28 Even in the most liberal formulation, such as in the recently formulated draft of the National Education Policy of 2019, the Indian government does not limit itself to the role of a financer, since education is still regulated by the government. See Draft National Education Policy 2019: Summary, https://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/nep/ English1.pdf (accessed on 12 September 2019). Though the present government claimed an ‘unprecedented’ granting of autonomy to the Indian Institute of Management, scholars were quick to point out the inefficacy (see Mohanty 2018). We must note that all educational institutions that are publicly funded in India are regulated directly by the government through its Ministry of Human Resource Development, or indirectly through various bodies like the All-India Council of Technical Education, the University Grants Commission and the National Council of Educational Research and Training. 29 Nietzsche delivered a total of five lectures on education during the months of January–March 1872 at the city museum of Basel. These lectures were a condition of his appointment as professor at the University of Basel. The lectures are collected under the title AntiEducation: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions (Nietzsche 2016). 30 In fact, for Nietzsche, the educational ideal of subject production gives away a ‘certain related tendency’ of a ‘philosophy that was once promoted for the state’s sake and to advance the state’s aims: Hegelian philosophy, in terms of its apotheosis of the state, which, it must be said, reaches its pinnacle precisely through this subordination of education’ (2016: 49). 31 In fact, Macaulay later argued along similar lines that it was the duty of the British government to spend on the education of the poor populace of London, defending his view in the British House of Commons in 1847. Further, citing Hume, Macaulay emphasises the distinction between an education that yields pleasure and profit for the individual and the kind of education that renders only service to society (Trevelyan

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1903: 449–450). In fact, as Macaulay sees it, both Smith and Hume envisage a hierarchical relation between basic education for the poor as a utility for the government, and education in the arts and sciences. In his references to Smith, Macaulay notes that the government’s duty of non-excessive interference in matters concerning civil freedom should leave the domains of literature, arts and sciences to themselves, implying that the education of the poor on the other hand must be geared to the services required for sustenance of the society (ibid.: 441). 32 In his Indian Higher Education: Envisioning the Future, Pawan Agrawal (2009) argues, providing data, that the country never recovered from this tilt towards the arts, in contrast to the sciences, and other professional disciplines such as medicine or engineering, subsequently posing serious challenges in the educational sector. 33 At the outset of the ‘Minute on Education’, Macaulay points out that no legislative bill, laid out in a proper systematic fashion, on ‘public instruction’ existed for the Indian colony, implying that what had prevailed until then, under the aegis of the British Parliament Act of 1813, was not a codified vision of the nature and mode of public instruction in a ‘colony’, and hence had not been passed as a legislative bill. Macaulay thus argues for disqualifying the practice of imparting ‘public instruction’ as prevalent in accordance with the Parliament Act of 1813. Interestingly, the prime reason for this disqualification that Macaulay highlights is the absence of any mention of a language of instruction in the Parliament Act of 1813. Macaulay’s insistence on the language of instruction brings to the fore the relation between language, education and reform. Of course, there is also the other aspect of Macaulay’s evangelical intent in the introduction of the English language (see Macaulay 1835). In fact, scholars like Elmer H. Cutts (1953) have argued that Macaulay’s Minute has an evangelical background that went back a hundred years. It is significant to contrast Macaulay’s stance with that of James Mill, who promoted vernacular education under the administrative governance of Warren Hastings. Mill’s endeavour was in line with the Orientalist mission of uncovering India’s glorious past. Within Mill’s vision, the enforcement of law prescribed the codification of Hindu law, which, in turn, was meant to uncover and enhance the true human nature of Hindu civilisational values. In contrast, with the introduction of English

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education, it can be noticed that an instrumentalist view of education got the upper hand. Significantly, it was in the same year that the Indian Penal Code of 1835 was introduced. Therefore, execution of the penal code, in conjunction with the educating mission, would demand delinking or undermining its reformist point of view as articulated by Mill. Education for Ambedkar, as we know, was clearly a mechanism for the realisation of liberty, equality, and consequently fraternity. In contrast to Gandhi and a majority of the early Indian educationists of colonial India, Ambedkar, following Dewey, clearly saw education as a means of ‘progressive change’ rather than a mode of ‘interpretative realisation’ of the truths of the tradition. The task of education was not to retain but rather to critically transcend tradition. As is well known, it was for this reason that Ambedkar emphasised the importance of the English language and of ‘formal’ education that provided one with facts in order to broaden our horizons and see things afresh. Thus, for Ambedkar, the formal apparatus of the institution of knowledge was an unavoidable necessity as a means for the realisation of the end of progressive change. In fact, Chandra Bhan Prasad, a Dalit writer in India, even came up with the idea of the ‘goddess of English’, and created an idol to be installed in a temple as a goddess of education for Dalits in India. See Sinha (2013); also see Pandey (2011). See Masani (2014) for an elaborate argument in this direction. This formula was adopted following the recommendations of the Kothari Commission (1964–1966). A student in a state-run school in India is exposed to three languages. Apart from Hindi or the language of the state and English, they learn a third language, generally their mother/father tongue if that is not the official language of the state. However, English is not the language of instruction in the classroom. The Kothari Commission, however, deemed English the primary medium of the library and of international communication. Macaulay, like Locke and Smith, might have sincerely believed that the market would take care of culture as well, a view that was put forth in economic terms by Smith in his postulate of the ‘invisible hand’. But this, as we know today, is an inaccurate projection of what the market can do (see Martin 2014). We must remember that while it might be true that we have an Englishspeaking population larger than all of Western Europe put together, or twice the population of the UK, English speakers constitute only about

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an estimated 10–30 per cent of the total population, depending upon the extent of knowledge of the language that is taken into account. This puts into perspective the size of the population that is left out (see Times of India 2010). Highlighting the reality on the ground, Madhav Chavan of Pratham, an NGO that engages in making education accessible to Indian children who cannot afford it, writes, ‘Delivering English on the ground, however, is a challenge. Contrary to what some people think, English is not widely spoken or heard, especially in Indian villages. Children have hardly anywhere to go to hear English or practise speaking English. Where they live, most adults do not have experience of English either. Yet, English vocabulary has been creeping into most Indian languages. Perhaps that is the best way for India to get ready for English learning’ (Berry 2013: 5). 39 The other fundamental question—how do we talk through and enable the realisation of the ideal of freedom and equality from within a space that constantly echoes with voices replete with the assertion of existentially experienced unfreedom?—would have to wait till we recognise the ‘unfreedom’ brought about by the language of the space itself. For a recent highlighting of the nature of ‘unfreedom’ in the language within the academic space, see Gundur (2016). 40 As Mark Robson (2013: 2) puts it, ‘perhaps the United Kingdom’s greatest and yet least-recognised international asset … English is becoming a core criterion in determining employability.’

References Agrawal, P. 2009. Indian Higher Education: Envisioning the Future. New Delhi: SAGE. Berry, V. 2013. English Impact Report: Investigating English Language Learning Outcomes at the Primary School Level in Rural India. London: British Council. Béteille, A. 2010. Universities at the Crossroads. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Camus, A. 1956. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. New York: Knopf. Cutts, E.H. 1953. ‘The Background of Macaulay’s Minute’. American Historical Review, 58(4): 824–853.

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de Sousa Santos, B. 2012. ‘The University at a Crossroads’. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 10(1): 7–16. Dewey, J. 2015 [1938]. Experience and Education, edited by A. Hall-Quest. New York: Free Press. Gundur, N.S. 2016. ‘Why Foucault? Relevance of Foucault in Light of Personal Experience’. In Vartamanada Itihasakara: Michel Foucault, 123– 142. Bangalore: Kuvempu Bhasha Bharati Pradhikara. Kant, I. 2007 [1803]. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, vol. 9: Anthropology, History, and Education, trans. R.B. Louden, edited by G. Zöller and R.B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kumar, K. 2001. Pride and Prejudice: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan. New Delhi: Penguin. Kumar, K. 2015. ‘Let Us All Blame the Teacher’. In A Pedagogue’s Romance: Reflections on Schooling, edited by K. Kumar, 44–48. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn. Kumar, K. 2018. ‘Autonomy in Times of Crisis’. Economic and Political Weekly, 53(18): 14–17. Macaulay, Thomas. 1835. ‘Macaulay’s Minute on Education, February 2, 1835’. Available at: http://home.iitk.ac.in/~hcverma/Article/MacaulayMinutes.pdf (accessed on 13 October 2019). Majumdar, S. 2018. College: Pathways of Possibility. New Delhi: Bloomsbury. Martin, F. 2014. ‘The Economic Consequences of Mr. Locke’. In Money: The Unauthorized Biography, 122–137. London: Vintage. Masani, Z. 2014. Macaulay: Pioneer of India’s Modernization. New Delhi: Penguin Random House. Mohanty, B.K. 2018. ‘Academics Question Modi’s Claim of Autonomy’. The Telegraph, 30 September. Available at: https://www.telegraphindia. com/india/pm-autonomy-claim-queried-by-academics/cid/1670581 (accessed on 12 September 2019). Nietzsche, F.W. 2016. Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, trans. D. Searls, edited by P. Reitter and C. Wellmon. New York: New York Review Books. Pandey, G. 2011. ‘An “English Goddess” for India’s Down-Trodden’. BBC News, 15 February. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/worldsouth-asia-12355740 (accessed on 13 October 2019). Robson, M. 2013. The English Effect: The Impact of English, What It’s Worth to the UK and Why It Matters. Available at: https://www.britishcouncil.org/

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sites/default/files/english-effect-report-v2.pdf (accessed on 14 September 2019). Sinha, C. 2013. ‘The English Goddess Who Went Away’. Open, 13 September. Available at: https://openthemagazine.com/art-culture/the-englishgoddess-who-went-away/ (accessed on 13 October 2019). Stokes, E. 1990.  The English Utilitarians and India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.  Times of India. 2010. ‘Indiaspeak: English Is Our 2nd Language’. Times of India, 14 March. Available at: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/ Indiaspeak-English-is-our-2nd-language/articleshow/5680962.cms (accessed on 13 September 2019). Trevelyan, Sir G.O. 1903. ‘The Duty of the State with Regard to Education’. In Selections from the Writings of Lord Macaulay, 440–454. Bombay: Longmans, Green, and Co.

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The ‘Debased Native Mind’ in Colonial Discourse: Education Policies in 19th Century Gujarat dhārā k. chotāi ‘To provide for the education of the great body of the people seems to be impossible,’ wrote Holt Mackenzie, secretary to the Bengal government in the Territorial Department, in his report of July 1823 (Selections from Educational Records 1920: 59). The statement suggests that even until the third decade of the 19th century, the colonial government was not very convinced of its project of imparting education to the ‘natives’ of India,1 or it could be inferred that it was grappling with the question of developing an apparatus for mass education in colonial India. The difficulties encountered by the colonial master were both of a practical as well as of an epistemological nature. The persistent urge to read the human mind in the fashion of the humanist tradition—the belief that man is the supreme creation of God, and, though once fallen, he has the capacity to rise and excel as the ‘paragon of animals’ (Shakespeare 2003: 143)—seems to have been the driving principle in justifying the ways of man to man2 under the schema of colonialism. To put it in other words, the humanist tradition served a twofold function in the colonial schema: first, it solicited conscientious approval in the name of humanism, and second, it entrusted the coloniser with the responsibility of fashioning their subjects in the mould of the humanist tradition. The drive of humanism is clearly evident in the following statement by Alexander Kinloch Forbes, a scholar of the Gujarati language and an administrator in the western province of colonial India: 49

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Teaching in Unequal Societies We are under a religious obligation not only to do the work for which we are responsible to human masters and which for the most part they alone can turn to the good of the country; but (beyond that) to employ ourselves and our faculties and means in some measure (what measure is a question left to every man’s own decision, but in some measure) to the benefit of India and the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ therein. (Parekh 2010: 9–10)

The gesture of reading the ‘native mind’ as a debased thing and as being in an ignoble condition seems to have been informed by the humanist ideology of the West. Instances of this gesture are many, of which a few may be cited here. Governor-General Lord Minto, in a minute dated 6 March 1811, spoke of the ‘uncultivated state of the mind of the natives’ (Selections from Educational Records 1920: 19). Holt Mackenzie in a note dated 17 July 1823 desired to ‘enlighten their [natives’] minds and improve their moral feelings’ (ibid.: 57). A letter dated 18 August 1824 from the General Committee of Public Instruction to the governor-general noted that ‘In proposing the improvement of men’s mind, it is first necessary to secure their conviction, that such improvement is desirable’ (ibid.: 95). J.C.C. Sutherland, Esq., secretary, General Committee of Public Instruction, in a letter dated 21 January 1835 to the government in the General Department, noted that ‘the one great duty of England towards India’ was ‘that of improving the minds and elevating the character of the Indian people’ (ibid.: 104). These instances show how the ‘native mind’ was referred to in the colonial discourse on education. The humanist ideology of colonial education is further evident in the following excerpt from Holt Mackenzie’s notes of July 1823, stating the purpose of education in colonial India: Its aim is to raise the character, to strengthen the understanding, to purify the heart; and whatever therefore can extend the knowledge of the people, whatever can give them a juster conception of the true relation of things, whatever can add to their power over the gifts of nature or better inform them of the rights and duties of their fellow

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men, whatever can excite invention and invigorate the judgment, whatever can enrich the imagination and sharpen the wit, whatever can rouse to steady exertion and bind to honest purposes; whatever fits man to bear and improve his lot, to render his neighbour happy, and his country [sic] prosperous; whatever in short tends to make men wiser and better and happier here and hereafterall are desired to be given, in due season, to the people of India. (Selections from Educational Records 1920: 58)

This statement proposes an idea of ‘man’ that was anchored in the humanist tradition of the Renaissance period from the 15th to the 17th century in England. The Renaissance discourse proposed a code of conduct for the Renaissance man, and also defined his aspirations. Shakespeare’s Hamlet aptly articulates this ideal nature of man in the following words: ‘What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals’ (Shakespeare 2003: 143). Both these excerpts—from Mackenzie and Shakespeare—also indicate, however, that the humanist philosophy during Renaissance times was intricately embedded within the Christian framework. The fallen man in European thought could aspire to rise again in the likeness of God himself, but this rise was promised and endorsed strictly by and within the Christian framework. The epistemic danger that the colonial master encountered in the context of India related to introducing ways of improving man without adopting the Christian framework. The direct implication of Christianity resulted in missionary activity and proselytisation. The apparatus of education had already been put in place by the missionaries for the purpose of conversion, and that had created a hostile attitude among the natives towards colonial education. This situation led to giving colonial education a secular character. Mountstuart Elphinstone, the governor of Bombay Presidency, emphasised the need for a secular nature of education:

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Teaching in Unequal Societies [T]he dangers to which we are exposed from the sensitive character of the religion of the natives, and the slippery foundation of our Government, owing to the total separation between us and our subjects, require the adoption of some measure to counteract them, and the only one is, to remove their prejudices and to communicate our own principles and opinions by the diffusion of a rational education. (Elphinstone 1884: 101–102)

Elphinstone further noted that ‘the mixture of religion, even in the slightest degree … involves not only the failure of our plans of education but the dissolution of our empire’ (ibid.: 105–106). Elphinstone considered it obligatory on the part of the rulers to ‘raise the natives by education and public trust to a level with their present rulers’ (ibid.: 65). Elphinstone’s views mark the early statement of the colonial ideology of education. In other words, it became imperative for the colonial rulers to win the trust of their subjects, for otherwise both the project of colonial education and the expansion of the Empire would be at risk. Elphinstone remarked that ‘the diffusion of education must depend on the spontaneous zeal of individuals, and could not be effected by any resolutions of the Government’ (ibid.: 80). Thus, the education policy was to be devised by the colonial government in a manner such as to create a demand for colonial education amongst the natives. The government recognised that education could not be imposed on the natives; rather, it should cultivate the disposition of mind that would be eager to receive colonial education. Therefore, a class of people were identified by the colonial master that had the potential to carry out this project of education. It was with regard to the Brahmin class of native society that Elphinstone in 1824 noted that the colonial education project could avail the services of ‘a body of men who have more zeal and more time to devote to the object than any other class of Europeans can be expected to possess’ (1884: 80). In the same minutes, though Elphinstone mentions that ‘in all countries the happiness of the poor depends in a great measure on their education’ (ibid.: 101), he

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expresses his apprehensions about making education open for all classes in native society: It is observed that the missionaries find the lowest castes the best pupils. But we must be careful how we offer any special encouragement to men of that description. They are not only the most despised, but among the least numerous of the great divisions of society; and it is to be feared that if our system of education first took root among them, it would never spread further[.] (Ibid.: 105)

Elphinstone’s concerns make it obvious that the project of education in colonial India was aimed at pleasing and convincing the higher class of people, who were already privileged in the native society. It is, therefore, apparent that the colonial education project was fraught with inherent paradoxes: on the one hand, it proposed the idea of general literacy which was accessible to all classes of the native society, thus introducing liberal universal principles; on the other hand, it devised an elitist outlook for the education project. The elitist stance of colonial education policy is also evident in other governmental records. In March 1825, the Court of Directors wrote to the governor-general: The improvements in education, however, which most effectually contribute to elevate the moral and intellectual condition of the people, are those which concern the education of the higher classes; of the persons possessing leisure and natural influence over the minds of their countrymen. By raising the standard of instruction among these classes, you would eventually produce a much greater and more beneficial change in the ideas and feelings of the community than you can hope to produce by acting directly on the more numerous class. (Selections from Educational Records 1920: 51)

This remark makes evident the project of retaining intact the power structures of the native society under the garb of colonial education. In recognising the influence of the powerful group of people in native society, colonial education reinforced such divisions in the society. This brings out the paradoxes inherent in the colonial education project. It aimed at creating individuals in native society who would

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serve as mediators between the rulers and the ruled. On the one hand, this class of people assumed or were endowed with a hegemonic position in relation to other classes of native society; on the other hand, they were used only as mediators by the colonial ideology to propagate the mask of the liberal universal principles of colonial education. This class of people also helped the colonial master to establish the normative forms of colonial ideology. They are often described as ‘native intellectuals’/‘local intelligentsia’ in available scholarship on colonial studies. Veena Naregal in Language Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere notes that the left-minded sociological analysis often brands them as ‘collaborationist’ (2014: 202). Several studies critically analyse the ideological moorings of the colonial education project in India (Joshi 1991; Sunder Rajan 1992; Viswanathan 2004). But the nature of the position of this group of people has not been analysed to the extent that it offers a nuanced reading of the intricacies of colonial education that devised such a position. An attempt is made in the latter part of this chapter to analyse the underpinnings of the position of the native intellectuals in the context of 19th century Gujarat. In this context, two more instances are worth discussing to understand the discursive strategy of colonial ideology in devising the position of the native intellectuals.3 Elphinstone in his minutes of 1824 promoted the cause of the Native College at Puna, which aimed mainly at imparting Hindu learning to Brahmins. When the Honourable Court of Directors raised objections to the promotion of such an institution, Elphinstone offered detailed reasons for encouraging such learning. The foremost reason he provided was that this class of people was well maintained by the Peshwa government, which annually distributed ₹5 lakh among their order in the name of dakshina (gift money given to Brahmins) (Elphinstone 1884: 106–107). On similar lines, Elphinstone argued, it would be in the interest of the colonial government to continue to promote the Hindu learning of Brahmins by allotting part of that sum as dakshina, so that the government could win the trust of this class of people in return. This move, in his view, would also help in countering the

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charge laid against the colonial government regarding its intentions of changing the religion and the manners of the Hindus. Elphinstone further argued: [T]he question is not whether we are to encourage Brahmin learning or European learning, but whether we are to encourage Brahmin learning or none at all.… we do not possess the means of teaching in the native languages the very rudiments of European sciences; and that if we did possess them, we should find few or none among the natives who are disposed or fitted to receive our instructions.… we must not forget that we are founding (or rather keeping up with modifications) a seminary among a most bigoted people, where knowledge has always been in the hands of the priesthood, and where science itself is considered as a branch of religion. (Ibid.: 108–109)

The colonial government thus had a vested interest in promoting Hindu learning amongst Hindus. By encouraging the cause of Hindu learning for Brahmins, the government reinforced the prevailing power structure in the social relations of native society. The justification that Elphinstone offered for the appointment of a professor to teach Sanskrit poetry related to pleasing the Hindu class of native society. He argued that at the outset it might seem an impractical decision to appoint a professor of poetry to teach Sanskrit poetry. But, according to him, the move would carry deeper implications in the minds of the natives, as the larger part of Hindu literature was formed by Sanskrit poetry, which, in Elphinstone’s words, had ‘the most intrinsic merit, and which has called forth the enthusiastic admiration of no mean judges among ourselves’ (Elphinstone 1884: 111). And it was this part of the Hindu literature which he thought was worth preserving as it did not diminish with time, like the ‘scientific discoveries of the civilized nations’ (ibid.). Rather, Elphinstone noted, It is otherwise with their poetry; the standard works maintain their reputation undiminished in every age, they form the models of composition and the fountains of classical language; and the writers of the rudest ages are those who contribute the most to the delight and refinement of the most improved of their posterity. (Ibid.)

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This statement seems to be very explicit in considering the Hindu literature worth preserving. But the preservation of Hindu literature or the classical/higher languages in colonial India was considered to be worthwhile only till the point was reached when English assumed that normative position in relation to the vernacular languages in India. The ideological nature of the colonial education project becomes further evident when Elphinstone says, in relation to the establishment of the ‘Native College at Puna’: ‘when once the college had become an established place of resort for Brahmins, it would be easy to introduce by degrees improvements into the system of education, and thus render the institution a powerful instrument for the diffusion of civilization’ (Elphinstone 1884: 110). What is implied is that once the ‘Native College at Puna’ was able to lure a large number of Brahmins, it would not be difficult gradually to bring changes in the educational policies to initiate them into the civilising mission of the coloniser, by exposing them to the liberal universal principles of English education. Thus, the colonial education project needed a group of people from among the natives who were educated not only to carry out administrative duties in the colonial set-up, but who would also fulfil an instrumental function in bringing about institutional shifts in colonial society. Krishna Kumar’s work (1991) brings to the fore these political underpinnings of the project of colonial education. He argues that the objective of colonial education was not merely to produce subordinate clerks for the colonial bureaucracy, but in fact was designed to introduce institutional shifts in the social and cultural order of the pre-colonial native society. Such institutional shifts were engineered by epistemic moves in the field of colonial education. The great admiration displayed towards classical languages like Sanskrit and Persian was extended to them in the context of the English Renaissance. Thus, these languages were read as classical in the fashion of Greek and Latin, which had aided in bringing about the Renaissance in the West. In this reading of the

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classical languages of the subcontinent, the colonial ideology seemed to be borrowing the trope of the English Renaissance into the Indian context. The application of the Renaissance trope is also evident in Macaulay’s minutes of 1835: The first instance to which I refer is the great revival of letters among the Western nations at the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. At the time almost everything that was worth reading was contained in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Had our ancestors acted as the Committee of Public Instruction has hitherto acted,—had they neglected the language of Thucydides and Plato, and the language of Cicero and Tacitus, had they confined their attention to the old dialects of our own island, had they printed nothing and taught nothing at the universities but chronicles in Anglo-Saxon and romances in Norman French,—would England ever have been what she now is? What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India. The literature of England is now more valuable than that of classical antiquity. (Selections from Educational Records 1920: 111)

Macaulay here refers to the classical languages as the cause of the Renaissance in England, and ascribes to English language and culture a superior position against which the native languages, literature and culture could be improved. Thus, the trope of the English Renaissance placed English in a normative position, and this necessarily involved imagining native society as living in the Dark Ages. C. Grant describes this situation in his Observations, written as early as 1792: The true cure of darkness, is the introduction of light. The Hindoos err, because they are ignorant; and their errors have never fairly been laid before them. The communication of our light and knowledge to them, would prove the best remedy for their disorders; and this remedy is proposed, from a full conviction that if judiciously and patiently applied, it would have great and happy effects upon them, effects honourable and advantageous for us.… There are two ways of making this communication: the one is, by the medium of the languages of

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Teaching in Unequal Societies those countries; the other is by the medium of our own. In general, when foreign teachers have proposed to instruct the inhabitants of any country, they have used the vernacular tongue of that people, for a natural and necessary reason, that they could not hope to make any other mean of communication intelligible to them. This is not our case in respect of our eastern dependencies. They are our own, we have possessed them long. [sic] (Selections from Educational Records 1920: 81–82)

These observations show how the colonial master claimed rights over the natives as their subjects and how they considered it natural to assume the superiority of English knowledge. In making the hegemony of the colonial government seem natural, the true nature of colonial ideology is revealed. It should be noted that the trope of the English Renaissance in the imperial imagination did not work in the Indian scenario as it was not only a question of linguistic difference between the two contexts; the situation in India was also fraught with philosophical, cultural and social difference (Naregal 2014: 43–44). Nevertheless, despite these differences, the colonial ideology considered it of paramount importance to disseminate the useful knowledge and liberal principles encoded in English. But such dissemination was not possible through the medium of English and the colonial project had to rely on the vernaculars for achieving a larger receptivity for colonial discourse. This led to the cultivation and modernisation of the vernaculars. However, post the 1850s, colonial ideology manoeuvred education policy to ensure the subordinate position of the vernaculars in relation to English. The preceding discussion underlines how, from among the different communities, only the Hindus were targeted, and among these only the higher castes were annexed to the project of colonial education. The difficulty in creating ‘demand’ (Elphinstone 1884: 101–102) for Western knowledge was also sought to be resolved by creating such a class in native society. As stated earlier, this class of people was understood to be very influential in the social relations of native society. So, by targeting only this class, colonial education

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policies further reinforced prevailing divisions in the social structure of the native society. In other words, these divisions along the lines of class, caste, creed and gender remained intact in the so-called ‘egalitarian’ project of colonial education. It is this underlying ideological concern of colonial government that led to the devising of the position of local/native intellectuals. The position of native intellectuals was fraught, as mentioned earlier—while they assumed hegemonic power in relation to other groups in native society, their powers were undermined in relation to the colonial master. Further, to translate the trope of the English Renaissance in the colonial context in India, this group had to perform an essential role—they were to function as mediators and as translators. Translations from Sanskrit and Persian to English and from English to the native vernaculars slowly and gradually replaced the classical/higher languages of colonial India. At the same time, such translations established the normative position of English as a classical language against the native vernaculars. Thus, colonial education foregrounded the linguistic hierarchy between English and the native vernaculars. In this regard, it is relevant to quote J. Malcolm’s remarks in 1828: It is quite essential to aspiring natives that they should have the advantage of translation from our language of the works which are best calculated to improve their minds, and increase their knowledge not only of general science, but to enable them to understand the grounds which led us to introduce into the system of the administration we have adopted for India the more liberal views and sounder maxims of our policy and legislation in England. (Selections from Educational Records 1920: 144–145)

Having laid out the broader schema of colonial education, I will now examine the nature of the debates which ensued around the question of colonial education amongst Gujarati native intellectuals in the 19th century. In the light of the preceding discussion, the discursive nature of colonial ideology is analysed alongside the emergence of

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the Gujarati native intellectuals to understand how the project of education reinforced existing power structures in the social relations of native society. The initial phase of executing the plan of colonial education gave rise to debate as regards the selection of language for the purpose of instruction. In the Bombay Presidency, the debate took the form of a conflict between the ‘conservative’ and the ‘enlightenment’ positions represented by Francis Warden and Mountstuart Elphinstone respectively. Warden opined that the colonial government could create an ambience for natives to imbibe the lessons of European knowledge, and that it was sufficient to establish the necessary ideological links between the colonial government and its subjects by using English as a mode of instruction in schools. However, according to Elphinstone, it was necessary to establish discursive links between the native subjects and the colonial government, particularly in the subordinate bureaucratic positions. And this aim could be achieved only by using vernaculars as the medium of instruction in schools: In imparting to the Natives useful knowledge to any extent, and with the hope to any good and permanent effect, it is evident the language of the country must be the chief and proper vehicle.… it is impossible to look with any hopes of success, to imparting knowledge generally and usefully in a language which must remain to the greater portion a foreign one. (‘Extract from Sixth Annual Report of the Bombay Education Society for 1821’, Selections from Educational Records [Bombay] 1955: 27)

Eventually, Elphinstone’s views prevailed and the proposal of using vernaculars as the medium of instruction received remarkable support from the ‘representative’ natives, who also showed a willingness to bear the expenses for the appointment of professors of English. A letter dated 1 December 1827 from the committee representing the native community to the secretary of the Bombay Native Education Society evinces the interest shown by the natives in the education project: Your Society will be pleased to bear in mind, what the Natives have desired us particularly to express, that by the study of the English language, they do not contemplate the supercession of the Vernacular

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dialects of the country, in the promotion of Native Education; but that they regard it merely as a help to the diffusion of the European Arts and Sciences among them, by means of translations by those who have acquired a thorough acquaintance with it; and as a branch of classical education to be esteemed and cultivated in this country as the classical languages of Greece and Rome are in the university of Europe. (‘Extract from the Fourth Report for 1827 of the Bombay Native Education Society’, Selections from Educational Records [Bombay] 1955: 109)

As stated, the native elites emphasised translation into the vernaculars, which would not only facilitate the accessibility of European knowledge but would also enable the modernisation of the vernaculars. Thus, the ideological implications of the colonial education project included laying down the trajectory for English in India and thereby also for the practice of translation. One may notice how the worries of the colonial government regarding creating a demand for European knowledge were answered by the natives by expressing their desire to gain the fruits of European arts and knowledge through colonial education. In this context, it would be worthwhile to examine the nature of debates that ensued around the question of colonial education amongst Gujarati intellectuals.4 In 1820, the Bombay Education Society5 formed a committee under the guidance of Elphinstone for the promotion of education among the natives. Immediately, the committee realised the lack of textbooks to be used in the school. The Native School and School Book Society, established in 1823, under the leadership of Elphinstone, was entrusted with the task of preparing material for school textbooks: A committee of the Society therefore recommended the preparation and publication of books both for the elementary and more advanced stages of education among the natives. The former were to be in vernacular, the latter might be in English. The class was to consist of works either translated from English or specially written in vernacular from English bases. (Covernton 1906: 25)

In 1840, the Board of Education was established and Navalram Pandya (1836–1888), a reformer and a critic of the 19th century,

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and also Narmad’s contemporary,6 considered this event as the beginning of reform in Gujarat (Pandya 1891: 144). He stated: ‘English education is the real foundation for reform, it is the real force and life of reform and there is no doubt about it’ (ibid.: 144). The Gujarati term for reform is sudharo. Narmad reflected on Pandya’s views on reform, saying, ‘Sudharvu etle bagadelu’ (Reform pre-decides the state of contamination) (Narmad 1998: 163). He said that cognisance of the deteriorated state of society was an a priori condition for the existence of reform. That which is ill can only be cured. Narmad wrote several articles in Dandiyo (a daily periodical edited by Narmad, est. 1864) relating to reform of the native society. Dalpatram Dahyabhai7 (1820–1898) also wrote several essays like ‘Bhootnibandh’ (Essay on Evil Spirits) (1849), ‘Gnatinibandh’ (Essay on Caste) (1851) and ‘Punarvivah’ (Widow Remarriage) (1853), and poems like ‘Hunnarkhanni Chadhai Hindustan Uper’ (An Invasion of the King of Industry on India) (1851), ‘Rajvidyabhyas’ (Importance of Education for Kings) and ‘Sudharavishe’ (About Reform) (1862), to name a few, relating to the idea of reform. Likewise, Navalram Pandya and Mahipatram R. Nilkanth (1829–1891) in Gujarat Shalapatra (est. 1862) (a periodical related to education in Gujarat) and Karsandas Mulji (1832–1875) in Satyaprakash (est. 1855) (a periodical which mainly addressed social and political issues) respectively, wrote about the social evils in native society and promoted the reform movement initiated by colonial discourse. In addition to this, several institutions like Manav Dharma Sabha in Surat (est. 1844), the Gujarat Vernacular Society in Ahmedabad (est. 1848) and the Buddhivardhak Sabha in Mumbai (est. 1851) were established to promote the ideas of reform and the new education. In 1826, notes K.M. Jhaveri, regular schools were opened in Surat (nine), Ahmedabad (two), Bharuch (two), Kaira (one), Dholka (one) and Nadiad (one) (Jhaveri 1956: 7). It should be noted that only the children of the upper classes/castes of native society attended the schools established in different parts of Gujarat. The report on Vernacular Reading Books in 1906 notes that schools of this kind were chiefly attended by the children of the

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higher and middle castes. Provision was also made for the education of ‘depressed castes’ and, in certain cases, of the ‘wilder tribes (e.g. Bhils and Kolis)’ and ‘to avoid unnecessary irritation of susceptibilities, separate rooms or verandahs are provided for the pupils of inferior caste’ (Covernton 1906: 19–20). In a report dated 14 August 1826, George Jervis, secretary to the Bombay Native School Book and School Society, records that 10 masters passed the qualifying examination conducted by the Translating Committee for ‘Goozarattee School Masters’ (Selections from Educational Records [Bombay] 1955: 263– 264). It is significant to note that all of them were Brahmins. Thus, the issue of caste was pivotal to the spread of colonial education in native society. Moreover, it should be noted that the Gujarati intellectuals who subscribed to the project of reform, such as those mentioned previously, all came from the higher class/caste of the native society. All these people belonged to either the Brahmin or other higher castes; they had also directly or indirectly been exposed to colonial education and became ardent supporters of the reform movement. As mentioned earlier, their position was fraught with a paradox—they enjoyed a powerful position in relation to their brethren, but the same power was subverted in their association with the colonial master. The case of Mahipatram R. Nilkanth aptly illustrates this paradoxical position. The following extract from the Report of the Department of Public Instruction for Bombay Presidency for the year 1867 gives insight into the ideological underpinnings of the appointment of the native translator, Mahipatram Rupram Nilkanth. He wrote: My personal work was as follows:Compiled a History of England in Gujarati, to the end of the reign of Henry VIII. Examined and reported on the following Gujarati works:1. 2.

Translation of the first twenty chapters of Johnson’s Rasselas, by Mr. Shapurji Edulji. A Vocabulary, English and Gujarati of words collected from Howard’s Third English Book, Part II, by Mr. Pestonasha Hormusjee.

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Translation of Hitopadesha, Part I., by Mr. Ranchodebhai Ooderam. Translation of Johnson’s Rasselas, by Mr. Girdhurlal Dayaldas, B.A.

I also revised and prepared for the press the following two works:1. 2.

A Translation of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, by Messrs. Ranchodebhai Ooderam, Chotalal Sevakram, and Manibhai Jusbhai. Vene Sahnar (a Drama), Translated by my Carkoon, Shastree Sookheshwar Bapujee.

(Report of Gujarati Translator, Educational Department, 1 April 1867, Report of the Department of Public Instruction 1867: Appendix C, 21–22)

The details evince the work carried out by a native translator in the Education Department. Mahipatram was supposed to carry out the translations from English and other languages into Gujarati. Moreover, he was also supposed to examine and amend the translations carried out by others—‘natives’ and Europeans—and in addition to this, examine works composed in Gujarati. The nature of this work precipitated a shift, creating a hegemonic position for Mahipatram in relation to other natives, and a submissive position in relation to his colonial master. This is evident in the following extract: You will … perceive that by far the greater portion of my time was taken up in reporting on books referred to me, a work not at all pleasant or enviable. I am displeased with myself whenever duty and truth compel me to give unfavourable opinions and make disparaging remarks upon them. I wish I could get more time for translation. (Report of the Director of Public Instruction 1866: 163)

The negotiations involved in the fraught position of a native translator for the Education Department can be well perceived in the case of Mahipatram. This suggests how successful the colonial government was in carrying out its plan of education and also in devising the position of native intellectuals, who were actually meant to support the ideology of colonial education in particular, and of the Empire in general. From the foregoing, it may be inferred that the project of reform was an elitist move in the schema of colonial government.

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The implications of this stance are also evident in the nature of the debate that ensued around the question of colonial education. The elitist nature of colonial education is further analysed through the following two incidents to understand how the discursive strategies of colonial ideology did not aim at bridging the divisions of social relations existing in pre-colonial native society. Rather, it solidified those boundaries behind the mask of an egalitarian project of colonial education. Both incidents (involving the preparation of the Hope Reading Series and the revision of Narmagadya for a school textbook) are related to preparing textbooks for the native schools. The parameters set by colonial policies for cultivating the minds of natives were projected in the process of selection and appropriation of the writings prescribed for school textbooks. Two kinds of textbooks were selected for the schools: (a) those that were especially written or compiled for use in schools; and (b) those that were selected out of the general literature for study and examination in schools (Report of the Committee Appointed to Examine the Text Books in Use in Indian Schools 1878: 339). The Government of India passed a resolution (No. 143 dated 29 March 1873) to the effect that the educational works at that time in use in schools appeared defective both in form and substance, and were unsuitable for the special training of Indian youth, and were even open to objection on the score of the immorality of many passages (ibid.: 199). In this context, the government requested every province to constitute a subcommittee to examine the substance of the textbooks. The committee was constituted in the province of Bombay by Resolution No. 399, 21 April 1873.8 It was asked to examine the textbooks with reference to the following points: I. With regard to Form, including—(a) Style and language, and (b) Graduation in the difficulty of lessons in a series. II. With regard to substance, including the points as to whether the books in question be—(a) Moral; (b) Generally accurate; (c) Put from an Indian point of view; (d) Suitable, e.g., in allusions and in range of subjects; and (e) Useful and instructive in common things. (Ibid.: 200)

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Based on the said parameters, the committee of Bombay Province examined the books in the following subjects: ‘1. Reading Books— a. The Departmental Series, and b. Extra Reading Books and Provincial Literature. 2. Grammar and Prosody 3. Geography 4. History 5. Books for Girls’ Schools 6. Common Knowledge 7. Anglo-Vernacular Manuals’ (ibid.). For the departmental series, a series of seven reading books was prepared by T.C. Hope (1858–1859),9 and several editions were brought out subsequently (Blumhardt 1892: 45–46). The Bombay textbook committee highly recommended the series for the schools on the grounds that, as far as the ‘graduation, matter, composition and style’ were concerned, ‘they are excellent, and in every respect adapted to the work of Native education’ (Report of the Committee Appointed to Examine the Text Books in Use in Indian Schools 1878: 201). Further, it appreciated the series10 as it contained many ‘original’ pieces which were presented from an ‘Indian point of view’. The range of subjects covered by the series was also found varied and very useful. And above all, the committee opined that ‘[t]hey are altogether unobjectionable on the score of morality; and the lessons which they convey in this direction are judiciously introduced, and point to the character and will of God and the well-being of man as the basis of morality’ (ibid.). George Buhler, the educational inspector of the Northern Division, expressed his views about the suitability of the series in 1873 in the following words: The series of Gujarati school books prepared under the superintendence of Mr. Hope is used in all recognized schools, both in those under Government management and in those registered under the grant-in-aid rules. It has enjoyed a great and increasing popularity for the last fifteen years, and even now, in spite of many changes in the standards, suits admirably the wants of our inferior and superior vernacular schools, i.e. those which teach up to the V. and the VII. standards, respectively. (Ibid.)

In his history of the Gujarat Vernacular Society, Parekh (2010) provides a detailed account of the committee constituted for the Hope Reading Series. While preparing and reviewing the series,

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issues relating to the process of standardisation of the Gujarati language were encountered by the committee. Thus, a subcommittee was constituted to standardise the spelling rules and dictionary of the Gujarati language. The members of this committee were Durgaram Manchharam, Narmadashankar Dave, Dalpatram and Vrajlal Kalidas Shastri (ibid.: 105). In this manner, the colonial education project gave rise to debates relating to the standardisation of the Gujarati language. Issues relating to the process of standardisation of language were debated at great length11 by Gujarati intellectuals like Dalpatram, Narmad, Navalram, Karsandas Mulji and others. The nature and scope of the present chapter does not permit me to trace that debate in detail here. It may be mentioned, however, as reported by Covernton in Occasional Reports: Vernacular Reading Books in the Bombay Presidency (1906: 11), that the Charotri Ahmedabadi form of language was considered a standard form of Gujarati by the committee, against Surati Gujarati, Parsi Gujarati, Muhammadan Gujarati, Kathiawadi Gujarati and Kucchhi Gujarati. As the dominant group of central Gujarat used the Charotri form of Gujarati, the latter came to be established as the standard form of Gujarati. From this, it may be inferred that the epistemic shifts produced by the hierarchical relations introduced between English and the vernaculars, Sanskrit and the vernaculars, and English and Sanskrit had percolated to the level of various forms of Gujarati. As Sanskrit had been found superior vis-à-vis the vernaculars, and English had been found to be superior vis-à-vis Sanskrit and the vernaculars, so the Charotri form of language came to be established as superior vis-à-vis other forms of Gujarati used in the native society. The views of British officials regarding the Hope Reading Series have already been touched upon, to the effect that the series was found very adequate for use in schools as textbooks. Now let us take into consideration the views on the series of a native intellectual, Navalram Laxmiram Pandya. He compared Narmagadya,12 published in 1865, with the Hope Reading Series, stating: ‘In the readers produced by

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Hopesaheb for Gujarati schools, the entire attention was fixed on simplicity of diction and hence in it the very native turn of the language was lost’ (quoted in Yashaschandra 2004: 599). He further opined that the series contained writings by the shastris or religious scholars, which were fraught with ‘pompous Sanskritised Gujarati’. In contrast to this, he observed that Narmad’s prose ‘is as native as it is simple, as mature as it is native’ and that it ‘was equally dear to the educated and the uneducated’; it ‘earned the affection equally of scholars of English and the scholars of Sanskrit’ (ibid.). Thus, Navalram considered Narmad’s prose more suitable for use in schools as textbooks than the Hope Reading Series. Navalram’s views came to fruition when Narmad was introduced to Buhler, director of the Department of Public Instruction of the Government of Bombay Province, in 1874. Buhler had read Narmad’s Narmagadya and found it useful for his department. He suggested that a new edition of Narmagadya be prepared by the author keeping in mind the needs of the school system under his department. Narmad accepted the offer and accordingly prepared a new edition with certain changes, accepting some further modifications suggested by Buhler which he found appropriate. Two thousand copies of this edition were printed. But Buhler was replaced by K.M. Chatfield before he could execute his plan of introducing Narmagadya at the school level. Chatfield suggested further changes, which Narmad did not heed, and the task was assigned to Mahipatram Nilkanth, the Gujarati translator in the Department of Education, to carry out the changes instated by Chatfield. The edition of 1874, prepared entirely by Narmad, on the other hand, appears to have been destroyed almost completely by Chatfield—of the two thousand copies printed, only two complete and bound copies have survived (Yashaschandra 2004: 600). This strongly suggests that Chatfield must have ordered the destruction of the entire print run of the 1874 edition, and not merely of selected chapters. Mahipatram states in his preface to the second edition (published in 1880) of the 1875 edited version of Narmagadya: ‘The extent to which it was possible the author’s writing

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has not been changed/edited, and wherever it was found necessary, the changes and the new writing have been generally added within the brackets’ (Narmad 1891, Preface).13 Ramnarayan Pathak, a poet and a critic, in his study of the two editions, found that extensive changes had been made at the director’s instructions and they were not enclosed in brackets (Pathak 1945: 101–121). It would be worthwhile to discuss one such instance. In Narmad’s 1874 edition, the following matter is described in a very ‘matter of fact manner’: There are three main points worth noting from the period between the twentieth year of Dayaram’s14 life and his fortieth year. First, he undertook a long journey [across India]. Second, he became a follower of the Pusti sect [of Vaishnavism]. And third, he became related to a beloved who never left his side. (Quoted in Yashaschandra 2004: 601)15

Chatfield’s edition of 1875 replaces this with the following ‘denunciation’: ‘[Dayaram] had a widow of the goldsmith caste, Ratan, for sexual abuse. She served the poet until his death.… [sic] had Dayaram married her instead of having illicit sex with her all the time, he would have had a much better reputation amongst gentlemen’ (quoted in ibid.). Yashaschandra notes that this substitution, too, appears without the square brackets of editorial intervention (ibid.). It can be observed that the 1875 edition, prepared under Chatfield’s instructions, not only condemns the relationship but also suggests that, although the poet was greatly respected by his readers, his lifestyle left room for ethical improvement. The text also comments on Dayaram’s poems as being mediocre (ibid.). Two questions that arise here are: (a) how print as a medium facilitates such manipulations; and (b) how it represented the ‘natives’ before their own younger generations. The fact that two thousand copies were almost destroyed by Chatfield also suggests the role of those in positions of power in controlling the circulation of print in the public sphere. Chatfield’s views regarding Dayaram and his poetry had a lasting impression on the writers of the late 19th century. For example,

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Govardhanram Tripathi in his Classical Poets of Gujarat seems to have been influenced by Chatfield’s views in assessing Dayaram as a poet. Tripathi enumerates the poet’s contribution to the Gujarati literary tradition in the following words: So far as poetical powers are concerned, he is undoubtedly the greatest genius since the days of Premanand. His poems of Krishna and the maids of Gokul are a stream of burning lava of realistic passion and love, and if lewdness of writings do not take away from the merits of a poet, he is a very great poet indeed. (Tripathi 1958: 53)

Tripathi’s comments suggest that ever since Chatfield’s intervention in and manipulation of Narmad’s assessment of Dayaram, most literary histories of Gujarati literature have represented Dayaram in the same light as that inscribed by Chatfield in the 1875 edition of Narmagadya. The interpretation and representation of Dayaram in the literary history of Gujarat have still not been revisited or contested. This is indicative of how the colonial officer, through the apparatus of education, not only intervened in the matter of the representation of the literary past of the people, but also distorted that literary past. The distortion of the literary past amounted to the distortion of the cultural identity of the people of Gujarat. Thus, colonial education policies, under the mask of egalitarianism, aimed to uproot the ‘evils’ of native society, in the process, simultaneously, contributed towards creating distorted literary pasts and distorted ways of relating with that past. The case of Narmagadya is one among many instances that help understand how, in colonial discourse, education policies served as an apparatus to instil particular forms of distortion in the minds of young natives. It also explicates how the stance of the colonial master, informed by the humanist philosophy of the West, necessitated the reading of his other/subjects in a derogatory manner. If the fiction of the ‘debased native mind’ had not been written, the whole discourse of colonialism would have collapsed. This chapter has also sought to read the positioning of native intellectuals as endemic to the whole

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project of colonialism, implying that the power structure of native society remained intact under the garb of colonial education.

Notes 1

The term ‘native’ was widely used in colonial discourse to indicate the superiority of the coloniser against which the inferiority of the colonised was defined and established. While it is used in the text henceforth without ironic quotation marks, the author intends to explore the nuances of the position entailed by this term, created by the discursive nature of colonial ideology, and contested and appropriated by the Indian people in the 19th century. 2 In Paradise Lost, John Milton writes, ‘I may assert eternal providence, And justify the ways of God to men’ (2007: Book I, Lines 1–26), to suggest the goodness of God, who with His grace turns everything from bad to good; He is the one who does justice to the actions of fallen men. Here, the colonial master seems to be justifying the actions of fallen men, who have been colonised by the colonial master to improve them from ‘bad’ to ‘good’. The fashion in which the colonial master appropriates the position of God in the colonial context is read here through the rhetorical device of a simile. 3 The first instance is related to the process of positioning of Brahmins in the project of colonial education, as discussed through Elphinstone’s minutes of 1824, and the second is discussed through analysing the position of Mahipatram, who worked as a translator in the Education Department. 4 The following discussion in no way intends to trace the history of colonial education in the western province or in the Gujarati context in the 19th century. It examines different positions on the colonial education system to understand its discursive nature in proposing the idea of education for the diverse mass of colonial India. 5 The Bombay Education Society was set up in 1816 to provide education to the poor children of Englishmen. The society introduced the teaching of the native languages in 1820, but encountered a major problem with regard to the ineffective material used for vernacular education. In 1821, the Native School and School Book Committee was formed as a

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Teaching in Unequal Societies branch of the Bombay Education Society with Mountstuart Elphinstone as its president. The society had made provisions for joint subscriptions for funds from both Europeans and wealthy natives. In January 1827, the society changed its name to the Bombay Native Education Society. Gradually, with the expansion of its operative aspects, it was reconstituted first into the Board of Education and later, in the early 1850s, into the Department of Public Instruction. This brief history is drawn from Selections from Educational Records (Bombay) (1955). Narmadashankar Lalshankar Dave, or Narmad (1833–1886) as he is commonly known, was a prolific writer and a social reformer in 19th century Gujarat. He experimented with several forms in Gujarati, and also appropriated the English literary tradition in Gujarati, evident in works like Narmagadya (prose writings) (1865), Narmakosh (Dictionary of Gujarati Language) (four volumes, 1861–1865), Narmakavita (poetry by Narmad) (1862, 1863, 1864), Narmakathakosh (Dictionary of Stories by Narmad) (1870), and his autobiography, Mari Hakikat (1933). He addressed several social and political issues in essays like ‘Mandali Malava thi Thata Laabh’ (Benefits of Forming Gatherings), ‘Lagna ane Punarlagna’ (Marriage and Remarriage), ‘Gujaratio ni Sthiti’ (The Condition/Predicament of Gujaratis), and ‘Swadeshabhiman’ (The Pride of One’s Own Nation). By his own admission, he was a ‘radical reformer’ who turned into a ‘liberal conservative’, as evident in his Dharmavichar (Essays on Contemplating Dharma) and the autobiographical essays titled Uttar Narmad Charitra. Dalpatram Dahyabhai (1820–1898) belonged to the Saurashtra region of Gujarat. His contribution to Gujarati literary history is important for understanding the shifts in the idea of the ‘literary’ as manifested in his poetry and prose in the 19th century. He met Alexandar Kinloch Forbes (an assistant judge in Ahmedabad) in 1848 and assisted him in preparing a manuscript of the history of Gujarat, which was published under the title Ras Mala (1856). At the request of Forbes, Dalpatram joined the Gujarat Vernacular Society as assistant secretary and edited Buddhiprakash, a periodical published by the society from May 1850. The members of this subcommittee were: ‘1. The Honourable J. Gibbs, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bombay, President. 2. K.M. Chatfield, Esq., Acting Director of Public Instruction. 3. Dr. T. Cooke, Principal of the Engineering College, Puna. 4. Dr. Kielhorn, Acting

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Principal of the Deccan College, Puna. 5. T.C. Hope, Esq., e. s. 6. The Reverend Dr. Wilson. 7. Major T. Candy. 8. Mr. Chanbussappa, Deputy Educational Inspector for Dharwar. 9. Rao Saheb Narrayen Jugganath Waidya, Deputy Educational Inspector for Sind. 10. Rao Saheb Mahiputram Rupram, Principal of the Training College, Ahmedabad. 11. Rao Saheb Narayen Bhai Dandekar, Principal of the Training College, Puna. 12. Mr. H. Batt, c. s., appointed as Secretary’ (Report of the Committee Appointed to Examine the Text Books in Use in Indian Schools 1878: 199–200). 9 Theodore C. Hope, the educational inspector for Gujarat, constituted a committee of natives to help him in preparing the Departmental Series to be used in schools as a textbook. As he was closely associated with the Gujarat Vernacular Society, and had witnessed Dalpatram’s engagement with Gujarati literature and language, he felt that Dalpatram’s role would be indispensable for preparing the textbook series. So, as Parekh (2010) notes, Hope made a special request to the Gujarat Vernacular Society to relieve Dalpatram of his duties in the Society. However, the committee of the Society did not completely relieve Dalpatram, but some interim arrangement was made so that Dalpatram’s services could be availed by both Hope’s textbook committee and the Society. Apart from Dalpatram, other native members who comprised the committee were: Ra. Sa. Bhogilal, the president, Ra. Ba. Mohanlal, Ra. Ba. Pranlal Mathurdas, Ra. Sa. Mahipatram Rupram and Ra. Sa. Mayaram. This brief description is drawn from Parekh (2010). 10 The Hope Reading Series (seven reading series), as mentioned earlier, was prepared under the guidance of T.C. Hope, and was published in 1858 and 1859. ‘The book has been prepared with the intention that reading and writing be taught in this country on a very different principle from that which has been pursued hitherto. The old way of teaching required the boys to sacrifice a good deal of their time in learning the alphabet, the different consonantal combinations, and the sounds produced by the union of each individual consonant with the twelve vowels in succession, and was besides very uninteresting to beginners. Learned men in Europe and others who had had large experience on the subject found this system of teaching objectionable on these and similar grounds. In this book, an attempt has been made to follow the plan which they recommend [this plan was termed the “look

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11 12

13

14

15

Teaching in Unequal Societies and say method”]. The essence of this plan is to teach reading, writing and meanings simultaneously, and to adopt the best available means to awaken the interest of the beginner’ (Report of the Committee Appointed to Examine the Text Books in Use in Indian Schools 1878: 215-216). The subjects covered by the series included morality, general knowledge, science, natural history, geography, history, language and literature. For more details see chotāi (2016). Narmagadya is a collection of prose writings by Narmad (Narmadashankar Dave). It encompasses several subjects relating to social, political, religious and literary changes in 19th century Gujarat. Narmad brought out the first edition of the volume in 1865. The work is important in understanding—apart from several other issues like the discursive nature of colonial policies, the issue of standardisation of language, social reform and so on—the emergence of prose in Gujarati literary history. Mahipatram wrote the editorial preface to Narmagadya only in the second edition of the 1875 edited version of the work, which was published in 1880. For my present purpose, the fifth edition of the 1875 version of Narmagadya has been referred to, which was published in 1891. The original writing is in Gujarati and has been translated into English by this author. Dayaram (1777–1852) is said to be the last representative Bhakta poet of medieval Gujarati literature. He is primarily known for his garbis (a form of poetic composition). His poetic compositions are found in Gujarati, Hindi and Marathi languages. He was instructed in the teachings of the Pushtimarg (a religious sect) which shaped his poetic compositions. After Dayaram, a new age of Gujarati literature and language is said to have begun under the influence of Western education and thinking. For the original reference, see Narmagadya (Narmad 1874: 82).

References Blumhardt, J.M. 1892. Catalogue of Marathi and Gujarati Printed Books in the Library of the British Museum. London: Longmans. chotāi, D.K. 2016. Literary Historiography in Gujarati in the 19th century: Issues in Ideology, Identity and Representation. Unpublished PhD Thesis: Central University of Gujarat, Ahmedabad.

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Covernton, J.G. 1906. Occasional Reports: Vernacular Reading Books in the Bombay Presidency. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing. Elphinstone, M. 1884. ‘Report on the Territories Conquered from the Peshwas’. In Selections from the Official Writings of the Hon. Mountstuart Elphinstone, edited by G.W. Forrest. London: Richard Bentley and Son. Jhaveri, K.M. 1956. Further Milestones in Gujarati Literature. Bombay: Forbs Gujarati Sabha. Joshi, S. 1991. Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History. New Delhi: Trianka. Kumar, K. 1991. The Political Agenda of Education: A Study of Colonialist and Nationalist Ideas. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Milton, J. 2007. Paradise Lost, edited by B.K. Lewalski. Blackwell. Naregal, V. 2014. Language Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Narmad. 1874. Narmagadya. Bombay: Government Central Book Depot. Narmad. 1875. Narmagadya, edited by Mahipatram Nilkanth. Bombay: Government Central Book Depot. Narmad. 1891. Narmagadya, edited by Mahipatram Nilkanth. Bombay: Government Central Book Depot, 5th edn. Narmad. 1998. Dharmavichar, edited by Ramesh Shukla. Surat: Kavi Narmad Yugavart Trust. Pandya, N. 1891. Navalgranthavali, vol. 2, edited by Govardhanram Tripathi. Ahmedabad: United Printing and General Agency. Parekh, H. 2010. Gujarat Vernacular Societyno Itihas, Part I. Ahmedabad: Gujarat Vidyasabha. Pathak, R. 1945. Narmad: Arvachin Gadyapadyano Adya Praneta. Ahmedabad: Bharati Sahitya Sangha. Report of the Committee Appointed to Examine the Text Books in Use in Indian Schools. 1878. Calcutta: Home Secretariat Press. Report of the Department of Public Instruction, Bombay Presidency, for the Year 1866–67. 1867. Bombay: Education Society’s Press. Report of the Director of Public Instruction, Bombay, for the Year 1865–66. 1866. Bombay: Education Society’s Press. Selections from Educational Records. 1920. Part I: 1781–1839, edited by H. Sharp. Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing.

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Selections from Educational Records (Bombay) (1815–1840). 1955. Part II, edited by R. V. Parulekar. Bombay: Asian Publishing House. Shakespeare, W. 2003. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, edited by Philip Edwards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sunder Rajan, R. 1992. The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Tripathi, G. 1958. The Classical Poets of Gujarat and Their Influence on Society and Morals. Bombay: Forbes Gujarati Sabha. Viswanathan, G. 2009. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Yashaschandra, S. 2004. ‘From Hemachandra to Hind Svarāj: Region and Power in Gujarati Literary Culture’. In Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, 567–611, edited by Sheldon Pollock. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Teaching Self-Respect: The Very Idea Apaar Kumar Individuals placed at the margins of an unequal society by virtue of belonging to a particular gender, class, race or caste often internalise a lack of self-respect.1 If self-respect is necessary for human wellbeing,2 this lack of self-respect should constitute a problem for societies that consider equality to be an ideal. Further, social transformation requires political empowerment, which in turn must presume self-respect among the discursively marginalised.3 Given this broader context, one could ask if education might help address some aspect of the problem of lack of self-respect. On one standard view, education is valuable if it ‘change[s] [individuals] for the better’ (R.S. Peters in Barrow and Woods 2006: 26); and it achieves this in part through the inculcation of autonomy and a sense of ‘personal well-being’ (Gingell 2008: 123). Since self-respect can be considered necessary for attaining socio-political emancipation,4 and forms a key constituent in enabling autonomous action and personal wellbeing,5 the question of whether self-respect can be taught can be raised both within the philosophy of education and the discourse on moral education. The concept of self-respect is central to an important debate in political philosophy—between what Dillon (1992c: 107) calls the ‘ethic of justice’ and the ‘ethic of care’. From the Rawlsian justice perspective, self-respect can be attributed to persons if they possess the same basic liberties and, therefore, the same status as all other persons (Rawls 1999: 478). From the care perspective, this notion of self-respect—which presumes the Cartesian-Kantian notion of the 79

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person as an abstract entity with self-consciousness, moral rights and the capacity for rational autonomy (Dillon 1992b: 56)—leads to the ‘taking-into-account-and-appreciating attitude’ account of selfrespect, which in turn is problematic because it is a ‘dispassionate, overly intellectualized, arm’s length response that does not engage us emotionally’ (ibid.: 58).6  In opposition to this characterisation of self-respect, some care theorists have argued that self-respect involves ‘cherishing and treasuring myself for who I am [in my concrete particularity]’ (ibid.: 62). Dillon’s notion of ‘care respect’ tries to reconcile the abstract personhood presupposed in the justice perspective with the concrete individuality that is central to the care perspective. On this view, all persons are equally valuable because they possess an abstract ‘human me-ness’ which includes reflexivity, self-consciousness, experiential unity over time, a life plan attached to a conception of the good, and the ability to interpretatively construct oneself and the world (Dillon 1992c: 118–119). Yet this abstract me-ness is valuable only to the extent that it forms ‘dimensions of or conditions for each person’s being the particular person she is’ (ibid.: 119). This view entails that while autonomy remains a moral and personal value, it is ‘neither all that matters nor what matters most’ for the respect-worthiness of persons because autonomy now forms only one path to becoming a ‘me’ (ibid.). Further, given the dependence of the abstract me-ness on the particular ‘me’, Dillon can be said to subordinate the justice to the care perspective. In what follows, I examine these arguments. In contrast, the present chapter forms part of a larger project that explores whether the best insights of the care perspective can be reconciled with an ‘enlarged version of Kantian theory’ that does not abstract from human psychology and the social context—as exemplified by Barbara Herman’s work which broadly falls under the justice perspective (Herman 2007: ix). Specifically, I investigate if self-respect as Dillon conceives of it in her essay ‘Self-Respect: Moral, Emotional, Political’ (1997) can be taught if we presuppose

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Barbara Herman’s theory of moral education. For Dillon, self-respect is a nonpropositionally held and emotionally forged interpretive orientation that determines one’s understanding of oneself.7 Further, it cannot be reconstituted through reason if it has been damaged. The claim that reason cannot remedy a lack of self-respect in persons is at odds with Herman’s reason-based training in value. In this chapter, I argue that we do not have sufficient grounds to think that Herman’s reason-based training in value cannot help instil Dillon-type self-respect. In section 1, I show that standard arguments supporting the view that morality cannot be taught are insufficiently convincing. Subsequently, I delineate Dillon’s account of what she calls ‘basal self-respect’ (section 2), and the basic tenets of Herman’s theory of moral education (section 3). In section 4, I show why Hermanian moral education need not be considered entirely superfluous if the goal were to teach Dillon-type self-respect. Finally, I conclude by outlining a rudimentary pedagogical practice consistent with Herman’s reason-based education in value.

The Claim That Morality Cannot Be Taught The standard arguments supporting the claim that morality, which includes self-respect, cannot be taught are unconvincing. In what follows, I examine these arguments. (i) If teaching involves the transmission of expertise, then teaching morals must require moral expertise. But there are no lecturers in honesty or professors in self-respect. Therefore, self-respect, and morals in general, cannot be taught (Ryle 1972: 323, 325; Gingell 2008: 135). This argument, however, disregards the fact that expertise in self-respect is not necessary in creating the conditions that would enable the development of self-respect.8 If creating the right conditions forms part of education, then self-respect can be taught. Here the right conditions include educational policy, but also course content, structure of the classroom and so on. Since the identification and institutionalisation of these conditions would require a collective

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effort, and if we accept that all such efforts are in principle revisable, then it is inessential to view individual teachers as experts in selfrespect providing prescriptions based on certain knowledge. Instead, one need only take the inculcation of self-respect as an explicit goal in designing the educational apparatus. (ii) Education requires assessments and tests, which cannot be devised in moral education. Therefore, moral education is suspect (Ryle 1972: 325; Gingell 2008: 135). But again, if the goal is to create the normative conditions required for the development of a moral temperament, then such assessments are superfluous, since the main task would then be to get the conditions right instead of monitoring the progress of individual students. If we could get the normative and institutional conditions right (for example, for instilling self-respect), then further argumentation would be required to deny that some students will not gain in self-respect as a consequence.9 (iii) Gilbert Ryle (1972: 325) argues that morals cannot be taught through lectures and examinations. Rather morality is ‘caught’ in the sense that we learn morals in the process of growing up through ‘example and critically supervised practice’ (ibid.). We require, first of all, acquaintance with the ‘good examples set by others’ like our parents, neighbours or people we have heard or read about (ibid.: 328). Second, we must be taught through ‘worded homily, praise and rebuke’ that some things are of ‘overwhelming importance’ (ibid.: 325, 328). Finally, we must train ourselves by practising moral actions (ibid.: 325). Thus, for Ryle, responding to the question of how we learn morality requires asking who we are trying to live up to (ibid.: 331). Here, emulating the role model cannot be reduced to the ‘instinctive imitativeness of the young’, but a person must learn to ‘think like his elder brother or hero of his adventure story, that is, to think for himself’ (ibid.: 331–332).10 Ryle’s position raises several questions. It is unclear why morals are caught if the inculcation of morals requires ‘example and critically supervised practice’ including ‘worded homily, praise and

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rebuke’. This is because if the conditions enabling the generation of self-respect must be created by someone other than the person trying to acquire self-respect, then it seems reasonable to think that selfrespect is being taught rather than caught. On the other hand, if it is incumbent upon the one trying to gain self-respect to catch morals on her own, then other questions emerge. Ryle (1972: 329–330) takes the acquisition of virtue as a matter of getting to be virtuous rather than as a matter of knowing something or knowing how to do something. Yet he also says that ‘conscientiousness does not very comfortably wear the label of “knowledge” at all, since it is to be honorable, and not only or primarily to be knowledgeable [my emphasis] about or efficient at anything’ (ibid.: 330). In this passage, Ryle seems to suggest that knowing something and know-how can be a part (‘not only or primarily’) but not the whole of virtue acquisition. However, he does not specify the exact part that knowing something and know-how might play in gaining virtue. Further, for Ryle, becoming virtuous requires imitating a role model. Imitation is not mere imitativeness because the person learning morality must learn to think like her role model (‘think like his elder brother or hero of his adventure story, that is, to think for himself’ [ibid.: 332]). Here again Ryle does not clarify either what ‘thinking’ entails, or the extent to which it might require knowledge, if at all. Thus, Ryle leaves indeterminate the extent to which knowledge might be required to gain morality (or self-respect). If this is the case, then the following questions can be raised with regard to the person trying to catch self-respect entirely on her own. If she does not know what self-respect is, then how could she identify self-respecting people to emulate? On the other hand, if she does know self-respect without having it, then is this knowledge a conceptual acquaintance, some sort of know-how, or both? How could she have acquired such knowledge in the first place? Was it caught or taught? If it was caught, then how was it caught, and why catch it again through emulation? If it was taught, then the claim that morality/self-respect is caught requires explanation. Also, if one can

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identify people to emulate only if one possesses some knowledge of self-respect, this would mean that we somehow already know what self-respect is. If this is the case, then why emulate others at all? Why would we not act in accordance with the knowledge of self-respect we already possess? Thus, the Rylean version of the morality-is-caughtnot-taught view requires clarification. (iv) In (i)–(iii), I have argued that any strong denial of the claim that morality, including self-respect, can be taught remains unsustainable, at least with regard to the influential philosophical literature on this topic. This then leaves open the possibility that selfrespect can be taught.

Dillon on Basal Self-Respect I now delineate Dillon’s account of basal self-respect—what it is, how it arises, and what it means for it to be damaged. Self-respect, or ‘basal self-respect’ as Dillon calls it, is not a ‘discrete entity’, but a ‘complex of multilayered and interpenetrating phenomena that compose a certain way of being in the world, a way of being whose core is a deep appreciation of one’s morally significant worth’ (Dillon 1997: 228). As ‘fundamental orientation to the self’, it is the ‘primordial interpretation of self and self-worth, the invisible lens through which everything connected with the self is viewed and presumed to be disclosed, that is, experienced as real and true’ (ibid.: 241). Dillon distinguishes between intellectual and experiential understanding to explain the emergence of basal self-respect. Intellectual understanding entails having beliefs based on reasons which lead inferentially to other warranted beliefs (Dillon 1997: 239). In contrast, experiential understanding relates to ‘experiencing something directly and feeling the truth of what is experienced’ (ibid.). As primordial interpretive valuing of oneself, basal self-respect is an experiential understanding, because it is felt to be a true experience.

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Moreover, one could intellectually understand that one is worthy of self-respect, but if the basal self-respect, which is an experiential understanding, is damaged, the intellectual understanding is incapable of repairing it. I now explain these claims in more detail. First, for Dillon, respect is, ‘fundamentally, perception, a mode of seeing’, and ‘all seeing is interpretation, a seeing of something as something’ (1997: 241). Thus, basal self-respect is an ‘interpretive self-perception’ or a ‘mode of normatively interpretive perception of self and worth’ (ibid.). This interpretive self-perception arises as follows. Experiential understanding develops first and establishes a frame of reference for all future understanding of self-worth— in Dillon’s words, ‘sets the warp into which the threads of our experience are woven to create the layered understanding of self and self-worth in which we are always swaddled’ (ibid.). This experiential understanding is not an ‘intellectual construction’, but results from our ‘evidence-processing and reality-representing functions’ (ibid.: 244). It comes out of a ‘complex, emotionally charged interplay of self, others and institutions which begins long before we are capable of conceptualizing self, worth, persons, institutions, and relations among them’ (ibid.). In this way, it ‘shapes and delimits our conceptual schema’ (ibid.), that is, structures the ‘conceptual, emotional and behavioral possibilities’ relating to a person’s selfworth (ibid.: 242)—how she cognises, values and feels about herself, what she expects from herself, what she takes as reason for action, and how she reacts to stimuli (ibid.: 241). Thus, for Dillon, whether persons develop self-respect or not depends ultimately on the sorts of emotional experiences they come to have early in their lives. Second, intellectual understanding cannot alter the experiential understanding that constitutes basal self-respect for the following reasons: (i) Basal self-respect is pre-conceptual because it moulds our conceptual understanding of ourselves (Dillon 1997: 244). It is also pre-agentive because it develops prior to our ability to exercise

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agency—the basal interpretation ‘happens in me, not something that I do’ (ibid.). (ii) This pre-conceptual basal self-respect is nonpropositionally framed and cannot be altered intellectually. Experiential understanding is expressed in the form of emotions or ‘nonpropositional understandings that are at odds with … beliefs and [intellectual] understanding’, but without involving ‘gross irrationality’ (Dillon 1997: 240). That is, experiential understanding is ‘nonveridical, but not without warrant and justification’ (ibid.) for the following reason. Some part of experiential understanding is explicit and representational, but much of it is made up of ‘unarticulated presuppositions implicit in certain ways of being in the world’ (ibid.). In other words, in experiencing our world, we acquire presuppositions about ourselves in the world—that is, some sort of understanding about the shape of our world and our place in it—which we cannot make conscious or put into words. Yet these presuppositions together form a ‘nonpropositional framework for interpreting the world’ (ibid.). This nonpropositional framework is pre-reflective, unarticulated and emotion-laden, and conditions our explicit conceptualisation of self and worth (Dillon 1997: 242). It is a consequence of our emotional experiences and the worldly context in which we are located. This is because, for Dillon, basal self-respect is a ‘natural interpretive response to the experiences of being a valued and valuable, or unvalued and valueless, person among others who are valued and valuable’ (ibid.: 245). These experiences—which constitute the nonpropositional interpretive framework—arise in two ways: first, the ‘experiential history of interactions with other people, particularly those with whom we have our earliest relationships’ (ibid.). We experience and ‘absorb’ others’ responses to us before we are capable of intellectually examining and evaluating these responses (ibid.). Second, the socio-cultural and political context conditions the experiential understanding of persons (ibid.). For instance, the devaluation and

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subordination of women (‘what is female is worth less’) shapes the nonpropositional framework of women and leads to a ‘diminished self’ (ibid.: 245–246). Since basal self-respect is primordial experientially constituted valuing prior to all conceptualisations of self and worth, it ‘retains the power to control self-understanding and self-valuing even if we manage to excavate it and lift it to consciousness’ (Dillon 1997: 242). So even if we come to understand explicitly that we lack selfrespect, there is nothing we can do about it intellectually, since the nonpropositional experiential understanding is ‘resistant to modification through reflection, criticism, or reconceptualization’ (ibid.: 240). (iii) If basal self-respect is damaged, then one cannot respect oneself even if one is aware that one deserves self-respect on intellectual grounds for two reasons.11 First, since basal self-respect is a ‘primordial valuing that sets the basic terms for all subsequent conceptualizations of self and worth’ (Dillon 1997: 242), it can ‘control self-understanding and self-valuing’ (ibid.). On Dillon’s view, the Darwallian categories of recognition self-respect and evaluative self-respect—both of which are intellectually accessed—depend on basal self-respect. One has recognition self-respect if one considers oneself to be an equal member of a community; keeps the dignity of one’s person in view in thinking, feeling and desiring; and strives to live in accordance with one’s own individual ideals and projects (ibid.: 230). In contrast, one acquires evaluative self-respect if one is living in consonance with the normative principles that constitute one’s self-conception (ibid.). If basal self-respect is damaged, then one finds little ‘consolation’ in recognising one’s personhood or in the awareness of one’s merit (Dillon 1997: 242). This is because having recognition and evaluative self-respect does not alter the negative ‘basal interpretation’—‘this [negative basal interpretation] is what I am most fundamentally, and nothing I do or become can change that fact, nothing can alter its

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implications’ (ibid.). This means that one could intellectually have recognition and evaluative self-respect, and yet lack genuine selfrespect. Second, a damaged basal self-respect is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is psychologically debilitating, but also morally debilitating because it deforms one’s valuing and value-discerning qualities (Dillon 1997: 243). The person defines herself as ‘worthless’ and the ‘abiding flavor of her life is shame and self-contempt’ (ibid.: 226). Even if she deserves, say, evaluative self-respect, she ‘interprets the evidence as ground for uncertainty about [her] worth’ (ibid.: 241). This impacts the person’s life, because what we are largely depends on what we understand ourselves to be and what we aim to become, which, in turn, depends on what significance we give ourselves and our lives (ibid.: 243). Thus, basal self-respect is a self-fulfilling prophecy—if you don’t have self-respect, you can never acquire it, certainly not intellectually. Dillon, of course, does think that one can somewhat repair a damaged basal self-respect by caring for others and reshaping the oppressive institutions that caused the damage (ibid.: 247ff.). In sum, on Dillon’s view, basal self-respect is a nonpropositionally structured experiential understanding that develops by means of a set of emotional interactions located within a particular institutional context. It is a primordial valuing of oneself that emerges early in life, and that once engendered cannot be altered intellectually.

Herman’s Theory of Moral Education Barbara Herman outlines a theory of moral education that departs from theories based on what she calls a ‘passive, descriptive project’ (2007: 92). We are all ‘however formed adults’ because our development is contingent, and depends on where and with whom we grow up, which in turn means that we internalise some virtues but also some faults (ibid.: 79). Passive theory takes this however formed adult as a starting point and asks what a person with such dispositions

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has reason to do (ibid.: 92). In contrast, Herman outlines a Kantian moral theory that aims, in constructivist vein, to form a normative moral character founded on an investigation into the ‘conditions that make right [moral] judgment possible’, and so does not begin with the however formed adult (ibid.). Herman calls this moral theory an ‘enlarged version of Kantian theory’ that, unlike traditional Kant interpretations, does not abstract the categorical imperative from human psychology and social context (Herman 2007: ix), and takes the derivation of duty as ‘deliberative’ (ibid.). Roughly speaking, this means that, for Herman, moral reasoning occurs in a ‘deliberative field’, that is, a ‘space in which an agent’s deliberations take place’ to the extent this agent is concerned with action aimed at achieving some good (ibid.: 18). This deliberative field is shaped by principles and commitments that express a person’s conception of value (ibid.). These principles and commitments are ‘interpreted’ to the extent they relate to a particular socio-institutional context, and they ‘construct a sensibility that gives practical sense to our experiences’ (ibid.: 42). This sensibility—or the taken-for-granted sense of how things work—is shared because interpretations of practical principles/commitments must be taught, or normal development would be impossible (ibid.). Children must learn which of their desires and interests have practical significance, and to value some feelings while disregarding others (ibid.). For this reason, moral education is important for Herman, and has the following features. (i) Moral education, on Herman’s view, goes beyond ‘dos and don’ts’, and involves the ‘creation of a sense of self and other that makes shared moral life possible’ (2007: 130). This is because morality relates to human flourishing in a collective, and since morality involves obligation, the ‘content of extensive regions of what we ought to do will be in important ways up to us’ (ibid.: 287). We can either act purely on the basis of reason, that is, our free rational agency, or be determined by our empirical circumstances (ibid.: 172).

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Therefore, ‘[t]he point of moral education is not just to make us good. It responds to a demand of our freedom—to express our capacity to make reason our rule’ (ibid.). In other words, its goal is to train people to be autonomous. Autonomy is the ‘capacity to judge and be motivated by the principles of a constructed deliberative field’ (ibid.: 128). Effectively autonomous moral agents are morally literate in that they possess a ‘developed moral intelligence that can read and respond to moral facts, incorporating their evaluative import into a shared way of life’ (ibid.). Since moral concepts are acquired in social contexts, autonomy must be empirically realised through a ‘social and institutional provision of well-formed values and evaluative skills’ (ibid.). The completion of moral education would bring about an ‘ectypal world’, which is the transformation of the natural world into a rational world (ibid.: 153). Thus, ‘training to autonomy makes autonomy empirically real’ (ibid.), which implies that we can overcome our upbringing through moral training instead of being determined by it (ibid.: 308). (ii) This process of moral education involves reason-based training in value, which, according to Herman, has the following features: (a) Moral education must instil an ‘acknowledgment that rational agency is a higher order regulative value’ (Herman 2007: 133). This requires that we are responsive to ‘detail of circumstance, institutions, character: how rational nature is expressed, where it is vulnerable, how it may be effective’ (ibid.). If we grant that rational agency is of higher value, then the aim of moral education is to develop the rational faculty from its ‘natural state to concern for one’s rational being as a fully moral power’ (ibid.: 136). This presupposes that morality completes and perfects rational nature (ibid.: 141), which is necessary given that humans cannot naturally see moral facts or grasp moral truths, but require ‘moral experiences and interpretations of experiences (instruction) to become aware of and responsive to a moral world’ (ibid.: 134). Thus, moral capacity is natural, but must be produced, and involves constituting a new conception of the self, not a new nature (ibid.).

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(b) Moral education as training to virtue is rational training in value (Herman 2007: 145). A moral person is trained in value, which means that she possesses a distinctive orientation to the practical world from the perspective of practical autonomy. This means that she can make connections that non-moral people cannot, and her aim is to confer the system of rational beings on the sensible world (ibid.: 134). Further, this rational training in value can be analysed into two aspects: (A) The specific role that reason plays in moral education; and (B) what it might mean to train persons in value. I discuss each of these in turn. (A) If training in value is rational, what is the specific role of reason in moral education? Herman says that the role of moral education is not to ‘fix shared moral concepts’, but to provide ‘deliberative tools, modes of reasoning and reflection that we might deploy together [so in community], with some confidence’ (2007: 129). These deliberative tools and modes of reasoning, on Herman’s view, must at least include the following aspects. First, part of the educative task in instilling morality is to ascertain what makes for sound moral reasoning (Herman 2007: 277–278). This naturally requires exercising our ‘deliberative and critical abilities’ to identify the correct moral norms (ibid.: 278). Second, moral concepts and values underlying moral judgement must be taught. For Herman, what qualifies as a reason depends on the ‘story of its value’ (2007: 158). The richer our grasp of reasons and the values that underpin them (‘evaluative richness to our moral knowledge’), the better our ability to make moral judgements (ibid.: 287–288). Therefore, skilful moral judgement requires an introduction to moral concepts and values. Further, practical skills like cooking are analogous to moral activity in several ways. Becoming confident in exercising practical skills is similar to gaining confidence in the employment of moral skills—one starts with rules, masters basic routines, and then gains experience and knowledge through trial and error (ibid.: 116). But there is a difference between them. Beyond a certain point, the individual exercise of judgement

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is authoritative in the cooking case such that over time rules are left behind, and replaced with taste and genius. In contrast, in the case of moral judgement, one must always orient oneself by means of concepts and rules that support moral reasons (ibid.). Third, moral agents must be taught the rationale for moral rules. If the normal morally literate agent could access the rationale of moral rules, she would have ‘greater control over judgment and a wider range of read and response’ (Herman 2007: 119). If the agent is taught the rationale for a value in various contexts, then this would influence her attitude and judgements, because it would allow her to understand why that value is a value, and why action based on it should be performed (‘appreciate the connection of moral requirement to unconditioned value’ [ibid.: 133]). In the absence of the rationale for value, errors of judgement would result, or the action may not be done with the right intention (ibid.). Thus, moral educators must ‘ensure that the value content of requirements is accessible, and in terms that suit our needs as moral agents’ (ibid.: 288). Fourth, moral education requires a community founded on rational principles. According to Herman, moral activity is ‘intrinsically interpersonal’ (2007: 117). Justifying an action as moral always rests on a reason that can ‘in principle’ be offered in explanation and justification of what we do (ibid.). This fact influences the nature of moral education. If we can justify our actions and judgements to each other in terms of the reasons we share, then we can have confidence in our values (ibid.: 128). The formation of new moral concepts, what Herman calls ‘moral creativity and improvisation’, must also be social in that it is ‘something we have to do together’ (ibid.: 293). Such a reasonbased moral education would not naturally end all discrepancies of status and power, but it is the best we can do (ibid.: 128). (B) Training in value has several aspects: First, in Herman’s view, reasons have independent validity, but interests and desires can lead to their misrepresentation (2007: 172). The possession of rationality alters both the objects we desire and the ‘content and structure of

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the desires we come to have’ (ibid.: 193). So the faculty of desire differs from the faculty of desire in accordance with concepts (ibid.: 233–234n), like desire in bees differs from that of rational agents (ibid.: 236). The ‘raw stuff of desire’ cannot directly form part of the deliberative field of the rational agent (ibid.: 244). Some notion of value is required to translate the material of desire into concepts construed as ‘recognition of an object into this’ (ibid.: 237). The desire can then be ‘addressed by [moral] judgment and deliberation’ (ibid.: 244). The goal of moral education is to ‘transform’ desires and interests by making them ‘sensitive to reason’ (Herman 2007: 173). Desires are transformed rather than constrained if one brings them into the deliberative field (ibid.: 127). Training rational agents into this process of transformation enables them to construct well-founded values from desires and interests (ibid.), such that morals are no longer in conflict with the agents’ ‘loves and attachments’ (ibid.: 269). An agent thus trained is not an expert (ibid.: 199). Instead, the transformation of her desires makes her perception of the world different from that of a person with untransformed desires—Herman says that moral skill is structurally closer to perception than practical skill (ibid.: 306). For instance, if the categorical imperative formed part of a person’s deliberative field, then it would not even occur to her to embezzle funds or disregard her sense of dignity (ibid.: 196), since embezzling funds or losing one’s dignity would violate the ‘content of activities and relationships she values’ (ibid.: 199). Second, one must teach values in a way that revisability is part of their form. This is because how we respond to new values depends on the ‘structure of value in social institutions that shape an agent’s moral intelligence’ (Herman 2007: 121). In other words, moral perception is socially constituted, and, therefore, reflection on one’s values is possible only if these values are ‘evaluable’ (or revisable) in their very form (ibid.: 124, also 313, 316). Revisability also includes avoiding mutually inconsistent values, since we value consistency as part of our normative practice (ibid.: 124).

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Third, we need lessons in value, because we cannot individually ascertain what is valuable, and our values are often a result of ‘morally suspect institutions’ (Herman 2007: 145). However, if we take our values to be inherently revisable and if we could articulate a rational criterion for what would count as progress in our value system, then an ideal moral education can offer conceptual resources to construct values we could all take as valid, at least at a particular point of time. These conceptual resources would include tools of criticism, political participation geared to changing morally unsustainable institutions, and autonomy of character in the ‘habit of interpret[ing] and refounding values’ (ibid.: 128). (iii) From (i)–(ii): Hermanian reason-based training in value aims to develop autonomy in persons. It requires a rational community; and involves identifying moral concepts, and teaching them through the explication of their rationale. In addition, it teaches agents to transform desire into moral concepts and values; views all values as intrinsically revisable; and provides them with tools to critique established values.

Damaged Basal Self-Respect and Reason-Based Training in Value Can Herman’s reason-based training in value help repair a damaged basal self-respect? I now argue that a negative response to this question requires further argumentation. In (i), I argue that Dillon’s conception of intellectual understanding seems far too narrow. Subsequently, in (ii), I ask why Dillon takes childhood experience to determine basal self-respect such that experience and reasoning cannot alter it. Finally, I raise the questions of (iii) why reason-forged values must be powerless in mending a damaged basal self-respect, and (iv) why, for Dillon, emotions cannot be rearranged in tandem with new rationally acquired moral concepts. Finally, in (v), I consider some general objections to my argument.

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(i) Dillon appears to conceive of reasoning far too narrowly, and thus cannot adequately support her contention that intellectual understanding cannot alter a damaged basal self-respect. In addition, even if Dillon could be seen as presupposing a broader conception of reason, it would still remain unclear why Herman’s reason-based training would be ineffective in repairing a damaged basal self-respect. Intellectual understanding ‘involves having beliefs which one has reason to accept as true, then coming by inference to have other beliefs which one takes to be true in virtue of their logical relation to warranted beliefs where the believing, inferring and assessing need not engage emotions’ (Dillon 1997: 239). Here, in her emphasis on inferentiality and independence from emotion, Dillon seems to model intellectual understanding on deductive reasoning. This conception of intellectual understanding combined with the emotional nature of basal self-respect leads Dillon to conclude that intellectual understanding cannot influence basal self-respect. However, if the goal is to ascertain whether reason can help instil or repair selfrespect, then one could characterise Dillon’s notion of intellectual understanding as being too narrow. A broader conception of reason— which Herman employs—would include not merely deduction, but also inductive reasoning that proceeds systematically in a particular social context and that is inherently revisable. Dillon does not discuss this sort of reasoning. Therefore, the question of the effectiveness of reason vis-à-vis a damaged self-respect must remain open. One could, of course, deny that Dillon reduces intellectual understanding to deductive reasoning in the following way. Recall Dillon’s successful professional. Her principle that professional success entitles her to self-respect is inductively gained, as is her awareness that she fulfils all the criteria for such success. From these premises, she infers deductively to the claim that she deserves selfrespect. Although deduction is in play here, the overall reasoning here must be viewed as inductive, since her premises are based on probability and gained in a particular contingent social context.

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Therefore, Dillon conceptualises intellectual understanding in primarily inductive rather than strictly deductive terms. The problem with this argument is that even if we grant that Dillon conceptualises intellectual understanding in inductive terms, it still remains unclear why such an understanding could not reconstitute a damaged basal self-respect. For instance, if one assumes like Herman that moral training includes moral concept formation, then one could conceive of a socio-historically conditioned, logically consistent and inherently revisable ideal of self-respect. This rational ideal could then be taught in classrooms through dialogue, making the rationale for it explicit and so on. Given that an account of this sort has preliminary plausibility, Dillon can deny that intellectual understanding can influence basal self-respect only if she shows that teaching reasonforged moral concepts in a rational manner can never correct a damaged self-respect. Since Dillon does not accomplish this, the possibility that reason can play some role in repairing a damaged selfrespect must remain open. (ii) Dillon claims that the emotional experiences of being valued or disvalued that we gain as children, and that shape our basal respect, are prior to any ‘intellectual understanding of self-worth’ (1997: 245). Therefore, intellectual understanding cannot alter basal self-respect. However, Dillon does not adequately support this claim for two reasons: (a) it is unclear why priority in time entails the primacy of one’s childhood experiences over one’s adult experiences; and (b) the claim that basal self-respect is impervious to reconfiguration in adult life can be defended only if it can be shown that experience and reflection, which adulthood brings, can never influence basal self-respect. (a) The claim that the impact of early childhood experiences on basal self-respect cannot be intellectually reconstituted requires further support for the following reason. It is unclear why, if a person could gain self-respect through intellectual means in one area of her life, this gain would not help

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her gain basal self-respect. Consider Dillon’s successful professional, X, who lacks basal self-respect despite believing intellectually that she deserves self-respect. Here, it must be presupposed that X has a degree of self-respect if X has achieved professional success. For it is hard to imagine X being effective if she were entirely lacking in self-respect— for example, she may lack the confidence to express her thoughts, avoid taking initiative, behave nervously and so on. Furthermore, it is not unreasonable to think that this self-respect evolved over time. That is, one can assume that X learnt to perform tasks better in the course of time—through practise, learning from her mistakes, getting a sense of the larger whole in which she operates and so on. So it can be said that X progressively developed professional self-respect in accordance with rational criteria. Since professional self-respect can be acquired only in adulthood and never in childhood, it can be said that self-respect can be rationally achieved at least in one domain in later life. Now, if someone can gain self-respect in one sphere of her life (here, the professional sphere) through the employment of her rational capacities, then it needs to be justified why basal self-respect cannot be rationally gained later in life. Such a justification would, first of all, require clarifying why acquiring self-respect in one area of one’s life cannot help in the acquisition of self-respect in another area of one’s life. For instance, being successful in her profession must give X a good sense of how the world works institutionally. But if this is the case, then why should we exclude the possibility that X might employ this understanding in reflecting upon her own experiential (personal) history in the same institutional set-up, which could then potentially alter her basal self-respect. Second, if we can progressively master skills, professional or otherwise, then it is not obvious why rationally gained adult experiences cannot alter the basal self-respect rooted in unreflective and highly arbitrary early experiences. This is especially puzzling because as adults we tend to take our childhood experiences as having less significance than our adult experiences.

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We could, of course, be wrong about dismissing our childhood experiences, as psychoanalysts would point out. Nevertheless, our giving more credence to our rational adult experience should at least mean that we might try to identify and rectify childhood trauma with the aid of rational resources gained as an adult. And if this is possible, then reason can play a role in repairing a damaged basal self-respect. Dillon does not exclude these possibilities. She merely asserts that our childhood experiences ‘shape and delimit our conceptual schema’ (1997: 244) without justifying the unalterable primacy of these experiences in the constitution of basal self-respect. (b) Any justification of Dillon’s claim that the experience and reflection that come with adulthood cannot alter the basal selfrespect arising out of childhood experiences would minimally involve arguing for the following propositions. First, one can argue that understanding one’s situation intellectually is different from merely experiencing that situation without any understanding. In the latter case, one is entirely subject to forces beyond one’s control, and merely experiences, say, the pain of lacking self-respect. In the former case, on the other hand, one could both understand that one lacks basal self-respect in conceptual/recognitional terms, and potentially attempt to understand the rationale for this lack. For instance, X could understand intellectually—either on her own or through some sort of education—that her lack of basal self-respect has its source in flawed institutions. Such a realisation can be expected to alter both her moral universe and her moral judgements.12 It follows that experience and reflection can add something to unreflective childhood experience. As a consequence, any defence of the claim that reasoning in adult life cannot reconstitute a damaged basal self-respect must show that the addition of experience and reflection can never help mend a damaged basal self-respect. Second, if we accept that reason emerges piecemeal in a social context, and if moral judgement requires giving and taking reasons (section 3), then more needs to be said about why reason cannot

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help reconstitute a damaged basal self-respect. For example, X could have access not only to her own reason, but also the reasoning of others including a critique of unjust values and institutions, which could then open up the possibility of rationally grounded political participation. If a moral education can make critique and viable political participation available to X, and if this could offer her a new set of values and a rationale for rejecting older values in favour of new values, then it is puzzling why this could not help repair a basal selfrespect damaged in childhood. In fact, Dillon’s position is puzzling in this regard. She asserts that political participation can help repair a damaged basal self-respect (Dillon 1997: 249), and yet she denies that intellectual understanding can be part of this process. This is problematic because rationality could be seen to form some part of political participation even if such participation also involves emotions. An oppressed person could participate in political resistance only if she grasps the reasons for resisting—for example, a law makes her life worse and her emotions could be seen to accompany this rational/conceptual awareness. If political resistance involves both reason and emotions, and given that concepts can be put into public language, then it needs to be shown why the creation and dissemination of new moral concepts aimed at achieving rational consensus within a community could not in part aid in mending a damaged basal self-respect. Naturally, this process would require several loci (political rallies, editorials and so on), but there are no prima facie grounds to think that the classroom construed as a space for rational discussion could not form part of this larger effort. (c) Hence, from (a)–(b), more needs to be said about the primacy of childhood experiences in constituting basal self-respect, and why experience and reflection gained in adulthood cannot help repair a damaged basal self-respect. (iii) According to Dillon, values arise out of being in the world. The values underlying basal self-respect come out of the childhood experience of being valued or disvalued within an institutional setting,

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and have an emotional basis. However, values, as Herman points out, can also be rationally forged. These values must be conceptual, and since concepts are capable of being publicly communicated, one can argue that these values can be taught. Therefore, to make her case that basal self-respect is impervious to intellectual reconstitution, Dillon must argue that emotion-based values cannot be altered or replaced by values arising from the process of reasoning. Further, she must demonstrate that if a person finds both emotion-based and reason-based values in her world, then an ideal moral education of the Hermanian sort that seeks to bolster reason-based value must remain ineffective in mending a damaged self-respect. Dillon argues for neither of these claims. (iv) I have argued, in (i)–(iii), that it is unclear why a reasonbased training in value could not, at least in part, aid in the process of reconstituting a damaged basal self-respect. I now address another aspect of Dillon’s argument— that intellectual understanding cannot influence basal self-respect because basal self-respect is emotionally engendered. The assumption here is that reason cannot ultimately alter emotions and desires, which leads Dillon (1997: 249) to prescribe caring for others as an antidote to a distorted basal self-respect. I propose that, while caring for others could certainly be helpful in repairing a damaged basal self-respect, this does not preclude the claim that a reason-based training in value, like Herman’s, could not also assist in this process. For Herman, moral persons desire something only if it is consistent with the prescriptions of reason. For instance, a self-respecting person would never desire anything that violated her dignity. The role of moral education is to transform desire in line with moral concepts and values (section 3). Can such a moral education also transform basal self-respect? In what follows, I show that it is possible to outline a preliminary account in which a reason-based moral education helps transform desire in a way that is consistent with moral concepts including self-respect. If such an account is plausible, or at least since

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Dillon does not exclude it, then Hermanian moral education could potentially repair a damaged basal self-respect. Concepts are modes of ordering reality. Equality as a concept, for instance, emphasises a different aspect of human beings as compared to feudal concepts. One could argue that the introduction of a new moral concept (for example, equality in a feudal setup) would rearrange feelings and desires over a period of time. Imagine a marginalised person, Y, in a context of gross inequality. If Y is taught the concept of equality in the classroom, she may not take to it immediately. However, if there were sufficient classrooms in which equality was being discussed in line with the best available pedagogical practices, and if Y could be part of rational discussions both inside and outside the classroom, then it does not seem entirely implausible that her self-perception as well as her hopes and desires might alter. In this imaginary case, rational training in value helps disseminate a concept which then leads to a gradual realignment of the emotions in tandem with this new concept. This realignment may require a long time and may depend on several factors, like the extent of Y’s habituation to inequality, and so on. Yet it is not absurd to think that our emotions can rearrange themselves in light of new conceptual developments whether institutional or cultural. In fact, this is quite usual in our daily lives. For example, we may fear a situation if we don’t understand it, but the fear fades away once we realise that the situation is non-threatening. If our emotions can be made to align with our rational concepts in our ordinary life, then one would have to argue for why this would not also be the case when it comes to our moral concepts, especially if the rationale of these concepts is widely taught in a way that provokes discussion.13 In opposition to this view, Dillon could contend that basal selfrespect is a complex emotional state and so cannot be altered through rational discussion or by merely understanding situations. She could further support this claim by arguing that low basal self-respect

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might become a habit that is not easily forsaken. However, to make this case, one must show that habit is indeed the normative cause that makes basal self-respect impervious to reason-based alteration.14 (v) In section 4(i)–4(iv), I have argued that Dillon’s strong claim that intellectual understanding cannot repair a damaged basal selfrespect requires further support. To make her case, Dillon must minimally account for what makes for the priority of childhood in constituting basal self-respect, and why experience and reasoning gained in adulthood cannot alter it; why intellectual understanding must be restricted to deductive reasoning; why values arising out of emotional interactions must possess greater appeal than the values arising out of reason; and why emotions cannot be realigned in light of new reason-forged moral concepts. I now consider some general objections that can be levelled against this argument. First, one could argue that self-respect cannot be taught because self-respect is different for different persons. But even if this relativistic position is defensible, it is beside the point here. On my view, the teaching of self-respect could involve several things at various levels. It could include articulating new concepts consistent with instilling self-respect, and reorganising the classroom as a democratic space in which a plurality of views could be discussed. Disagreements could appear on both these levels and then either disappear in the course of rational discussion or persist until a new consensus emerges. Here, I am neither legislating the content of self-respect nor prescribing a way of instilling it and am, therefore, unconcerned with the issue of relativism. Instead, I am merely suggesting that the question of whether reason-based training in value can help teach self-respect in classroom settings must remain open. Second, it could be said that even if reason-based training in value can help teach morals, it cannot help teach self-respect. Such a claim would require an argument, but it does seem somewhat odd at first sight. If one can offer a rationale for why truth-telling is a

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value—for example, it makes collective action possible—then one could also offer some sort of rationale in the case of self-respect. For instance, one could propose that a lack of self-respect limits the possibility of what we can do or become, and so on. Of course, in either case, providing the rationale alone will not help, but there is no reason to think it cannot play a part in helping people become truthtellers and persons with self-respect. Finally, Dillon could be interpreted not as denying that intellectual understanding can help repair a damaged self-respect, as I have done here, but as saying that intellectual understanding alone cannot accomplish this task. However, such a reading of Dillon would be problematic. Dillon says explicitly that intellectual understanding cannot help with a damaged basal self-respect (see section 4[i]). In addition, she does not include reason while listing the ways to restore a damaged basal self-respect (Dillon 1997: 247ff).

Concluding Remarks I have argued that the question of whether a reason-based training in value can help repair a damaged basal self-respect must remain open. A fuller investigation of this question would at least require a rigorous analysis of the notion of self-respect and an exploration of the pedagogical techniques that might help teach it. Yet if we assume, for the sake of argument, that self-respect can be taught, then one could provisionally sketch a pedagogical practice consistent with Herman’s theory of moral education. First, the teacher would avoid denying the discrepancy between the inequalities existing in the real world and the idealised rational-democratic space of the classroom (if it can be fashioned). In fact, she would constantly facilitate a back and forth between these two opposed domains, and emphasise the socially constructed nature of morality and self-respect. Second, following Herman and Mitchell, in-class activities and homework assignments would be structured around writing exercises, including

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personal statements, reading responses, writing on films, art and so on. As far as possible, these writings would be collectively discussed. Third, moral history would be taught as part of the larger goal of imparting the rationale for morals, as Herman suggests. It would include not only the history of moral reasoning, but the imbrication of morals in local institutions (Herman 2007: 293). Fourth, the teacher would present herself as a role model, but only if students are permitted to critique her on rational grounds. Biographies could help teach the concepts presupposed by a model moral character (cf. ibid.: 266). Finally, since examinations cannot help with moral education (section 1), grading could be based on effort rather than quality (cf. Ferguson 1987: 29), though how this might be put into practice would have to be worked out.

Notes 1

2

3

For instance, Ferguson (1987: 341) says that ‘[m]ost feminists would take it to be a truism that women’s sense of self-worth, and consequently our personal power, has been weakened by a male-dominated society which has made us internalize many demeaning images of women.’ Rawls (1999: 386) characterises self-respect as a ‘primary good’. Selfrespect refers to a person’s ‘secure conviction that his conception of his good, his plan of life, is worth carrying out’, and his self-confidence that he will be able to fulfil his plans (ibid.). A lack of self-respect makes a person feel that her plans are valueless, and that she would lack the will to pursue anything of value (ibid.). Robin Dillon (1992a: 134) argues that for Rawls, having self-respect is psychologically advantageous as it aids the ‘zest with which we pursue our plans of life’. While granting that self-respect has psychological benefits, Dillon places more value on selfrespect than Rawls does. In Dillon’s view, self-respect is ‘life enhancing’ because its absence makes life ‘not simply bland or dysfunctional … [but] meaningless’ (ibid.: 135). In addition, it helps foster moral relationships between people (Dillon 1992b: 60). Dillon (1992b: 53) takes self-respect to be ‘crucial to feminist political empowerment, as the source of the strength and confidence needed to effectively challenge and change subordinating institutions’.

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5 6

7

8 9 10 11

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Ferguson recommends a feminist education that would help develop ‘self-integrity and self-worth’ so that women acquire the ‘psychological resources [they] need to develop full self-realization’ (1987: 341; also Dillon 1992b: 53). Such an education is necessary because people lacking in self-respect are ‘timid’ and ‘risk averse’, and ‘face the problem of contributing to [their] own subordination because of not even trying to achieve goals [they] really want’ (Ferguson 1987: 341). See Kant (1996: 435–436); Rawls (1999: 385ff.). Meyers (1986: 86) admits that Rawlsian self-respect depends on life plans that include both justice and the personal aims of individuals. However, she opines that Rawls’s theory of deliberative rationality which is required for planning one’s life does not ‘adequately deal with the role of nonrational factors in personal choice’ (ibid.). Not all care theorists would agree with Dillon’s general approach to care ethics (see Tong and Williams 2018). Dillon’s work has been centred here because it deals with the notion of self-respect in a differentiated way. Ryle (1972: 327) says that moral experts are not required for teaching morals. Ryle (1972: 331) also denies that morals are learnt through ‘tests and techniques of instruction’. Carr (1991) also presupposes the role model theory, and consequently emphasises teacher training. Dillon cites ‘familiar’ cases in which women lack self-respect despite their awareness that they deserve to feel self-respect (1997: 232ff.). A successful professional takes pride in her success and yet lacks selfrespect. A feminist rejects the male construction of the female body, but still feels ashamed when she menstruates. A woman understands that she is well-respected, but feels an ‘unjustified resentment’ that others are treating her badly. As Herman says, if the normal morally literate agent could access the rationale of moral rules, she would have ‘greater control over judgment and a wider range of read and response’ (2007: 119). Ryle’s view may seem to be at odds with the claim that reason-based education could potentially help teach morality. However, as I argued in section 1(iii), Ryle’s position needs clarification. Despite the fact that Ryle takes it that acquiring virtue involves coming to be virtuous, rather than getting to know something or knowing how to do something, he

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also suggests that knowing something and know-how can be a part but not the whole of virtue. Yet he does not clarify the extent to which knowledge might be part of virtue-acquisition. In addition, he says that a person learning self-respect must not be merely imitative, but must learn to think like her role model. However, he does not specify either the nature of this thinking or the extent to which knowledge might be involved in it. 14 Mitchell (1998: 129) argues that a traumatised person ‘withdraws from reality at the level of his or her language’. This language is the ‘verbal version of the visual language of dreams … expressions of feeling rather than meaning’ (ibid.: 132). Curing such a person requires producing order and clarity not merely through naming, but also writing. This is because ‘order and disorder in human experience is an interactive process’ (ibid.: 130), and writing can help one perceive oneself from the perspective of the other (ibid.: 131). If we view a person with low basal self-respect as a variant of the traumatised person (which naturally requires an argument), then one could argue that naming and writing could be ways of altering the emotionally inflected basal self-respect. So if reason-based training in value makes writing an essential part of its pedagogy, then it seems plausible that reason-based training could aid in mending a damaged basal self-respect.

References Barrow, R. and R. Woods. 2006. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. London: Routledge, 4th edn. Carr, D. 1991. Educating the Virtues: An Essay on the Philosophical Psychology of Moral Development and Education. London: Routledge. Dillon, R. 1992a. ‘How to Lose Your Self-Respect’. American Philosophical Quarterly, 29(2): 125–139. Dillon, R. 1992b. ‘Toward a Feminist Conception of Self-Respect’. Hypatia, 7(1): 52–69. Dillon, R. 1992c. ‘Respect and Care: Towards Moral Integration’. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 22(1): 105–132. Dillon, R. 1997. ‘Self-Respect: Moral, Emotional, Political’. Ethics, 107(2): 226–249.

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Ferguson, A. 1987. ‘A Feminist Aspect Theory of the Self’. Canadian Journal of Philosophy (Supplementary Volume), 13: 339–356. Gingell, J. 2008. ‘Moral Education’. In Philosophy of Education: The Key Concepts, edited by C. Winch and J. Gingell, 133–136. London: Routledge. Herman, B. 2007. Moral Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kant, I. 1996. Practical Philosophy, trans. and edited by M.J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meyers, D.T. 1986. ‘The Politics of Self-Respect: A Feminist Perspective’. Hypatia 1(1): 83–100. Mitchell, J. 1998. ‘Trauma, Recognition and the Place of Language’. Diacritics, 28(4): 121–133. Rawls, J. 1999. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, rev. edn. Ryle, G. 1972. ‘Can Virtue Be Taught?’. In Education and the Development of Reason, edited by R.E. Dearden, P. Hirst and R.S. Peters, 323–332. London: Routledge. Tong, R. and N. Williams. 2018. ‘Feminist Ethics’. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by E.N. Zalta. Available at: https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/win2018/entries/feminism-ethics/ (accessed in December 2018).

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On the Ethics of Teaching: The Lessons of Athenian Democracy Patricia Fagan The ethical problems of education are not just that we are trying to educate in a context of unchosen inequity and injustice. That fact— the fact of disparity of opportunity, of resources and of success on the basis of race, class, gender, geography—has always been a fact. More recently, the effects of globalisation and, especially, of the rise of social media (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and the like) have begun to reveal themselves. Increasingly, I am teaching young adults who have been trained by their experience of the world outside of school to be consumers who value in themselves their capacity to choose what they prefer; they ‘retweet’ the remarks of others, they ‘like’ posts, they choose ‘skins’ for their smartphones out of hundreds of possible options. But to a large degree, aside from their role as ‘choosing’ and ‘liking’ consumers, they experience themselves as ineffectual, which renders them passive, isolated and silent. Universities, in North America at least, contribute to students’ sense of themselves as consumers inasmuch as they present university education as another consumer good to be chosen and purchased. This particular consumer good, university administrations claim, provides students at the end with a token (a degree, a diploma) that will guarantee them a good job, and this is its putative value. As university teachers, then, we work within a context that increasingly denies the human, transformative value of what we do and, more significantly and perniciously, denies the human value of the students we teach. The most vulnerable group 108

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here, the body of people most likely to be harmed by this context, is our students. I think it is incumbent upon us as educators to work against this tendency in our institutions. This, I believe, is something we can each do within our own disciplines, and what I am going to discuss and describe here are some of the values and practices that I bring to my teaching of the works of classical antiquity that, I believe, rely on and cultivate my students’ capacities for self-determined action, for cooperation, for expression.

The State of the University The field in which I teach and pursue research is Greek and Roman studies, or classics. When I was a university student myself, and even when I started teaching full-time about twenty years ago, the study of Greek and Roman antiquity, along with European studies in general, was still privileged within North American university curricula. Universities still modelled their offerings and structures upon the offerings and structures of European (and especially, in Canada, of English) universities. Students in humanities courses and humanities degrees were overwhelmingly of European descent and so had some sense of identification or familiarity with that material. Aspects of Greek and Roman antiquity were standard elements in high school courses on world history and mythology. I could, therefore, as a teacher of ancient Greece and Rome, say that my field was ‘relevant’ to my students. Indeed the ‘relevance’ was not a particularly pressing concern; the fact that there were students interested in studying the material and professors interested in and capable of teaching the material was sufficient justification for teaching it from the point of view of everyone involved: students, professors, administrators. This situation pertained even within the context of the questioning and critique of the standard humanities canon and methodologies that began to come to a head in the 1970s. More and more people inside universities—students, professors and even administrators— began to notice that to study the humanities was, to a very large

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degree, to study the works and perspectives of dead white men, to the exclusion of women, non-Europeans and contemporary artists and thinkers—to the exclusion, that is, of most of the world and most of the history of the world. And, indeed, humanities teachers and students in North America were by and large the people who most fervently demanded that universities become more just and more intellectually sound by directing more attention to material and questions outside of the canon, outside of the worlds of the dead white men. Their programmes and universities did become broader in scope, did become more just, by recognising that the dead white man is one voice and one perspective, having an equal, not a unique, claim to hear and study alongside other perspectives and voices.1 At the same time that the humanities disciplines—literature, philosophy, history, religious studies—have been developing and changing, so, too, other aspects of universities in North America have been changing. In keeping with demographic changes in patterns of immigration, more and more students at our universities are not of European descent.2 Simultaneously, university administrations have put fewer resources into and less emphasis upon humanities education.3 Instead, they now tend to prefer fields like business, engineering and computer science. More students come to university in search of a degree that will lead directly and straightforwardly to a job; so more students are coming to university to study business, engineering and computer science than to study literature, philosophy and history, or even, for that matter, physics, biology and chemistry. When I look out at my classrooms now, for the most part, I see students who are not going to pursue degrees in my field—Greek and Roman studies—or in philosophy, or in history. I see students who will earn degrees in media studies, or business, or computer science. Further, I see more and more students who do not come from European (let alone Greek or Italian) backgrounds; I see students who are Nigerian, or Jordanian, or Anishinaabe, or Indian. So, from the perspective of my university’s administrators and from the perspective of plenty of my students, the materials that I

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teach, the artefacts of ancient Greece and Rome, are not directly and immediately relevant. How, then, in good conscience and good cheer, can I continue to teach this material to these students under these circumstances? The answer to that question cannot be that I continue to teach Greek and Roman studies simply in order to maintain that tradition at the university, nor can it be that I continue to teach what I was hired to teach merely because that is what is in my job description and that is what I was trained to do. I continue to teach Greek and Roman studies, my particular set of dead white men, because this material and the way I teach it (which is really the key here) are relevant, are necessary to the core of what university is supposed to do for students. I am going to argue that it is precisely in its lack of immediate and direct relevance—that is, in the absence of students’ identifying themselves with the material and the culture—that the great value of this material lies.

The Goal of Teaching The core of what a university does with respect to students, especially undergraduate students, is educate. A university aims to help young people become competent, active adults; it aims, I would say, to help young people become citizens. By ‘citizen’ I do not mean a citizen of any particular country—I am not saying that university education in Canada, for example, should aim to inculcate Canadian values or to instil knowledge of how government works. Rather, I mean that university aims to help students emerge into the world capable of taking up the responsibilities and activities of people who see themselves as effective and meaningful participants in shared human activities, who are capable of exercising good judgement, who are capable of learning and understanding new things as their lives confront them with unfamiliar situations. These are abilities relevant to citizenship in any society, not just in Canada, and they are politically important, even though they have no direct relation to the government.

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In broad outline, the idea of citizenship I am working with here bears some resemblance to the idea of citizenship that the citizens of Athens in Greece developed about 2,500 years ago, the idea enshrined in their democratic constitution. Before I go on to talk about this ancient constitution, though, I must say that I do not regard Athenian democracy as fully just or adequate to the world we inhabit now. For example, Athens had a slave-based economy; and citizenship was limited to men over eighteen years of age who were the offspring of Athenian citizens, so no woman was a citizen and no immigrant could be a citizen.4 These features, I believe, clearly point to problems in the Athenian view of society. I do think, though, that, in their conception of what a citizen does and can be responsible for, the Athenians got something pretty right. The ancient Athenians themselves did not call their constitution a democracy (in Greek, a dēmokratia); the Athenians called their constitution isonomia, which basically means equality under the laws.5 The only people who could be fully equal under the laws were citizens. When we examine how the Athenians tried to live in isonomia, equality under the laws, we see some interesting things. First, the Athenians had a participatory, not a representative, democracy. The heart of isonomia, then, was active citizen participation in all aspects of the running of the city; any citizen, regardless of class, could share in the work of the city. This sharing manifested itself most clearly in the citizen assembly, the sovereign body of the city, which passed all of the laws and issued all of the decrees about policy and action (such as declarations of war, treaties and so on). In the assembly, each citizen had one vote; each citizen could speak in support of or in opposition to any proposal; each citizen could propose amendments to proposals; decisions of the assembly were made based on a simple majority count of votes; each vote was equal to all other votes.6 The Athenians did not have organised political parties that determined how a citizen would cast his vote. Further, the Athenians did not have a professional bureaucracy; instead, citizens took turns serving oneyear terms as officials in various capacities: managing meetings of the

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assembly, running the law courts, inspecting weights and measures in the marketplace, assessing and collecting taxes and so on. The city paid citizens for performing this work in an effort to allow access to offices to citizens with less wealth. Most officials were chosen by lot. Scholars have calculated that, at the height of the citizen population in 431 bc  e, about 20,000 out of 50,000 citizens did this work in any given year.7 Over the course of a life, then, every citizen would have worked for the city several times. The other area in which citizen activity on behalf of the city was particularly apparent was in the law courts. The Athenians had plenty of law courts for dispute resolution. Every year, 6,000 citizens were chosen for duty as dikastai, dikasts or judge-jurors; for particular trials, smaller panels of judge-jurors (between 200 and 500) were chosen to hear the cases.8 Complainants and defendants were self-represented; there were no professional presiding judges to arbitrate or decide points of law at trial. Citizens chaired trials, kept order at trials, recorded trials, oversaw all aspects of the running of the courts. While there are many other examples of manifestations of citizen participation in ancient Athens, these few examples suffice to make my point about citizenship as active participation in the work of the city. Aristotle, in the Politics, says that what defines a citizen is participation in two things—archē (ruling power) and krisis (making judgements).9 Athenian citizens certainly qualify as citizens in Aristotle’s terms— they possessed ruling power through the assembly and they passed judgements through the law courts and in their work as city officials. In order for isonomia to work, the citizen had to be competent. Democratic Athens relied on citizen competence and it cultivated citizen competence. It relied on citizen competence by having all of the work of the city performed by regular citizens; it cultivated citizen competence in the same way. Citizens ruled themselves and learned how to rule themselves (archē) and they exercised judgement (krisis) on behalf of the city and its laws.10 Athens was, for citizens, a place that demanded and provided a ground for its citizens communicating with each other, being directly

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involved in making decisions, learning how to be involved in more and more capacities, being capable of functioning adult independence. This kind of citizen competence is, I think, what undergraduate education should aim for. Most of the students I teach will not pursue specialised graduate degrees; they will earn a BA or a BSc and then they will go out into the world. So undergraduate education should not aim primarily at cultivating specialists, but at helping young people become competent, independent, self-motivating young adults. My argument is that, in the context in which I teach—an urban, ethnically and economically diverse Canadian university in the early 21st century—what I teach—ancient Greek and Roman social history, literature, religion and philosophy—is exactly suited to achieve this goal. It is, of course, not just the material itself that does the work, it is also how the material gets taught. There is a widespread tendency to teach Greek and Roman studies in a kind of semi-pious way. People teach the sacred stories of big men like Pericles and Julius Caesar doing big things—a narrative students are encouraged to memorise, not examine. Then there is the awestruck aestheticism that vibrates at the sublime beauty of an archaic Greek statue or of lines from Virgil’s Aeneid. This approach tells students to study Julius Caesar or archaic Greek statues because they are important and so it is good for students to be exposed to this material so that they will have the trappings of educated people. This way of teaching anything is rarely going to produce good thinkers, agents or understanders. My point is, rather, that this material that I teach is worth teaching because it contributes to my goal of helping young people cultivate their own citizen competence.

Teaching Strategy I teach this material not simply to preserve the material but to help students and myself study these ancient materials for the sake of living now and into the future. There are two elements to my achieving

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this goal. First, the way I teach this material is by being what the more polite of my students call ‘a demanding teacher’. Second, it is the very otherness of this material, its distance in time and in place, its unfamiliarity that helps to do the work of cultivating citizen competence. I will now lay out some of my teaching demands and explain briefly what I think the demands and the material achieve together.

Principle 1: Spelling counts and dates matter Greek names and words look weird to most of my students. Many of them try to assimilate the spellings to English spellings. By insisting on correct spelling, I get them to attend to detail, to acknowledging the force of another language’s practices. Something similar is true with respect to dates. Facts do have force. It matters that the Peloponnesian War (431–404 b ce) happened after the Persian Invasions (490, 480– 479 b ce). You understand something by knowing that fact. Knowing what you are talking about helps you to have something to say.

Principle 2: Come to class and do your reading A lot of ancient authors are difficult to read: Thucydides and Aristophanes, for example. Some things are just difficult and they are things we have to do for ourselves (getting through the reading). But we do not do these things in isolation—we build understanding for ourselves by coming to class and working with others to understand. Understanding is not given to students by the teacher; instead, the teacher can help students to work effectively with the issues that have arisen for them through their independent efforts to grapple with the reading. In the absence of students doing the preliminary and foundational work of reading the texts, there is nothing to work with and little substantial progress in understanding to be made.

Principle 3a: The Greeks are not us We must work hard not to assume that our own values, experiences, knowledge and beliefs pertain everywhere, at all times.

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Principle 3b: The Greeks were people too The Greeks were different from us; nonetheless, the same basic human experiences that we face—family, embodiment, war, social life, gender, sexuality—were present for the Greeks. Understanding how the Greeks interpreted and addressed these experiences can help us understand how we address them and maybe even why we address them as we do. The goal is to understand, not to pass negative judgement. Doing this work demands that we see that human beings are not incomprehensible to each other.

Principle 4: Particularity is meaningful, relevant and determinant It is important that we ask the phenomenological questions. Phenomenology investigates what the experience means to the one experiencing it.11 Thus, of our historical texts, we must ask—what does this thing (the Oresteia, for example, or the Odyssey) think it is doing? How does it express its thought? What needs of its own is it trying to address? What does it presuppose? What does it demonstrate? In my experience, the artefacts of ancient Greece and Rome work well with these principles to achieve what I take to be the primary goal of undergraduate education—the cultivating of citizens. On the one hand, the otherness of the material in Greek and Roman studies noted in Principle 3a, its alienness for my students, offers plenty of occasions for practising these four principles, and that is valuable in its own right. More deeply and transformatively, though, this material of the very other offers a resource for learning how to think competently and talk competently about those very basic human experiences noted in Principle 3b, things like politics, sexuality, religion, gender and ethnicity, and, because it is alien, it offers a kind of safe ground for what is ultimately a critical self-reflection. Because this material is not us, we do not have to feel implicated in it or responsible for it. We can practise careful, attentive, evidence-based, reasonable thought and communication without running up against our own

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vulnerabilities and defences. Having developed these practices and dispositions and habits, we can bring them to bear in our own lives as citizens, parents, consumers, neighbours, travellers. Finally, I began by noting that I see a great deal of poverty of thought among my students. The poverty of thought is in part a poverty of imagination, of a capacity to think that the world ever was or is or can be different from what they already think it is, of a capacity to come up with their own ideas. Greek and Roman studies, again, because of its otherness, is a rich ground for imagination—my students know nothing about the material, have nothing to think about it, and so they have to build up knowing and thinking in part through imagining. They must ask, ‘what was it like?’, ‘why would people have done that?’ Their study of Greek and Roman antiquity, therefore, precisely requires them to exercise their imagination. And a developed imagination is critical to competent citizens because with it, they regard the world as open to them, open to their agency, open to their thought and intervention.

Conclusion Here, then, are some of the lessons about university teaching that I have learned from studying and teaching about ancient Athenian democracy. The core goal of university education is to help undergraduates become citizens—competent, self-motivated, clearthinking participants in the activities of their world. In teaching, I have found that the study of Greek and Roman antiquity lends itself well to cultivating these citizen skills and stances. The otherness of the ancient Greeks for my students renders this material open to students’ imagination and inquisitiveness. The strangeness of their practices, from spelling through to social practices of slavery and household organisation, presents students with an opportunity to aim to understand the material, the culture, they are studying rather than to pass judgement upon it. When students start with the goal of understanding, rather than judging, they take up practices

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of working from evidence, of not interpreting through the lens of their own experiences and views, of approaching the other as comprehensible, as having motivations, goals and beliefs that we can all work to understand. The otherness of the Greeks also provides students with a safe ground within which to learn to discuss and think about fundamental and often fraught aspects of being human: gender, family, embodiment, politics. Addressing these issues through the ancient Greek lens allows students to confront the core issues without the burden of feeling themselves directly implicated, whether as privileged or as victims, in the values and ideas of the ancient Greek other. As I indicated earlier, the usefulness of my field, Greek and Roman studies, to university education of citizens depends very much upon how one teaches the material. The days when, in North America, we could teach this material as the default core of humanities instruction, as the ‘foundation’ of Western civilisation, as immediately our own are, fortunately, gone. If we begin by acknowledging the other (for my purposes, the ancient Greeks and Romans) as other, as unfamiliar, as different from ourselves and our world, we commence the project of teaching and learning about the other as it is; we ask questions such as, ‘what did they do?’, ‘what did they think they were doing?’, ‘why did they think that?’ We begin from evidence and we build from evidence to develop an understanding of this other that tries to allow the particularities of the other to reveal themselves. In order for students to become competent in this project of helping the other reveal itself to us, we teachers must be demanding and we must ask of our students that they do the work that will help them become competent in this project. We must hold them accountable to facts and to accuracy; these facts are the ground from which they will develop their understanding, so the force of fact (of spelling and dates, for example) must be clear and accepted. We must ask that they take responsibility for themselves as students and learners; we ask them to read to prepare for class and then, when the class meets, we all, students and teachers, work

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together to discuss and understand what we have all read. We must ask of them that they cultivate careful evidence-based interpretation; we ask students not to assume that what they study is just another version of what they already think they know and understand; we ask that they approach the other as other, as different, as having its own parameters and as open to our inquiry and understanding. That is, we ask of them that they learn to approach the other by asking what the other, in its own terms, is trying to achieve. If we can help our students develop these practices, we are on the way to educating citizens: young people who are open to the realities of the world, capable of understanding the world, capable of sharing that understanding, capable of cooperation and participation in the framing of their own activity in that world. Our students will develop these dispositions and practices if and only if we demand that they do, if we show them how to do these things, if we provide the space for them to do it. And we all have to do it—we all, not just one or two of us, have to live up to the demands of teaching well.

Notes 1

2

For example, Dirlik (1999) provides an overview, from a perspective closer to the period of great change at North American universities, of the decline in Eurocentrism in educational and cultural institutions in light of the emergence of corporate globalisation, which, Dirlik argues, is an example of the triumph of Eurocentrism. See also Gregory (2008), who offers an account of changes in the content and practices of humanities education at North American universities, noting the expansion of subject material and methodologies. His general arguments about the value of humanities education are similar to the points that I make here. For an account of patterns of immigration to Canada, see Edmonston (2016). Using data compiled by Statistics Canada, Edmonston shows that, in 1971, 79.7 per cent of immigrants to Canada were from the United States, the United Kingdom or Europe. By 1991, that number had fallen to 27 per cent; by 2011 to 16 per cent. Immigration from South Asia accounted for 9 per cent of immigrants in 1991 and 17 per cent by 2011; immigration from East Asia accounted for 31 per cent

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of immigration by 2011. So immigration patterns to Canada changed significantly from the 1970s to the 2010s, with more and more people coming to Canada who were not of European descent. Most Canadian universities do not collect data about student ethnicity; consequently, I cannot provide accurate data to support my impression of the changes in this aspect of the demographics of Canadian university students. I will note that the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, in its report, ‘Trends in Higher Education, volume 1: Enrolment’, deposited at the National Library of Canada, discusses the significant rise in international students and recent immigrant students at Canadian universities (AUCC 2011: 24–32). See also Usher (2018: 18–20), who notes that international students accounted for just under 40,000 students at Canadian colleges and universities in 2000, and that that number rose to over 220,000 in 2015–2016. International students, then, students from other countries who come to Canada to study, account for a significantly higher number of post-secondary students now than twenty years ago. 3 For example, Barrett (2016) links recent trends in Canadian federal government funding of science, technology, engineering and math research to the exclusion of humanities research to a decline in the number of full-time faculty positions in the humanities at universities in Canada. 4 Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 42.1. 5 See Poetae Melici Graeci 893–896, an anonymous drinking song that celebrates Harmodius and Aristogeiton; they killed the tyrant Hipparchus and thus made the Athenians isonomous, equal under the laws. Herodotus 3.80.5, in a theoretical discussion of kinds of constitution, calls the constitution that puts power in the hands of the people an isonomia (see Ostwald 1969: 96–160). Ostwald traces the use of isonomia and related words in Athenian contexts, noting their association with the ‘democratic’ constitution introduced by Cleisthenes in 508/7 b ce, and argues that the term was most likely introduced to the Athenians by Cleisthenes himself to describe his slate of reforms and to distinguish that slate specifically from tyranny. 6 Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 20.4; 25.2; 27.1; 41.1–2. See Thorley (2004: 32–4) for a good description of how the Athenians’ citizen assembly worked.

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7

See, Hansen 1999: 309–320. See also Thorley (2204: 78) for population figures in Athens. 8 Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 63.1–3; 68–9. See also Hansen (1999: 181–183) for a clear summary of how the Athenian jury-courts worked. 9 Aristotle, Politics 3.1.1275a22–23. 10 See Freire (2000), especially Chapter 3, on education as the practice of freedom. Freire’s notions of citizen participation and competence are similar to what I am describing here for democratic Athens. 11 See, for example, Merleau-Ponty (2014).

References AUCC (Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada). 2011. ‘Trends in Higher Education’, Volume 1: Enrolment. Ottawa: AUCC. Barrett, P. 2016. ‘Why No Funding for the Humanities?’. Canadian Association of University Teachers Bulletin, 19 September. Available at: https://www.caut.ca/bulletin/2016/11/commentary-why-no-fundinghumanities (accessed on 24 July 2019). Dirlik, A. 1999. ‘Is There History after Eurocentrism? Globalism, Postcolonialism, and the Disavowal of History’. Cultural Critique, 42: 1–34. Edmonston, B. 2016. ‘Canada’s Immigration Trends and Patterns’. Canadian Studies in Population, 43(1–2): 78–116. Freire, P. 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman. New York: Continuum. Gregory, M. 2008. ‘Humanities Education Then, Now, and Why’. South Atlantic Review, 73(4): 117–145. Hansen, M.H. 1999. The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles, and Ideology, trans. J.A. Crook. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 2014. ‘The Phenomenal Field’. In Phenomenology of Perception, trans. D.A. Landes, 52–65. London: Routledge. Ostwald, M. 1969. Nomos and the Beginnings of the Athenian Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thorley, J. 2004. Athenian Democracy. London: Routledge, 2nd edn. Usher, A. 2018. The State of Post-secondary Education in Canada. Toronto: Higher Education Strategy Associates.

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From Walls to Bridges: Education as Dialectic and the Educator as Curator of the Affective Conditions of Dialogue Kym Maclaren I teach a university-level course in prison, inspired by the Walls to Bridges model—it brings university students together with people who are incarcerated for a full semester university credit course. Participants read philosophical texts and explore philosophical ideas centred around the course’s key themes (often, when I teach it, the themes of freedom and confinement). What is perhaps most remarkable about this kind of course is that the participants—we call them ‘inside students’ if they are incarcerated, and ‘outside students’ if they are not—typically begin separated by walls both physical and social, but soon build meaningful bridges with each other, thereby transforming their initial ‘us and them’ orientation into an experience of shared, communal inquiry and deep-reaching education. In this chapter, I would like to consider what, within this pedagogical model, allows for the development of a community of inquiry and an experience of profound education, even within the rather charged context of a correctional institution and even given the various inequalities and other ‘walls’ existing between students. My aim is not to propose that all classes ought to be taught on the Walls to Bridges model—different situations will call for different pedagogical innovations. My aim is rather to propose that we can learn something important about the conditions of genuine education by considering how the Walls to Bridges model works. 122

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Indeed, by reflecting upon how different forms of walls are overcome by this pedagogical paradigm, and inequalities are transformed into resources rather than hindrances, I think we can learn even about the conditions of education in courses that are not especially marked by inequalities but that nonetheless are characterised by students being largely ‘walled off’ from each other. Such ‘walls’, I will suggest, are inclined to form in most classes, at least in North America. In the first section, I consider the inequalities—mostly due to social stigma, but also due to other forms of limited opportunities— that differentiate students in this class, and that tend to put up walls between them. At the same time, turning to the voices of those students themselves, I let them describe their experiences of walls coming down, distances being bridged and meaningful education occurring. I also describe the particular sense of community that tends to develop within Walls to Bridges classes, which I call ‘dialogic self-realising community’. In the second section, in order to shed light on the kind of education that seems to be happening in this course, I argue that education is dialectic, or the transformation of personal assumptions—and thus realisations of new ways of being one’s self—through dialogue. But I also propose that dialogue can only be realised in a context of affective trust and a shared sense of solidarity. In the third section, I propose that many educational situations and practices work against dialogic self-realising community and the trust and solidarity that it involves. Against our best intentions, these institutions and practices work instead to produce isolation and alienation in students, or what Sartre calls ‘seriality’. The fourth section presents some of the techniques used by Walls to Bridges, contending that they work by virtue of curating a certain affective space that is conducive to dialogue, community and dialectic as selfrealisation. This affective space works against seriality and distrust and transforms seeming inequalities into communally recognised sources of insight. Ultimately, my contention is that all educators have, as one of their foremost foundational tasks, to establish an

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affective space that breaks down walls created by experienced inequalities, by distrust and self-protectiveness, and by our tendency towards seriality.1 Only through overcoming these walls is education, in its most existentially penetrating sense, made possible.

From Walls to Bridges At the beginning of a Walls to Bridges course, many factors are at work that threaten to undermine genuine education and to produce a situation where students are protectively closed in on themselves, feeling themselves in different worlds than each other. To start, there are the obvious inequalities associated with the fact that some are confined within prison walls, and others can come and go (so long as they abide by security protocols). The outside students, for instance, have easy access to their families and friends, to private spaces, to books of their choosing, to the internet, and to the movies, television and music they like and in which they can take refuge. The inside students do not. The outside students live largely by schedules of their own devising; they can choose when and what they eat, how they dress, with whom they spend time, when they talk or text on the phone and to whom, whether they prioritise work or play, who they sleep beside, and with whom they shower, go to the toilet or get naked; they also are likely to have many avenues open to them for avoiding or reporting people who treat them with condescension, contempt or violence— especially if those people are employees of public institutions. None of this is true for incarcerated people, at most correctional institutions. Even if outside students do not know the full details of these inequalities and must learn them from their incarcerated colleagues, still, they are keenly aware that, in general, they have freedoms, refuges and resources that inside students do not, and they feel this as a kind of ‘privilege’ or inequality that sets them apart, and invites an ‘us and them’ distinction. That sense of privilege tends to cultivate feelings of guilt and pity in the outside students—guilt that they have a more liveable life,

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and pity towards those who lack that liveable life. But those are not the only distancing emotions involved. It is also the case, despite well-intentioned efforts to keep these emotions at bay, that fear and suspicion tend to make their way into the experience of the outside students. What the outside students initially know of the inside students is just that they have been found guilty of crimes—possibly of some deeply horrifying crimes—and that they are hidden away in a foreign and frightening place, regulated by unfamiliar rules, which probably produce toughness and inhumanity if these were not already there. Furthermore, outside students are encouraged by societal stigmas, and by prison security procedures, to think of incarcerated people as dangerous, manipulative and selfinterested. Before being allowed to participate in the class in prison, correctional facilities typically require university students to go through an orientation to the prison, and that orientation, in the name of security, often involves pointing out to students the many ways in which they might be manipulated and blackmailed by prisoners (especially if they share personal details), or the many ways in which they might unwittingly contribute to the construction of a deadly weapon—for instance, by loaning a prisoner a pen.2 The incarcerated classmates are thereby constituted in advance, by the correctional institution and by larger societal stigmas associated with incarceration, as dangerous and tricky, as people around whom one should be eminently cautious. The incarcerated students, on the other hand, are often worried by a correlative fear—the fear that their incarceration makes them seem (by virtue of stigma) or be (by virtue of lost opportunities) morally or intellectually inferior to the university students. Many (but not all) of the incarcerated students are unfamiliar with the university setting, some not even having finished high school, perhaps because they were dragged into what we call the ‘school to prison pipeline’.3 This, put together with the social weight given to a university education in our society, tends to constitute, in advance, the university students as intimidating and belonging to an exclusive

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club, in the eyes of many inside, incarcerated students. The threat of moral and intellectual discrepancy here is often intensified by age differences (the inside students can sometimes be more than twice as old as the outside students), gender expectations (the incarcerated students in my classes are typically men, the university students are both men and women), and possibly racial stigmas (an inordinate number of incarcerated people are racialised, and have dealt with a long history of being suspected as morally and intellectually inferior for racial reasons). In addition, the staff at prisons will often speak of the university students as providing a service to, or helping, the inmates, thereby further suggesting the moral superiority of the university students. Though the incarcerated students will often feel themselves superior in another way—by virtue of their street smarts and experience of the world, which they expect towers above the naiveté of the university students—the university students are largely constituted by other social forces as inhabiting another social class, and incarcerated students tend, therefore, to expect that they will be supercilious because of it. Experiences with institutions of education may also play an important role in inviting protective walls and isolation in this (and as we will see in the third section, in any) classroom. Many students (both inside and outside students) have experienced their formal education as inducing competition, alienation, isolation and the threat of failure. That they might not only face these again, by virtue of being in a university course, but also face them in the context of threatening others, makes for an ominous start to the course. Given all that divides these students, then, what is amazing is that this class, like others which are similarly taught on the Walls to Bridges pedagogical model, is typically quite successful, and on many fronts. Often it renews in both inside and outside students a love of and hope for education. Many inside students who had given up on education start to pursue it again. And the outside, university students, say things like this:4

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[The course had] a huge impact. It was very enjoyable, and the best course I have taken throughout my entire four years of university. It allowed me to grow and learn with others in a way that isn’t always possible in many courses. The inside students as well taught me more than I have learned from any other student. The experiences and knowledge they had to share was priceless.

From both inside and outside students, we hear comments like the following: ‘It changed the way we view education and inspired us to be more involved through participating more in the current class or attending new ones.’ Students will often talk about how much they felt they learned about not only the topics of the course, but also themselves. One student says: I never thought I could look to what I already know to learn new things. This class was set up in a way that called upon me to learn from myself/others and to teach myself/others things that I did not even realise that I knew. Before Inside Out [the former name, in Canada, of Walls to Bridges] I assumed that teachers knew and students learned from them. I now see that there is more to it.

Others, when asked what aspect of the course had the biggest impact on them, have said: ‘Working together to understand and to make meaning of the texts,’ or, ‘While learning in this class setting, we learned about ourselves through the material, which is what made the material matter.’ This learning together was, it seems, inseparable from the establishment of a sense of community, belonging and mutual care between the students. As one student says: ‘Having a hands on experience really helped me to see the humanness in people. This experience stripped away the layers that I thought once separated us and helped reveal our similarities and common struggles.’ Another adds: ‘Everyone got to contribute, feel important enough to share thoughts. Feeling comfortable helps to fuel learning and lowers resistance to learning.’ A further student, when asked if the course challenged any assumptions he held, answered: ‘Yeah, that no one really cared about us. I truly felt like I belonged and was still human.’

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The sense of community that typically evolves in these courses is worth elaborating further. One student, Bryan Hood, described it very aptly as ‘oneness through individuality’: students (and the professor) experience themselves not just as in community with others, but as in community by virtue of their differences and the singularity of each member. Each member is felt to be a vital part of the whole, for each member contributes something unique and the community is not what it is without them. Indeed, if a person is missing on any particular day, the community seems amputated, and it feels difficult to go on without them. Thus, the parts are, in their very differences, essential to the whole. At the same time, this community is not merely the sum of its parts, for one has the sense that one is able to be who one is, to make one’s own unique contributions, only by virtue of being a part of this whole. Something about this particular convergence of our differences, all united in a common project, enables each of us to access aspects of ourselves, ways of being ourselves, that have heretofore been inaccessible to us.5 One finds oneself, in the context of this community, thinking thoughts, or enacting oneself, in new and unforeseen ways.6 Being in community is, therefore, a matter of reciprocal shaping of one another, through dialogue, in such a way that each more fully realises or becomes him- or her-self. The parts are thus an expression not only of themselves, but of the whole, and of themselves as the whole allows them to become. To experience this community is thus to feel oneself on the one hand indebted to and grateful for each other, and on the other hand, responsible to each other. There is mutual appreciation as well as caring mutual contribution, and in those we achieve a unity that both draws upon, and allows us each to become more fully, the individuals that we are. ‘Oneness through individuality.’ Let me call this a ‘dialogic, self-realising community’, since it is achieved through dialogue, since it allows each member to more fully realise him- or her-self, and since it is a form of community that realises (and tends to maintain and perpetuate) itself internally, and not through the

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imposition of a third-person group designation (like ‘university student’ or ‘incarcerated person’). To recapitulate, then, what this section has proposed: On the one hand, I hope to have made clear how, even in the context of many factors that encourage walls to go up between (and amongst) these inside and outside students, the Walls to Bridges pedagogical format seems, as its name suggests, to forge bridges instead—bridges not only between students, but also back to themselves. On the other hand, students’ voices suggest that these bridges and the particular form of community that realises itself in them powerfully enabled their learning. Recall these statements: Everyone got to contribute, feel important enough to share thoughts. Feeling comfortable helps to fuel learning and lowers resistance to learning. This class was set up in a way that called upon me to learn from myself/ others and to teach myself/others things that I did not even realise that I knew. [The biggest impact of the course was] working together to understand and to make meaning of the texts.7

I aim, in what follows, to understand better what encourages such community where, otherwise, experienced inequalities and histories of alienation in education tend to put up walls. I aim also to consider why such a sense of community might be associated, as students suggest, with a remarkably transformative form of education. Ultimately, I will argue that we as educators must take on the task of curating affective spaces that are conducive to dialogic self-realising communities. As a first step, however, let me propose, in the next section, (a) that truly transformative education is a form of dialectic arising out of dialogue, but also (b) that dialogue is insufficient for education and needs to be supported by the trust and solidarity that typify the dialogic self-realising community we see emerge in Walls to Bridges courses.

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Education as Dialectic through Dialogue? To think more carefully about what education is, let us recall one of the most long-standing images of education—the image of the cave as it is given to us by Plato’s Socrates in the Republic (Plato 2007: 514a–521b). The cave is, according to Socrates, an image of ‘our nature as it involves education and the lack of it’ (ibid.: 514a). We can rehearse briefly the details of the image—people sit chained facing the cave wall, unable to turn to look at each other or behind themselves. The wall is illuminated by a fire behind them, and figurines that are held up in front of the fire cast shadows on the wall. The prisoners suppose that, in dealing with those shadows, predicting what will follow what, they are dealing with reality in its self-evidence. In fact, however, they are in substantial ignorance, they lack education. Were they to understand what they see more deeply, they would need to recognise that things only appear as they do because there is a fire behind them which illuminates the space they live in and makes the shadows stand out. This fire, if we ‘cash out’ the metaphor, is like the assumed, unacknowledged values that shape our own seemingly self-evident perceptions. If, for instance, I am oriented by the assumption that power, wealth and status are the greatest goods, then the world will appear to me self-evidently in terms of opportunities for, or obstacles to, attaining those goods. Were I a horse-trainer oriented by such values (to take a common Greek figure and update it into modern terms), horses would appear not primarily according to their own needs and potentials, but in terms of possibilities for my own advancement. This horse can make me much money and win me much fame, if I can just push him a little harder, to achieve a little more. I can, however, become aware of these assumptions which shape my perceptions. And if I do—especially if I find myself drawn into other ways of seeing, based on other assumptions—I can begin to examine and question these assumptions, and to move beyond them. This movement, Socrates tells us in an image offered just before

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the cave image—the image of the divided line—is the movement of dialectic and active insight; it is the movement wherein we take our presuppositions as ‘stepping stones and springboards … going up to what is presuppositionless and the source of everything’ (Plato 2007: 511b), or making our way metaphorically out of the cave and into the sun. We cannot, of course, look directly at the sun, and so perhaps we can never transcend all presuppositions and make full contact with what is the source of all. But through the criticism of our presuppositions, and the correlative stepping up to new, higher, better assumptions, we can transform how we perceive the world. Challenging the assumption that what is good is power, wealth and status, for instance, allows me, as a horse-trainer, to start to see something very different in my horses—not opportunities for my success, but rather what this horse is, himself, and the potential he has to become, not what I want him to be, but a better version of himself. I can start to see how each individual horse strives in its own way to actualise its proper good, and I can thereby become a trainer who facilitates that actualisation, rather than simply imposing my own agenda for what the horse needs to be.8 The examination and challenging of my own assumptions about what is good, then, allows me to see more objectively, to be more in touch with the reality of things, to make my way out of the cave and into the clarity of the sunlight. Education, as I understand Socrates here, is this process of dialectic, of moving, through self-reflection, self-examination and the transformation of my orienting assumptions, to a greater openness to the objective reality of things.9 Supposing that education consists in such dialectic, we can think further about the art of educating. Socrates claims that this art is a matter of turning a soul around, to direct its power of insight towards the assumed values that shape its perceptions. This turning elicits a gradual, step-by-step, critical reflection upon the legitimacy and source of those values. Using sight as a metaphor for insight, he says of education: [T]here would be an art to this very thing, this turning around, having to do with the way the soul would be most easily and effectively redirected, not an art of implanting sight in it, but of how

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to contrive that [redirection] for someone who has sight, but doesn’t have it turned the right way or looking at what it needs to. (Plato 2007: 518d)

The art of education is not giving insight, but orienting a person such that their power of insight might engage in its proper work. Education is inducing a turning around or revolution (periagôgê)10 in a person, such that they themselves come to new insight on their own. But how does one reorient another? What is this art, exactly? Socrates’s own practice offers a beginning answer. Socrates makes use of at least two methods, each of which is dialogical insofar as it inspires people, through verbal interaction, to take up a perspective beyond their familiar perspective. On the one hand, he enters into conversation with others, questioning them about the things they say, what they mean and the implications of their views. On the other hand, he offers images, visions or myths, like the image of the cave, the vision of the polis, or the myth of Er. Each of these can be productive of self-examination and transformation. Dialogical questioning can motivate one to take a new perspective on, and to clarify, the orientation that one currently has, in all of its systematic implications and contradictions. Questioning can thereby motivate a transformation of that orientation and the assumptions that ground it. Images, visions or myths, on the other hand, like all good stories, invite one into a certain way of perceiving, a specific configuration of the world, that has as its own foundation a set of values potentially different from one’s own. By being drawn up into a new way of perceiving, one is equally drawn into orienting assumptions that may stand in tension with one’s own, and that invite a questioning and reworking of one’s own—an inner dialogue by virtue of inhabiting another’s story or perspective alongside one’s own. The image of the cave, for instance, can help to challenge the common assumption that education is merely acquiring information, and allow us to contemplate the possibility that education requires a revolution in one’s way of making sense of the world. Both questioning and the narration of a particular way of seeing can, then, inspire, through

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dialogue, an educational reorientation and new insight into oneself and the world. Neither of these two dialogical methods is guaranteed to work, however. Others’ unfamiliar stories can be ridiculed and dismissed. Socrates highlights this in the image of the cave when he describes the prisoners’ reception of the story told of the sun outside. The person who comes in from outside simply seems confused and ridiculous to the prisoners within (Plato 2007: 515d, 517d). Similarly, more than half of the jury at Socrates’s own trial apparently dismissed Socrates’s own narrative of the origins of his philosophical practice of questioning citizens, supposing that this was just a further manipulation by one who twisted words to make ‘the weaker speech the stronger’ (Plato and Aristophanes 1998: 19b). The problem is that, in the context of suspicion, distrust or competition, we tend to resist others’ stories, looking for how they are devious or can be written off, instead of allowing ourselves to align with them, to enter into them, and to see in terms of them. Stories, then, are not enough. Trust and a willingness to go along with others—a sense of solidarity—must be in place, too. Dialogical questioning, also, can lead to the shutting rather than the opening of interlocutors’ minds. Indeed, Socrates’s life was taken, it seems, because his efforts to engage people in dialogue and (shared) self-examination led instead to perceptions that he was attempting to humiliate them, and to raise himself above them (while encouraging the youth to do the same). In a more trusting, solidary context (like that which we witness between Socrates, Glaucon, Adeimantus and eventually Thrasymachus in the Republic), dialogic questioning might indeed produce learning. But in a context where interlocutors’ orienting values are power and status, rather than a shared search for truth, a sense of competition and distrust dominate. In this context, Socrates’s questions tend to motivate a hardening against him and against all that might encourage transformative learning. After all, questioning suggests the limitations of the questioned person’s current convictions. Questions can also invite moving beyond one’s

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limitations into new, unknown ways of being oneself. But they only seem so inviting if one believes that one will survive this overturning of oneself, if one feels oneself with others who recognise and reflect one’s self as more than the particular conviction that is being overturned, and who will, therefore, carry one with them. In the absence of such a sense of community, it seems, souls can be hardened against the very things that promise to help them learn; efforts at dialogue (through storytelling or questioning) can fail, and, where there might have been the shared exploration of differing perspectives, instead walls go up and hostilities intensify. I began, then, in the first section, by focusing primarily on a form of walls that can emerge between groups—walls between ‘us’ and ‘them’. I have now proposed, in the second section, that education or learning is essentially self-transformation through dialogical reflection upon one’s familiar assumptions; and we have seen that, in this context, there is another kind of wall that can go up and hinder learning—namely a wall of self-protectiveness. Let us turn to a third form of walls—walls which Sartre calls ‘seriality’.

The Tendency towards Seriality within Formal Education My proposal here is that the institution of education, in North America at least, has a tendency to encourage isolation and individualism rather than solidarity in students—and that this inhibits education understood as dialectical transformation. Though an analysis of isolationism and individualism in the institution of education could be done on many levels,11 I will focus on classroom practices, and the expectations and habits that young people tend to bring to classrooms, which are informed by and further inform and perpetuate those practices. The particular form of isolation and individualism that I think we tend to produce amongst students within the classroom is what Sartre (1982) calls ‘seriality’.

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Seriality is a form of collectivity characterised by an isolation of its participants from each other. Sartre offers, as an initial illustration, the example of a gathering of people at a bus stop. There is a certain unity to this gathering: they are all oriented towards, and conduct themselves in terms of, a common goal—that of getting on the next bus. And yet, this unity between them is relatively external and passively imposed, for the people at the bus stop do not feel themselves in active community with each other; they each live towards this goal in a kind of isolation from each other.12 They talk on their own phones or read their own newspapers; they live in their own little specific and unique ‘worlds’, without cognisance of or active interest in each other’s uniqueness or specificity. They are, as Sartre says, ‘a plurality of isolations’ (1982: 258). And yet, these commuters are not just atoms isolated from each other, for there is also a kind of organisation to this gathering—an organisation which each individual also lives and supports simply by taking her ticket from the ticket machine as she arrives and assuming her place in line. The gathering is thereby ordered as a series: first in line, second in line and so on. And this ordering puts individuals into relation with each other and makes them have an impact on each other. Depending upon how many free seats there are on the bus, those ahead of me will make it the case that I do or do not get on the bus. Those who come after me are similarly impacted by my assuming my place in line. We are thus put in relation to each other. But this relation is characterised by a kind of indifference, interchangeability and otherness. We are for each other not singular, unique individuals who make a difference to each other in their uniqueness; we are, rather, each ‘an abstract generality’ (Sartre 1982: 259), a closed world which takes a place in line merely by being a material object, and is thus experienced as identical to and interchangeable with any other. By assuming this place in relation to interchangeable others, then, we are not just a plurality of isolations, but ‘a plurality of isolations lived as a project’ (ibid.: 258). We embrace and sustain our isolation as the way in which this unity makes itself.

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Contrast, for a moment, the form of community that I described as emerging in a Walls to Bridges class—the dialogic, self-realising community. There, we saw a form of unity that was not a ‘plurality of isolations’. There, we saw how one person’s ability to access insights of her own, and thus to grow, learn and become as a singular being, was deeply indebted to others’ singular voices and the unique perspectives they provided. There, students discovered, in listening to others’ questions and reflections, the ability to reflect upon and access themselves in new ways, to ‘teach myself/others things that I did not even realise that I knew’.13 In dialogic, self-realising community, we recognise each other in our differences, we feel obliged to each other in our specificities, because it is only in and through these differences and specificities that we are drawn along into new realisations of ourselves. We come back (or forward) to ourselves as unique persons through others as unique persons. In seriality, however, rather than coming to oneself or realising oneself, one finds oneself ‘other to self  ’ (Sartre 1982: 260). One’s place in the series has nothing to do with, and involves no enaction or realisation of, one’s own specificity. One is merely ‘n+1’ in a series, just like everyone else. And so, all that one shares with others, and indeed produces in others by assuming one’s own position, is precisely this being other to oneself.14 Such seriality, Sartre asserts, is a constant possibility within any group or community, and thus something against which any community must always struggle. My proposal, here, is that university classrooms, at least in North America, are often places where this seriality comes to dominate, and dialogic, self-realising community is undermined or foreclosed—and transformative education along with it. Consider a class on its first day. Like the commuters at the bus stop, students in a class begin with a common interest that unites them in a relatively external manner, namely the course itself. Each is taking the course in order to succeed in it—whether success means to

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them learning a certain content or merely getting a good grade. They all aim at success in the class, but their aiming is not a communal project, but ‘identical instances of the same act’ (Sartre 1982: 262). This ‘plurality of isolations’ is evident in those classes where, awaiting the beginning of class, students sit in uncomfortable silence, each in their own little world, reading, doodling, checking their phones. Indeed, like the prisoners in Socrates’s cave, they often seem most comfortable, most at home, sitting facing the front of the class, not looking at one another. The professor’s entrance can be a kind of relief, for now all students have something to do, and they can bury themselves further into their own worlds, forgetting the others as much as possible, by taking notes as the professor lectures. Traditional classroom ‘geographies’ or built environments reinforce this isolation of students from one another. Chairs are normally set up facing the front, where the professor stands. All attention is on the professor, and the arrangement of the room suggests that students are an audience that, like the cinema’s, is meant to fade into the background. If lighting in the classroom suggests that one is allowed to be aware of others (there is not simply a spotlight on the professor and dark in the ‘theatre’ seating), these others are intimated only in the form of ‘abstract generality’, and not in terms of a singular other whom one might face, and who has something meaningful to contribute. Even if chairs and desks are moveable so that they can be put into a circle or board-table arrangement, still, blackboards, whiteboards, podiums and the very shape of the room can assert that these more communal arrangements are working against the normal and proper one, the default—which is the arrangement that effaces students as subjects. The lecturing form of ‘teaching’ also tends to serialise. Lecturing, despite much criticism, remains one of the foremost ways in which education is ‘given’ (in mainstream education in North America, at least). And indeed, though one can learn to be critically and actively involved in listening to a lecture, the format itself of one person holding forth for an extended period of time does suggest that the

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professor is there to give, or to ‘implant’ or ‘deposit’ knowledge (as Socrates [Plato 2007] and critical pedagogue Paulo Freire [1981] say respectively in their criticisms of common practices of education). The implied passivity or object-status of the student entails that students become mere ‘abstract generalities’ for a lecturer, and for each other. A good lecturer aims to know her audience and to bring the content to life for them by speaking to their assumptions, convictions and likely questions. But if all she does is lecture, then it is virtually impossible for her to know individual members of the audience in their uniqueness, and especially in the unique ways they have of being subjects and of contributing responsibly, discerningly, creatively (or not) to learning. This lecturer can thus do nothing other than speak to an imagined ‘Student’ who is interchangeable with others. As a result, the whole course may be played out in the students’ efforts, individually and in isolation, to keep up with and make sense of the content of the lecture on the professor’s terms. Many professors, feeling the disconnection in their classrooms, will ask questions of their students, in an effort to elicit some reciprocity. Or they might introduce ‘pair and share’15 exercises in an effort to get students to talk with each other. But if the questions remain on the professor’s terms, and are not helping the students turn towards themselves and find the ways in which they are personally touched and called into question by the material, or the ways in which their own experience sheds new light on the material, then the students’ answers and further questions simply reproduce and sustain the disconnection, the ‘plurality of isolations’; the student responses merely reveal the abstract generality that students feel themselves to be. For instance, responses may be given in abstract, jargon-laden terms that show no substantial insight into the issues, and seem, instead, to be attempts to show oneself, through the use of the jargon, to be ‘in the know’—to be that abstract ‘good student’ desired by the teacher. Or, all too frequently, the content may not be addressed at all, and student questions take the form of ‘should we be thinking this?’ or ‘will we need to know this for the test?’—which are again ways of trying to become

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the abstract good student. In these kinds of response, the student remains other to herself and to other students in the room. Were she able to ask a question that drew the material into relation with real, experienced human struggles, and laid it out in plain, honest terms, she would have the experience of realising questions and knowledge that she did not know she had, of turning towards her own existing assumptions, and of opening a space for the realisation of new insight. At the same time, others around her would thereby be enticed into the discussion, newly engaged. For, they would find themselves attuned in a new way to the human realities at stake, discovering that this was a question that they, too, had—or finding themselves enabled to access a new question or thought which might contribute to the development of the discussion. These are the moments when a classroom starts to come to life. But when the professor alone lectures, very little in the class format solicits this kind of personal, singular, self-realising engagement. Grading is another classroom practice that, working in conjunction with these other practices, serialises. I have been emphasising the ways in which a classroom closes students off from each other and from themselves. But insofar as they are sitting in a classroom with others, and being addressed in a manner that implies some ideal ‘Student’, students cannot help but feel the weight of the question of what their place is in relation to others. Grades can offer a resource for answering that question—in the absence of opportunities for a student to participate meaningfully in a discussion and to realise the value of her own contributions, she may be motivated to turn to grades to discern who she is, where she belongs, and how she is doing. Grades, however, answer in a serialising manner. We saw in the bus stop example that, by virtue of the institution of a ticket machine, people were constituted as a series, as each n+1. The institution of grading, I am proposing, does something very similar by virtue of the ranking A, B, C, D, F. Students who are asking the question of their place in the class can locate themselves in two senses using this ranking.

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On the one hand, students will use that ranking to decide whether or not this area of study is ‘my thing’. A student who normally achieves a C ranking in other disciplines, but achieves Bs in her philosophy courses, is often inclined to think—by virtue of these grades alone—that philosophy is what she ought to do. She may continue in philosophy, then, not because of the great personal meaning or forms of self-realisation that she finds in philosophy, but because she gets better grades in it. Perhaps she even finds psychology more stimulating of growth and insight, but that is not ‘her proper path’ according to the grades. She thus defines herself in a manner that is relatively external, or that keeps her other to herself. On the other hand, because grades are in large part an ordering of students in relation to each other (A students are better than B students), the existence of grades can induce a competitive charge and concern for power and status within the class.16 Much like the bus stop example, this means that the place of others has an impact on my place. If others are performing at a high level, then they are shaping my possibilities of getting a high grade. Without them in the class, I might well have been at the top; with them, I feel myself relegated to a lower grade—very much like the commuter who might not get on the next bus. This induces what Sartre calls further ‘serial behaviour, serial feelings and serial thoughts’ (1982: 266). Students will experience the task of speaking out in class as a task that is first and foremost a matter of exposing oneself to and positioning oneself within the class. They are thus inclined towards raising questions and proposing answers that (they suppose) win them some credit, show them to be ‘in the know’. Aiming to set themselves apart from others, rather than to ask a genuine question or develop a new insight, their behaviour affects others in the class. They tend either to inspire in others a spirit of one-upmanship or to intimidate others, such that they withdraw into the safety of an isolated silence. What is largely foreclosed here is the possibility of speaking in a way that unearths one’s own current convictions, in both their virtues and their possible

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limitations, and that draws others into new genuine insights. As a result, one never comes to experience one’s solidarity with and need for each other in the project of learning. What dominates is the mercenary mindset of needing to succeed in the class as an isolated individual. The classroom, then, hardens into a system of alterity, where everyone feels other to herself in and through being other to each other, and where the only viable possibilities that present themselves are rivalry or reticence, two sides of the same coin. Much in a classroom, then, encourages ‘serial behaviour, serial feelings and serial thoughts’. This makes it clear that seriality is not just a category that an observer might apply from the outside to a classroom or a crowd at a bus stop—seriality constitutes its participants in a certain way; it is a ‘mode of being’. One becomes that abstract generality, loses touch with oneself and propagates this way of being in others too. Let this suffice for a consideration of the serialising walls that can go up in a classroom, and the practices that encourage them. We have now considered three types of walls: (a) walls between groups, or ‘us and them’; (b) self-protective walls in the face of possibly overturning one’s assumptions; and (c) the walls of serialisation, which constitute us as abstract, isolated generalities. My proposal is that a Walls to Bridges course begins with all these walls in place, but that it also has techniques that can break these walls down, and that work to constitute a dialogic, self-realising community. This community, I am proposing, is the kind of community that allows for transformative education. As educators, then, we might all learn something from the successes of Walls to Bridges courses.

Learning from Walls to Bridges If I am right, and all classrooms have a tendency towards walls of seriality and self-protectiveness, imagine how much this might be intensified by the walls of ‘us and them’ that can set apart incarcerated students from non-incarcerated. And yet, Walls to Bridges classes are

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experienced by students as remarkable for the overcoming of these walls, and the community and learning that are thereby enabled. Let us then turn, finally, to noting some of the Walls to Bridges pedagogical techniques that facilitate this. Walls to Bridges courses begin with ice-breaking activities— rotating students so that they get to talk one on one with each member of the class, we ask them sometimes silly questions like ‘what is the most embarrassingly bad TV show that you love to watch?’, or more serious questions like ‘describe a time in your life when you experienced real learning. What enables real learning?’ These can start members of the class reflecting upon themselves, and accessing their own often unnoticed experiences, so that they become less ‘other’ to themselves. At the same time, these kinds of questions can help students to discover commonalities that run across the groups, and to practise, in a light-hearted, uncharged setting, being honest and vulnerable with each other through sharing their unique stories. Trust and solidarity begin to develop. The study of course materials then proceeds without any lectures. Discussions are typically conducted either in a large circle format (sometimes by passing a ‘talking piece’ so that everyone has a chance to say something), or in small groups, with the professor posing or soliciting a question for discussion. The membership of small groups is regularly rotated, so that students have a chance for serious discussion with all. Making the professor a facilitator of and participant in dialogue, rather than an authoritative lecturer, invites an attitude of openness to others, along with a realisation that learning will only ever happen, if it does at all, through the contributions of the members of the class. Discussions are oriented around the ideas and issues articulated in texts. But students are encouraged to process the material by bringing it into relation to their own lives, and considering the light it sheds on their lives, or the ways in which their own lives illustrate, confirm or perhaps challenge ideas in the texts. Recall Socrates’s two methods—storytelling and dialogic questioning. Bringing one’s own life experiences to bear

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is a form of storytelling, and it raises questions that allow us to dig further into the text, while also attuning us to new terms that the text offers for making sense of those experiences. For instance, in reading an existentialist text concerned with how we take, or fail to take, responsibility for our own choices, examples emerge of struggling with drug addiction, or with alienation and anxiety in university. In an engagement with Marx’s reflections on alienated labour, experiences are shared of jobs that induced such alienation and those that worked against it. With these concrete examples in mind, students are able to clarify for themselves, through a back-and-forth hermeneutical engagement with the text, a refined understanding of the text and a refined understanding of their own experiences. By virtue of this hermeneutical circle, the student starts to experience herself not as an interchangeable and isolated individual, but as a singular being, singularly addressed by the text, as it is opened up through shared reflection upon lived experiences. As we saw one student observe: ‘While learning in this class setting, we learned about ourselves through the material, which is what made the material matter.’ This process of engaging the personal, however, is not just a matter of forging a bridge between the individual student and the ideas of the text. It is also a matter of forging bridges between the members of the class. It is a matter of allowing the differences that initially separated students to become differences that unite them. For, in honestly and unpretentiously sharing their own singular experiences, students discover how others’ stories can shed a new light on an issue, and how, through their own contributions, they, too, can facilitate realisations in other students. Students realise that they have an impact on each other not just by making each other ‘other’ and perpetuating isolation, as in seriality, but by facilitating a reorienting of each other’s power of insight, and drawing each other into richer, more discerning ways of perceiving the world and themselves. Though many in the class may not have struggled with drug addictions, for instance, and though many may not have experienced alienation and anxiety at university, they nonetheless find that these different experiences reveal deeper kinships

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and common struggles, shed new light on social institutions in our shared world, and put into relief not only the other’s, but also one’s own specificity and difference. Students thereby come to experience each other (and the text) as indispensable, essential and unique parts of the whole. Each brings to the discussion experiences and insights that no other can bring, and thus each helps bring all into a deeper relation with the issues under discussion, with themselves, and with each other. Students thereby further forge a sense of solidarity and trust between themselves. They learn that letting the ideas of the text and the experiences of others work on them allows for growth and learning; and they learn that if they speak honestly and self-reflectively, they can contribute to others’ learning and growth, too. In this context, something akin to Socratic questioning becomes (if never easy) more viable. Students are able, without shutting each other’s minds, to raise challenges for each other, to gently point out, in each other’s perspective, possible blind spots, prejudices and contradictions. And they can do this with care, compassion and humility because their own assumptions have been challenged in this course, and because they have come to see, through their interactions, that each individual is more than their existing convictions and each individual cares to learn and grow, and to overcome presuppositions that can harm others. Their challenges to each other thus arise upon a background of care, mutual appreciation, and responsibility and indebtedness to each other. And those who are challenged can stomach those challenges better because they know that they are not being cut down by someone who wants to take their place; they feel the greater context of solidarity, and others’ appreciation for their contributions.

The Educator’s Role as Curating an Affective Space Conducive to Learning If I am right to propose that walls can get in the way of transformative learning, and that dialogical self-realising community can enable such

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learning, then it seems that an educator’s main task is not one primarily of communicating content. Communicating content, without an environment of active participation and personal engagement, is merely implanting or depositing knowledge. The educator’s primary task, rather, is one of curating an affective space conducive to learning. Here, by ‘affect’ I mean not an internal feeling, but an attitude or orientation; and by ‘space’ I mean a situation that solicits an affective reorientation in all. The educator’s task, I am proposing, is to cultivate a certain relation to the text and to each other. That relation is an attitude of trusting that the text and others can speak to one, and that if one speaks honestly, without aiming to establish one’s rank in the class, then one will speak to them too. It is an attitude of humility, of recognising that the text and others will see things that you have not yet seen, that transcend your current power of insight. It is an attitude of wonder, of opening oneself to new insights that require one’s own engagement and yet that one cannot produce by oneself. Correlatively, then, it is an attitude of gratitude towards those others for allowing you to see things anew, to challenge and transform your assumptions, and thereby to become more than you are. And, finally, it is an attitude of responsibility and care for sustaining the community that allows each to learn and to grow.17 These attitudes are both conducive to and fostered by the forms of dialogue that Walls to Bridges techniques help to institute. In other words, the more one enters into these attitudes, the more one experiences self-realising community and transformative dialogue; and the more one experiences that community and dialogue, the more one enters into these attitudes. We, therefore, come to these not by intellectual learning, nor by trying to control inner attitudes, but by finding this affective orientation modelled by others in their acts of dialogue, and by practising these orientation-inducing acts ourselves. The educator’s most basic task, then, is to inhabit this affective orientation themselves, to thereby attune students to the possibility of such attitudes, and to engage them in practices that will help them realise such attitudes. Insofar as those affective attitudes are

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cultivated, I am proposing, transformative learning will happen. For education is, as Socrates says, not the implanting of insight in a soul without it, but the art of reorienting the soul such that its own power of insight can do its work.

Notes 1 See contributions to this book by Drs Mahadevan, Banerjee and Karilemla for related arguments for the relevance of certain affective orientations and spaces to education. 2 In my most recent Walls to Bridges course, the correctional facility required that all outside students read a book, 238 pages long, called Games Criminals Play. This book gives anecdotes of prisoners getting friendly with non-prisoners only in order to learn the latter’s weak spot and then, to use that weak spot to their advantage, eventually blackmailing the non-prisoners into bringing drugs and weapons into the institution. At other orientations, we have been shown the various weapons that some prisoners have made out of pens, springs, paperclips, toothbrushes and so on, and the escape tools made out of gum, in order to drive home how sneakily creative an incarcerated person can be, if they are given even the most innocent-seeming item. Never are we told about the environmental pressures that might drive a person to such creativity. And very rarely are we reminded that these stories are stories of extremes and not representative of most prisoners. Imagine a similarly security-motivated orientation to university—one’s introduction to university life would be through stories of the various rapes, assaults and thefts that have happened on campus. 3 The ‘school to prison pipeline’ refers to the fact that schools are adopting policies like police officers in the hallways, and zero tolerance for transgressions, which criminalise children’s transgressive actions, lead to greater surveillance and greater chance of being charged with crimes, and establish criminal records that increase the chance of further charges. Non-criminal punishments by the schools in the form of expulsion or suspension also increase the likelihood of students coming into contact with those looking to recruit into criminal activities. Due to racism, it is especially racialised students who are suffering the effects

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of this ‘pipeline’. See, for instance, Nance (2016) and Rodriguez Ruiz (2017). 4 These quotations are drawn from anonymous course evaluations; as a result, I am unfortunately unable to give credit by name to the authors of these words. 5 As Sartre (1982: 269) says, in the context of describing a non-alienated form of community, where there was once alterity, or otherness, we find instead ‘my own spontaneity in the Other and that of everyone in me … a human relation of reciprocity’. 6 In other words, the whole cannot be what it is without these parts, and this part is what it is as an expression of the whole. In Sartre’s words again (1982: 267), ‘in an active … differentiated group, everyone can regard himself both as subordinate to the whole and as essential, as the practical local presence of the whole, in his own particular action.’ 7 It is worth acknowledging that not all Walls to Bridges courses have the impact described in students’ comments here. Various factors (individual, interpersonal, institutional, accidental) can undermine the functioning of the class. But on the whole, the impact of Walls to Bridges courses tends strongly in this direction (Pollack 2015). It is also true that those for whom the course format will not work well do not typically end up in the class; nonetheless, the surprise and transformation that students in the course typically experience suggests strongly that Walls to Bridges courses are not just catering to certain students’ desires or leanings, but are opening up new ways for people to realise themselves as part of a learning community. 8 Human relations to horses (and dogs) will always involve human agendas, insofar as these animals have now been bred to be dependent on and in the service of humans. But within this context, there can still be extreme differences between those who simply press their own agenda on the animals, and those who work to recognise and be answerable to the animals’ own needs and potentials. That we are never free of an agenda in this example aligns with the idea, articulated above, that we can never ‘look fully at the sun’ or that we can never be fully free of presuppositions and the interests they involve. 9 Here I am understanding ‘objective reality’ not in terms of transcendent forms, as is so often assumed to be the objective reality at which Plato’s Socrates aims, but in terms of each concrete individual and that individual’s striving towards its own good (which is arguably what

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Teaching in Unequal Societies Socrates really cares about, as he exhorts Athenians to care for their souls by cultivating virtue [Plato and Aristophanes 1998: 29d–31c]). In his translation of Plato’s Republic, Joe Sachs remarks that ‘the two words used here for education, the turning-around (periagôgê) or redirecting (metastrophê) of the whole soul, also have the meanings, respectively of revolution and conversion’ (Plato 2007: 214n119). One could, for instance, also analyse the institutional policies of schools and universities, or the impact that capitalist culture, more generally, has on students and teachers. Influential analyses include Bowles and Gintis’s (1976) book on how the educational system reproduces the capitalist social division of labour; or Illich’s (1973) claim that graded curricular teaching for certification inhibits real learning. Henry Giroux has written extensively on neoliberalism’s effect on education. Giroux and Penna (1979) exemplify (and nicely summarise) a movement that started to question the ‘hidden curriculum’ in schools—how ‘ideological messages [are] embedded in both the content of the formal curriculum and the social relations of the classroom encounter’ (ibid.: 21). Freire (1981) considers how the traditional ‘banking’ model of education perpetuates oppressive structures, and what it would take to educate in a manner that transformed those oppressive structures. ‘The unity of the collection of commuters lies in the bus they are waiting for.… everyone is identical with the Other in so far as they are waiting for the bus. However, their acts of waiting are not a communal fact, but are lived separately as identical instances of the same act’ (Sartre 1982: 262). I am re-quoting an anonymous student evaluation here. Sartre puts the same idea in these words: where there was once alterity, or otherness, we find instead ‘my own spontaneity in the Other and that of everyone in me … a human relation of reciprocity’ (1982: 269). Says Sartre: ‘since all the lived characteristics which might allow some interior differentiation lie outside this determination [this orientation towards the bus, and serial ordering], everyone’s identity with every Other is … their common alterity’ (1982: 260). These are exercises where students are asked to turn towards a classmate and to explore the possible answers to a question the professor has given them. The professor allots them a particular amount of time to do this, and when the time is up, they are asked to ‘share’ their results with the rest of the class.

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16 Though in principle, so long as a teacher is not ‘bell-curving’ the grades, it is possible for all students in a class to get As, or all to get Bs, Cs or Fs, this is not what the grading scale A to F suggests. 17 Compare the list of virtues that Freire (1981) claims are endemic to, and essential for, genuine dialogue. Freire, like me, proposes that transformative education is achieved only in and through such dialogue.

References Bowles, S. and H. Gintis. 1976. Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. New York: Basic Books. Dewey, J. 1944 [1916]. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: The Free Press. Freire, P. 1981. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum. Giroux, H.A. and A.J. Penna. 1979. ‘Social Education in the Classroom: The Dynamics of the Hidden Curriculum’. Theory and Research in Social Education, 7(1): 21–42. Illich, I. 1973. Deschooling Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nance, J.P. 2016. ‘Students, Police, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline’. Washington University Law Review, 93(4): 919–987. Plato. 2007. Republic, trans. J. Sachs. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing. Plato and Aristophanes. 1998. ‘Plato’s Apology of Socrates’. In Four Texts on Socrates, trans. with notes by Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, rev. edn. Pollack, S. 2015. ‘Report on the Impact on Students’. In Walls to Bridges. Wilfrid Laurier University. Rodriguez Ruiz, R. 2017. ‘School-to-Prison Pipeline: An Evaluation of Zero Tolerance Policies and Their Alternatives’. Houston Law Review, 54(3): 803–837. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1960. Critique de la raison dialectique, tome I. Paris: Gallimard. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1982. Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, edited by Jonathan Rée. London: Verso. Sidorkin, A.M. 2004. ‘In the Event of Learning: Alienation and Participative Thinking in Education’. Educational Theory, 54(3): 251–262.

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Education for Democracy: Philosophical Reflections Inspired by Brazil’s Movement of Landless Rural Workers Bruce Gilbert In this chapter, I will engage in some philosophical reflections on the educational practices of a rather extraordinary Brazilian social movement, the Movimento de Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra do Brasil (Movement of Landless Rural Workers of Brazil; henceforth MST). The MST, as I will explain in more detail shortly, organises impoverished people to occupy underutilised land; it forms farming cooperatives on that land, and then strives to build schools and health care centres on each settlement. The MST also has a series of regional schools, formal relationships with over twenty universities in Brazil and a national university of its own near Sao Paulo. Throughout the organisation, the MST attempts to create a pedagogical process that arises out of the needs and aspirations of its members who are, of course, among the poorest, least literate and most marginalised people in the country and, indeed, the world. These pedagogical practices, many of which are inspired by or are elaborations of ideas of Brazilian philosopher and pedagogue Paulo Freire, have had a profound, transformative impact in a country that is one of the most unequal and most pluralistic societies in the world. I will proceed in four steps. First, I will briefly introduce the Brazilian context in terms of its inequality and pluralism. Second, I will analyse the factors that led to the emergence of the MST and the dynamics of its growth and actualisation. Third, I will move into an engagement with the local, 150

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regional, national and international educational structures of the MST, with a constant eye to its teaching practices. And, finally, I will offer some philosophical reflections on the ‘rationality’ of the MST in general and of its pedagogical commitments in particular.

Pluralism and Inequality: Brazil’s Reality Pluralism Brazil is the world’s fifth-largest country by both population and landmass. As with nearly every region of the Americas, Brazil’s Indigenous population suffered a tragic genocide during the period of European colonisation. Before the arrival of the Portuguese, Dutch and English colonisers, it is estimated that there were many millions of Indigenous people in what is now Brazil, constituted by some 2,000 different peoples. This initial pluralism of Indigenous peoples, because of enslavement, mass murder and disease, has been reduced today to a population of only some 817,000 Indigenous people making up some 200 separate tribes. Amazingly, there are still 188 distinct Indigenous languages actively spoken in Brazil today. Even despite the genocide, in other words, the Indigenous population alone makes Brazil a very pluralistic society. Despite their resolute attempts, the Portuguese authorities were unable to successfully force the Indigenous population into slavery. It was relatively easy for Indigenous people to flee into the wilderness, and many of those who did not died of illness or depression. In response, and in step with the other colonial powers in the Americas, the Portuguese and later Brazilian authorities turned to the African slave trade. Indeed, more slaves were forcibly transported to Brazil than to any other country—so many, in fact, that Brazil has the second-largest African population in the world today, after only Nigeria. Brazilian pluralism, therefore, is marked by a still very significant diversity of Indigenous peoples, Afro-Brazilians, descendants of Portuguese settlers and many other immigrants. Indeed, large

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populations of Japanese, German, Polish, Italian and Arab immigrants arrived in Brazil, especially beginning in the last decades of the 19th century and continuing well into the 20th. Brazil, for example, has the largest Japanese diaspora of any country in the world.

Inequality and the Conditions for the Emergence of the MST Statistically, Brazil has almost exactly the same level of wealth inequality as India, with the richest 10 per cent receiving over half (55 per cent) of all national income in 2015, while the bottom half of the population, a group five times larger, earned between four and five times less, at just 12 per cent (Alvaredo et al. 2017: 5). Only the Middle East has greater wealth inequality than Brazil and India, due to the extreme inequality of the distribution of petrodollars. The deep tax cuts to the wealthy that began with Washington Consensus economics in the early 1980s have played a role in Brazil as in most other countries. However, there are also key historical reasons that make Brazil’s inequality particularly egregious. When the plantation/ slave economy in the colonial period finally gave way to emancipation in 1888, an enormous class of underemployed, seriously impoverished and totally marginalised ‘citizens’ was created—a population that later fed the infamous favelas around Brazil’s largest cities. Meanwhile, land tenure remained in the hands of latifundiarios, traditional landowners who controlled vast tracts of land, who often employed their own former slaves at wage levels that were frequently more profitable to them than during the slavery epoch itself. It was this population, swollen still further by millions of impoverished people who were not former slaves, that formed the basis for the eventual formation of the MST.

The Emergence and Consolidation of the MST While Brazil flirted with agrarian reform throughout the 20th century, even establishing constitutional provisions in 1964 and 1988 for the expropriation of land that was not meeting its ‘social

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function’—that is, attaining certain levels of agricultural productivity—almost nothing in the way of agrarian reform actually took place. When applications were made to expropriate land because it was not meeting its social function, wealthy landowners could prevent expropriation by buying a few head of cattle, planting some crops and then tying up the legal process in court for decades. Due to this impasse, various activists and the Catholic Church in the early 1980s reversed the strategy. Instead of staking a legal claim to land in the hope of eventually settling on it, land would be first occupied by a very large group of families who would set up an instant tentcity on it and defy the landowners and the authorities to force them off. Land occupations have become the decisive and very successful strategy to generate agrarian reform in Brazil since 1983, and the MST itself was formally created in 1984, separating from its roots in the Catholic Church.1 Upon occupation, applications are made in court to legalise the occupation, using the ‘social function’ clause of the 1988 Constitution. The strategy of occupation and settlement formation has been so successful that there are now many thousands of successful MST settlements with some 1.5 million members. These settlements have mixed forms of property and work. Though they prioritise production for subsistence, once basic needs are met, they expand into production for sale as well forming agribusinesses. Usually, they are cooperatives in at least some sense of the word— from marketing or tool cooperatives all the way to full production cooperatives.2 Typically, each settlement creates its own educational and health care services for its members. Each MST settlement is autonomous, though linked to others through a variety of networks of support, and each is, moreover, democratically self-governing. The MST has become one of the world’s largest, most successful and most inspiring social movements. It is a very prominent member in an international food and agricultural justice movement called Via Campesina, which has member organisations in India like the Bharatiya Kisan Union, the Karnataka Rajya Ryota Sangha and others, as well as the National Farmers Union and Union Paysanne in Canada.

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Education in an Unequal Society: The Pedagogy of the MST The base of the MST, and thus also the base of its educational system, is the individual settlement. One of the highest priorities, once legal ownership has been attained, is to build a local school. At first, this is typically a makeshift wooden building. But within a few years the MST constructs modern and well-equipped schools. The settlement school not only provides elementary and sometimes secondary education, but very often basic literacy education for many of the adults. I have attended classes where sixteen-year-olds teach forty to seventy-year-olds how to read and write. But local schools are only the base. The MST pedagogical system, broadly conceived, has the following components: 1. At the local level, there are schools on MST settlements. 2. The MST also has agreements with over twenty different universities in Brazil so that its members can learn agricultural science, cooperative management, teaching, marketing and other skills necessary to running successful cooperatives, and so on. 3. The MST runs several national schools of agro-ecology, so that settlements, if they wish and if they are able, can use agroecological methods. 4. The MST has many regional schools for training activists and organisers. 5. These regional schools for activists and organisers are themselves linked together with the Escola Nacional Florestan Fernandes (ENFF), the MST’s national university near Sao Paulo. Like the regional schools, the ENFF runs courses in everything from philosophy and Latin American history to social theory and leadership development. Moreover, the ENFF also offers courses taught in Spanish for social movement members from all across Latin America. (It is common to have people at the school from twenty or more nations, including partner movements in Africa and Asia, at the same time.)

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The MST also participates in international pedagogical agreements through the Via Campesina and other international organisations. For example, the MST has sent brigades to countries like Haiti, South Africa, Mozambique and Angola.

Throughout the range of the MST’s pedagogical strategies is a philosophy of education that is geared to the situation of systematically marginalised people. The goal of the MST’s system of education is thus one of liberation. This involves much more than simply teaching to read and write, or providing what we think of as an appropriate curriculum of standard public schools. It involves instead an articulation of the fundamental insights and abilities necessary for communities to liberate themselves and become autonomous rather than being dependent on employers (where they are exploited) or the state (where they are clients). It is plain even from this brief summary that the MST’s commitment to a pedagogy of liberation is deep, and its capacity to organise and implement these pedagogical structures is very well developed. I will continue to elaborate on these structures in what follows, but will do so in the light of the question of how and why the MST exemplifies a kind of pragmatic rationality.

The Rationality of the MST and Its Pedagogical Structures At this point, I would like to enter into the explicitly philosophical part of the chapter. As I indicated in my introduction, I would like to explore why the MST and its pedagogical practices are rational, in the pragmatic or even (broadly) Hegelian sense of the term.3 I will first, then, say a few words about what this rationality looks like in general.

Reason in History ‘Reason in History’ is the title sometimes given to the ‘Introduction’ to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1991). This notion

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of reason in history can be taken in a way that is seriously mistaken.4 The rational, one might suppose, is to be determined discretely and autonomously in thought and then applied to the everyday world. It is precisely in this sense that Kant’s pure concepts of the understanding, for example, are derived a priori and then applied to sensory intuitions with a priori synthetic judgements. A political and historical version of this argumentative strategy could be found in the derivation of 18th-century rights discourse—including that of the American and French Revolutions—from the universal features of rational freedom. Kant, again, is the paradigmatic case. The character of rational freedom is determined a priori in, for example, the manner that the maxim of an individual agent could pass the test of universality. My own capacity to take myself as the end of rational deliberation about my own good life extracts me from my determination by desires, drives and cultural, religious or political traditions, and I can thus count myself as free in so far as I distance myself from those traditions. Yet the fact that I am free also means that I can immediately perceive other human beings to be identical (equal) to me in this regard. I am an end in myself and so too are other persons ends in themselves, thus it is rational to treat another human as an end in herself and never merely as a means. Together, we are a community of free and equal beings. Or again, from our reason we infer our liberté, from which we, in turn, infer our egalité and thereby discover ourselves to be a rationally free fraternité. The rallying cry of the French Revolution meets the standard of rational freedom, it seems. Empirical history is thus measured against the standard of a form of rational freedom deduced from premises established outside of history.5 Yet if the character of freedom is determined from outside of history and then applied to history as the standard by which it should be judged, there can be no compelling argument that real historical agents really were motivated by reason at all. Marx, for example, could thereby argue very persuasively, using premises from within empirical history itself, that the system of right blessed by the notion

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of rational freedom was really just the contractarian logical and legal superstructure that allowed those who had private property of the means of production to maximise the rate at which they exploited their workers, who were, of course, as ‘rationally free’ to enter and lawfully depart from contracts as those who dominated them. ‘Rational freedom’ is thereby revealed as the ideological and superstructural bulwark of power, domination and exploitation. Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault and others would engage in similar critical projects and, in the process, discredit the notion that there was ‘reason in history’6— at least if the character of that reason is determined a priori and then supposedly applied externally to history. Reason, then, must emerge as the intelligibility of history itself. However, it would seem that conceding that reason must arise within history is tantamount to abandoning reason. So why, then, can it be said that empirical history is rational? The simplest starting point for an embedded theory of rationality is the notion that people ‘do things for reasons’—human beings behave intelligently. Reason, to put this more technically, is the intelligibility of the way we determine ourselves—of our ‘self-determination’. The notion of ‘reason in history’ identifies the logic by which individuals and societies have intelligently made themselves what they are in the temporal process of negotiating with each other the forms of relationship that animate them. This notion of reason is pragmatic—that which is ‘fully’ reasonable is that which ‘works’ at any given historical moment in any particular context. Some readers might find this unsatisfying for either: (a) reducing reason precisely to the kind of genealogical history of power from which it is putatively trying to distinguish itself; or, worse, (b) crowning de facto regimes of power and domination as just and reasonable. Neither is the case. Let us see why with two simple examples. First, a young girl copes with her domineering and abusive father by developing great powers of stoic withdrawal.7 In the context of her family life, this is a rational strategy that, to the best of her ability to tell, most effectively promotes her own self-determination.

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Later, having developed her ability to resist her father with other means, she might adopt a different strategy that she now considers to be superior—say confrontation. Her reasons are the ground of intelligibility and, in so far as she finds confrontation to be superior to stoicism, it is superior. Confrontation, in her judgement, furthers her project of self-determination better than stoicism, and is precisely for that reason more rational. While she may or may not be able to explain to others why it is superior, such an account could always, in principle, be given—either by her, or by a perspicacious friend, family member, therapist or other supporter. This account would justify with reasons why confrontation is a superior strategy of selfdetermination to stoicism and justify it with reasons that any rational being could grasp. Of course this girl, or one of her supporters, might come up with a third, still better way of dealing with the father, and the possibility of the same kind of account would thereby exist in this third strategy. She might also make mistakes. But, as always, the only arbiter of good and bad, better and worse, is her own experience. To summarise this example with a philosophical generalisation, the rational is the best possible mode of relational self-determination that a given person, community or society can articulate and embody in concrete life at any given moment in time. Each such mode of selfdetermination has, in principle, a rational account of the history of its own development. Typically, this historical account will be one with plenty of situations in which various kinds of conflicts, obstacles, challenges or difficulties are surmounted by the intelligent and intelligible innovations of the very people who are most engaged in them. The intelligibility of these innovations, however, is accessible to anyone with the time, energy and willingness to immerse herself enough in those contexts to understand them. This is precisely what happens when, for example, a psychotherapist patiently works to understand the life experiences that led her client to seek help in the first place, or when someone travels to another country to immerse himself in the language, history and culture of that society.

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We can now see why this form of reasoning does not capitulate to any kind of relativism or arbitrary genealogy. The girl’s strategy of confrontation can be shown to be rationally superior to stoic evasion, and it is thus a more rational attitude. We glimpse here a typical fallacy that plagues debate on these issues. Either reason can be determined a priori and applied externally to history (for example, Kantianism) or there are only contingent power relations (for example, genealogy). The view of rationality I am defending here states, rather, that every situation is intrinsically rational, and that rationality can only be grasped as that which develops itself in degrees. Moreover, this question of ‘more or less’ rationality is disclosed in time as personal or social histories, in which the standards of ‘better and worse’ or ‘more or less’ rational are disclosed in real, concrete historical engagements of human beings with each other and with nature. Let us now see how this notion of rationality helps us to understand the MST.

Reason, History and the MST To take a particularly wide scope, it is impossible to comprehend the MST outside of the trajectory of human freedom unleashed in particular in the Enlightenment. A key grounding premise of the notion of rationality I am sketching here, in other words, is that the project of human emancipation in general animates the MST— not because members of the movement necessarily understand the history of the struggle for human freedom in any detailed way, but because they affirm that they are the victims of an injustice and they strive for their own liberation. From a more properly philosophical point of view, the notion of freedom, since its emergence in the West in the era of the American, French and Haitian Revolutions, is particularly resilient precisely because any challenge to the pre-eminent status of freedom as the grounding term of rational analysis in human affairs turns out to presuppose freedom. Attempts to challenge freedom, in other words, in fact presuppose essential elements of freedom, such as sceptical

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doubt, the articulation of alternatives and the justification of these alternatives by the giving of reasons. Putative challenges to freedom as the fundamental category of reason in the human domain reveal themselves instead to be debates internal to the character of freedom. Indeed, the question of how to interpret the MST, as liberal/reformist or as socialist/revolutionary, is one such debate. Let us turn to that now. As in Western society in general over the last two centuries, there is a lively debate within the MST and among its members, supporters and commentators about whether the ultimate purpose of the movement is to help integrate impoverished and marginalised Brazilians into the liberal-capitalist order, or to contribute to the construction of an altogether superior socio-economic order. For the liberal reading, I will draw on the theory of John Rawls as providing a paradigmatic framework of rational intelligibility. This kind of interpretation of the MST, loosely defined, is easily found in literature and in activist circles that support the MST.8 By the liberal reading, the MST is justified because it achieves the necessary material and institutional conditions for liberty, as liberals tend to conceive it. According to John Rawls’s ‘difference principle’, for example, it is impossible to enjoy full liberty if one is saddled with overwhelming poverty, illiteracy, terrible health care and the complete inability to participate in the political process (Rawls 1999: 65–73). Since the MST addresses all of these problems (and quite successfully), it can be regarded as rational by liberal standards. In the same vein, the MST’s violation of property rights can be justified by the principles of civil disobedience, once again rigorously defended by John Rawls and other authors in the liberal tradition (see ibid.: 326–331). By extension, then, the liberal reading of the MST also approves of the movement’s educational efforts, citing the failure of the universal public school system in Brazil as grounds for the MST taking matters into its own hands, and applauding in particular when the MST successfully forces the government to pay for the public schools that the MST builds on its settlements—something that has happened

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quite often. Liberal commentators think the MST is rational precisely because it helps an otherwise excluded population reach the groundfloor level of political liberty. This ground floor is not attained by libertarianism, nor by anything less than a robust system of institutions, like an excellent universal education system that compensates for the irrational inequalities that emerge due to contingent circumstances and market forces. The MST, to summarise, meets the conditions of rationality that Rawls establishes in the ‘original position’. But this liberal reading of the MST is not the only way to interpret the movement and, moreover, it is not the way that the MST understands itself. This is not to say that the liberal interpretation of the MST is purely mistaken, but to say that it is insufficiently rational. The MST says in its main objectives that it has ‘socialist values’ and that it seeks the ‘supremacy of labour over capital’.9 Thus, by the MST’s own standards, the movement does not engage in civil disobedience in order to attain land and a means of subsistence so that it can attain the ground-floor material conditions of participation of liberal society. Rather, the MST is animated by broadly Marxist conceptions of freedom. In other words, a land occupation is not liberal civil disobedience but the ‘expropriation of the expropriator’ or ‘the seizure of control over the means of production’. Moreover, the MST has a robust theory of exploitation, in Marx’s sense—if one does not have control over the means of production, one must sell one’s labour power in order to survive. Capitalists would never buy the labour power of others if they could not keep for themselves the surplus value produced by the workers they hired, a value that should belong to the workers whose labour produced it.10 The MST shares a slogan with the Catholic organisation that helped to create it, the Pastoral Land Commission—‘The land to those who work it!’ Exploitation, in other words, is a form of domination and is condemned as an injustice in the light of the notion of human freedom, broadly conceived. The liberal interpretation, in other words, understates the problematic to which the MST’s actions are an attempted solution. By the MST’s

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standards, ‘ground-floor participation’ in liberal society amounts to the status of integration into a system of exploitation. If we cast our minds back to a time when the moral and thus also rational status of slavery was still very much in play in the West, such as in the early 19th century, we find ourselves at a point in time logically similar to what the MST faces with respect to exploitation. Back then, abolitionists decried slavery as unjust, just as now the MST decries other forms of exploitation as unjust. Yet despite the abolition of exploitation qua wage labour in the USSR, China, Cuba and other communist countries, we can no longer say that ‘history is on the side of the MST’, for though those countries did abolish exploitation, they did so at a cost to other forms of freedom that was too high to pay in the opinions of most people. One might agree, for example, that exploitation is unjust, while arguing that the best ‘solution’ to it is a form of social democracy with a regulated free-market economy and private property of the means of production such that a progressive tax system and sturdy systems of universal health care, education and other such welfare institutions repay the worker, in effect, for the wealth that was earlier exploited from her. This social democratic solution is a third rational interpretation of the MST (along with the Rawlsian liberal and Marxist interpretations). Given the complexity of interpretations of the MST, all of which seem rational in their own way, why and how should the philosopher support the MST? The answer to this question involves reflection not just on the rationality of the past, which we have just explored (however briefly), but the rationality of the future. The most important term regarding irrationality in the future is what Marx calls ‘utopianism’, drawing on Hegel for this point. It is easy to contrive wonderful, seemingly rational schemes in one’s own mind, and quite another matter to embody them in a concrete, historical form. What is rational in the future is the further development of forms of human freedom that already exist but are at odds with themselves (in selfcontradiction) in a manner that calls for a transformative solution.

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Of course, we don’t know how the future will turn out, but the rational solution is, it may be recalled, the ‘best’ solution to the problems that beset the MST and its members. And what is the best solution for the MST? Unlike communist nations like Cuba, the MST has successfully created institutions that abolish exploitation without compromising other key forms of freedom. For example, MST settlements and the movement in general are fully democratic. Since this abolition of exploitation creates concrete possibilities for enormous benefits to some of the poorest people in the world without the harms one finds in centrally planned state communism, the philosopher should support what is a concrete step forward in the cultivation of freedom and reject both the liberal and the social democratic interpretations of the MST (though I will have occasion to revisit this judgement later). Let us take note of another key feature of the struggle against exploitation in Latin America, the main strategy for which has traditionally been to take control of the state. Attempts to do so by electoral means have usually ended in coups d’état (as in Guatemala, Chile and Grenada) or economic strangulation (as in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela). Attempts to take over the State by revolutionary means have also met with massive waves of terror, kidnapping and, indeed, military dictatorship (including from 1964 to 1985 in Brazil), if not an outright invasion by the United States. In sum, in Latin America in general and in Brazil in particular, the left has failed to seize state power.11 Given this failure, the MST articulated an altogether new strategy—it bypasses the state almost completely. Since it can support itself economically (having seized the means of production), it need not depend on the state, and to a large extent can fund its own housing, educational and health projects. The MST, in other words, creates somewhat autonomous islands of socialism within Brazil’s territory, with the hope of expanding into other domains. To summarise: I posited three forms of rational solution to the perennial injustices of Brazilian life—the liberal, socialist and social

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democratic. The MST rejects the liberal approach because it does not address the injustice of exploitation. The social democratic solution affirms the Marxist claim that exploitation is unjust but observes that the market economy provides strong increases in the standard of living of workers, elaborate civil rights, and a reasonably robust democratic state. Exploitation is unjust but is mitigated through state programmes that redistribute exploited wealth back to those who, in fact, produce it—workers. The MST rejects this ‘indirect’ approach to the injustice of exploitation because it is able to create ‘islands of socialism’ that eliminate exploitation while providing both for full democratic processes, civil rights and economic growth. Until this strategy proves to be a failure (which it might), it is thus the most rational strategy. Should it prove to be a failure, the MST presumably would revert to something like the social democratic solution. The MST’s commitment to socialism and relative autonomy from the state has enormous implications for its pedagogical structures. Let us turn to that now. As we have already seen with respect to economic organisation, the MST’s educational system seeks a lot more than to merely meet the ground-floor requirements of liberal freedom, for it seeks to unmask the ideological pretensions of precisely this liberal freedom, which proclaims without blushing that one can be free and exploited at the same time simply because one has freely sold one’s labour time on the free market.12 Thus, a foundation of MST education, even at the most basic level of literacy, is to empower its members to see themselves as victims of many forms of domination (exploitation indeed, but also including racism, sexism and so on) and also as agents of their own liberation. The MST’s commitment to the notion that one cannot be fully free if one is exploited puts it in an ambiguous and yet telling relationship with the state and its system of universal public education. On the one hand, the MST lobbies vigorously for improvements to public education in Brazil, not just for its own settlements, but for Brazilians

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in general. Even a minimally efficient and universally consistent system of public education would make an enormous difference in Brazil. And yet the public education system, however beneficial in other respects, also has an ideological function—it systematically hides exploitation. The MST, therefore, when it successfully convinces the government to pay for schools on its settlements, always tries to reserve the right to oversee who teaches in those schools. It is in light of this that the MST has developed some of its bilateral agreements with Brazilian universities, which typically have a complement of sympathetic professors to help the MST train its teachers. In light of these same principles, the MST uses broadly Freirian pedagogical principles. It rejects the ‘banking’ notion of education, by which knowledge is ‘deposited’ in the learner (see Freire 2012). Reaching back to Socratic techniques, the learner is the agent of her own liberation. Her experiences as the dominated and exploited, combined with her yearning for freedom and well-being, are the entry point for critical reflection. It is this principle that determines the content of the curriculum and the goal of a successful educational programme.

Conclusion The MST has responded constructively to two related impasses: first, progressives in Brazil who had heretofore been preoccupied with and prevented from attaining state power, created through the MST a path towards ‘socialist values’ that does not rely upon the state. Second, the MST’s educational strategy has found a way to encourage the principle of universal, public education while securing a measure of autonomy for the elaboration of a pedagogical system that is not ideological— that does not cover over the systemic nature of exploitation in Brazil. Of course, neither of these creative interventions in the history of freedom is unambiguous. The Brazilian state must still recognise the MST’s land claims and the MST still draws on the state for various

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other forms of support, such as credit and basic security. Moreover, if in principle the MST can modify the universal public education system to bend it towards its own goals, then so in principle can other more powerful groups—the state itself, corporate interests and so on. But these ambiguities are themselves inherent to ‘reason in history’. The relation of particular sectors of the society to the society as a whole is always already ambiguous. This ambiguity is the vitality that generates political struggle, and that is a necessary condition for the elaboration of the concept of freedom.13 Yet if this ambiguity is never resolved, nor then is political struggle. Wisdom about this ambiguity, as opposed to facile and dogmatic formulae otherwise common in the history of the left, is a key part of the MST’s political and educational strategy.

Notes 1

The Conference of Catholic Bishops of Brazil continues to support the MST through its Pastoral Land Commission (Comissão Pastoral da Terra). 2 For a detailed analysis of cooperatives in the MST, see Diniz and Gilbert (2013). 3 Of course, the arguments I will give in what follows only sketch out the basic structure of this issue, both with respect to reason in general and to the MST. 4 Indeed, for those unfamiliar with the way Hegel interprets and transforms Christian doctrines in very unorthodox ways in his philosophy of religion, his talk of ‘Providence’ in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History is easily misunderstood in precisely the sense that I will develop here. 5 Of course, Kant makes these claims in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, the Metaphysics of Morals, The Critique of Practical Reason and elsewhere. His attempt to render this as a theory of history is found in a variety of essays, but especially in Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose. 6 For elaboration of this idea, see Brandom (2012).

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7 This example is adapted from John Russon’s (2003) book Human Experience, which itself is a very insightful exploration of this kind of rationality. 8 For a variety of perspectives on the MST gathered in one volume, see Carter (2015). 9 Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, www.mst.org.br (accessed on 12 June 2019). My translations. 10 Marx’s theory of exploitation is articulated in detail in Marx (1992); see especially Part III, Chapters 7–9. 11 Of course, the Cuban Communist Party has ‘successfully’ controlled the state in that country since 1959, but the effects of punitive measures imposed upon it by the United States, the Cuban government’s failure to implement democracy and its frequent violations of civil rights mean that the MST generally does not seek to literally imitate its form of socialism. 12 To his credit, Rawls does say that it would be rational from the original position to choose a form of market socialism, but he doesn’t claim that this would be more rational than choosing private ownership of the means of production. See, for example, Rawls (1999: 239–242). 13 I elaborate in detail on the issue of ‘vitality’ in social and political life in Gilbert (2013).

References Alvaredo, F., L. Chancel, T. Piketty, E. Saez and G. Zucman. 2017. World Inequality Report 2018. World Inequality Lab. Available at: https:// wir2018.wid.world/files/download/wir2018-full-report-english.pdf (accessed on 16 November 2018). Brandom, R. 2012. ‘Reason, Genealogy and the Hermeneutics of Magnanimity’. Available at: http://www.pitt.edu/~brandom/ currentwork.html (accessed on 17 February 2019). Carter, M. 2015. Challenging Social Inequality: The Landless Rural Workers Movement and Agrarian Reform in Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press. Diniz, A.S. and B. Gilbert. 2013. ‘Socialist Values and Cooperation in Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement’. Latin American Perspectives, 40(4): 19–34.

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Freire, P. 2012. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Gilbert, B. 2013. The Vitality of Contradiction: Hegel, Politics and the Dialectic of Liberal Capitalism. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1991. The Philosophy of History. Buffalo: Prometheus Books. Marx, K. 1992. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1. London: Penguin Books. Rawls, J. 1999. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Russon, J. 2003. Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis and the Elements of Everyday Life. Stony Brook: State University of New York Press.

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Can Pedagogies Be Both Critical and Caring? Kanchana Mahadevan The activity of teaching in plural societies has a specific duty of commitment to inclusiveness.1 It has, therefore, to disavow the authoritarianism of absolute knowledge and monolithic cultures. The teacher plays a significant role in ushering in inclusiveness through a pedagogical process of dialogue that engages with interpretation, critique and reconstruction of multiple cultures. Such dialogue enables resisting cultural homogenisation in plural societies. Habermas’s discourse ethics becomes an obvious reference point for exploring the pedagogical possibilities of dialogue. However, Habermas’s own theorisations of communicative action and discourse ethics have neither engaged with pedagogical ethics nor postcolonial contexts. Yet, his analyses of the system-world and communicative action do have a bearing on the philosophical foundations of education. In his critique of the system-world, Habermas discerns mass educational institutions as bastions of instrumental reason. In contrast, his communicative model aims at ushering in a process of mutual listening, since it is not wedded to any substantive notion of good in prioritising the right over the good. However, Habermas also opens up some crucial questions: to what extent can critical dialogue accommodate affect? How can it engage with the socially vulnerable? These questions are related to Marianna Papastephanou’s (2010) critique that an emphasis on the rationality of mutual agreement with otherness is not adequate to address a humane pedagogy. 171

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This chapter engages with the extent to which Habermas’s model of communication can speak to the pedagogical concern of democratising the role of the teacher in the Indian context of a plural and unequal society. It argues for democratising the role of the teacher, who plays a pivotal role in countering inequality and promoting pluralism; such a role requires communicative dialogue. However, this chapter also notes that such a model is inadequate as it does not focus on the unequal power relations that hinder communication. It argues, following Nel Noddings (2002), that the notion of conversation as storytelling offers a more adequate possibility for inclusive dialogue in democratic teaching.

The Relevance of Habermas’s Critical Theory to Education Habermas has only occasionally addressed the theme of education in a direct manner (see Habermas 1987a, 1989). In the burgeoning body of scholarship on his writings, the studies on education are few and far between.2 Further, his work is entrenched in the European context, so that a postcolonial engagement with Habermas appears prima facie Eurocentric. Yet Habermas’s work has relevance for an ethics of teaching (and learning) in plural societies, especially in the Indian postcolonial context. His ethics of dialogue emphasises deliberation and the social contexts of learning, rather than indoctrination of specific forms of life. Moreover, discourse ethics also has the utopian dimension of free and equal communication, a regulative ideal to evaluate social inequalities. This dimension addresses a key problem confronting the Indian debates on education—the lack of satisfactory conceptualisation of the teacher’s role and its underlying ethics. This problem is acute given the persistent image of the teacher as someone who disseminates information with authority. Habermas’s critique of the widespread instrumentalisation and compartmentalisation of university knowledge in the post-war context of heightened

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industrialisation (1987a, 1989) is also relevant in the Indian context. Indian educational institutions are largely controlled by industry and market (Habermas 1989).3 On this model, education aims at producing an apolitical professional class whose knowledge can be steered in diverse directions—thus, ‘both information flowing from research into the channels of industrial utilisation, armament, and social welfare, and advisory knowledge that enters into strategies of administration, government, and other decision-making powers, such as private enterprises’ (Habermas 1989: 2; 1987a: 7). Indian institutions of knowledge tend to emphasise knowledge production through processes of instrumental rationality (using positivist methods) and equate pedagogy with the transmission of such information.4 Institutionalised education in India commenced during colonisation with a stress on social utility. The centralisation of schools and educational institutions was set in motion during the 19th century by British colonial rule (Kumar 2005). The British East India Company5 established Fort William College, the first college for training bureaucrats, in 1800–1801, followed by a charter committing itself to educational institutions in 1813. Macaulay’s 1835 Minute established English as the foundation of formal learning in India (ibid.: 72). The colonial educational system proclaimed Indian knowledge and skills as inferior to establish its own educational policy grounded in modern technological skills. Its goal was to produce Indian citizens—professionals and civil servants—to strengthen the Empire. Although there was development of science and technology in keeping with the availability of Indian resources for colonial goals, it was not a priority for the British administration.6 The emphasis was on India’s acquiring scientific knowledge from the West. Colonial knowledge systems did not integrate the diversity of Indian culture, society and skills—with the exception of a few dominant ones (see Chowdhury 2017: 7–33)7—in the curriculum.8 British colonisers did not consider the pedagogical tools available in India as worthy of institutionalised education. As a ‘meek dictator’

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(Kumar 2005: 73), the teacher became vulnerable to controls from what Habermas terms as the system-world of politics and bureaucracy governed by instrumental reason (Habermas 1987b: 113–197).9 Colonial institutions did not consider the teacher to be a critical thinker questioning cultural homogeneity and social hierarchies. They also considered India to be abjectly unschooled in the pre-British era. This was both inaccurate and led to the neglect of the active agency of the teacher in the pre-colonial period (Kumar 2005). Village teachers were rooted in the social community and contributed substantively to the curriculum in consonance with prevailing conventions in indigenous pedagogical practices (ibid.: 74). They chose texts as per the student’s progress and taught in innovative ways.10 Instructors who taught dance, music and folk art had greater autonomy. The teacher had the power to delay or speed up a student’s learning as per the progress made. Further, the teacher imparted knowledge to a small group of senior students who then transmitted it to the other younger students in the class. The teacher, despite exercising authority, had a deep involvement with the student’s progress. This differed from the model of the ashram, where the teacher as guru was revered as an infallible figure of knowledge. The advent of colonisation introduced a fixed curriculum and a textbook culture11 over which the teacher had no control. Moreover, progress in learning was determined by examination. The teacher became a State worker who performed administrative tasks, rather than a cultural figure who reflected on texts. The teacher’s task expanded to maintaining student records, cooperating with inspections and assisting the government with the census.12 The reduction of teaching to imparting information simultaneously included administration.13 Given these circumstances, teaching was not considered prestigious and was compensated with the illusory idea of the teacher as a figure of power. In keeping with this trend, the teacher in the colonial context was also regarded as a guru to seamlessly tie up with hegemonic Brahminical tradition.14 The teacher’s seeming power over students masked their overall powerlessness in the larger scheme.

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Such instrumentalisation of education treats the university as a factory where goods are produced, following Habermas (1989: 4, 16–17). Even nationalists who challenged colonialism did not question such an assumption in their demand for greater inclusiveness in the prevailing colonial educational system (Kumar 2005).15 The nationalists emerged from the colonial framework of education that produced a class of elite leaders committed to the Enlightenment notion of progress as industrialisation, science and technological mastery. This has continued in post-independence and neo-liberal India where the goal of Indian education is viewed as market progress (Kumar 2011). Ideas and debates are considered to be irrelevant, with a focus on practical skills. There is a ‘technoutopianism’ (ibid.: 39) of turning to devices and instant messaging to speedily transmit knowledge. As a result, the teacher is a resource for circulating knowledge. This, in turn, fortifies the teacher as a controlling figure who does not find it useful to reflect or discuss in class. It also weakens the teacher by undermining his or her agency. Yet, the ethical tenor of a cultivation or Bildung model cannot be posited as an alternative to the instrumental paradigm in the endeavour to democratise the teacher. For colonial pedagogy had its own version of ethics and Bildung, despite its apparent valueneutrality.16 British administrators regarded the process of educating Indians as a project of civilising the uncivilised to acquire humanity. For the colonisers, ethical failure originated in the ignorance of science-technology, which had to be remedied with transformative knowledge.17 Rational knowledge was assumed to be scientific and technological, whose instrumental focus left little room for the practical dimension of culture, presupposed to be rooted in the passions (Habermas 1989: 6; Kumar 2005: 35–36). The divide between reason and passions invokes the dominant Enlightenment philosophical-ethical view that reason must control the passions. The British educational institutions were on a self-appointed mission of civilising Indians through individual self-cultivation (Kumar 2005:

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25–48). Indians were considered to be passionate and in need of selfdevelopment through the acquisition of rational knowledge. Habermas’s critique of the Humboldtian Bildung model of universities18 becomes relevant at this juncture. Bildung aimed at developing the individual as autonomous and responsible (Habermas 1987: 53). The university, thus, became an apolitical space of scholarship to enhance the self-development or Bildung of the researcher/teacher and the learner (ibid.: 14). Its domain as an unobtrusive sphere of academic freedom developed in tandem with the nation-state, which it aimed at evolving alongside the individual. Such a simultaneous process of development strengthened the ideals of humanity or a ‘whole people’ (Jaspers 1959: 134).19 (On a parallel note, the colonial educational project in India did subscribe to the Bildung ideal as it aimed at humanising Indians through the moral authority of the teacher. The classroom format was didactic, rather than dialogical, so that learners could be transformed.) Further, following Habermas, an apolitical approach hinders the possibility of unrestricted dialogue and encourages elitism. The communication emphasised is one that takes place within a small group.20 Habermas maintains that there is very little room for the life-world model of dialogue—where teachers and students engage in an ethics of self-reflection to arrive intersubjectively at knowledge. Further, the substantive Bildung model of the German university is premised on bringing like-minded people together (Habermas 1987a). As a result, there is very little room for disagreement and pluralism. Moreover, the social dimension—with its hierarchies—remains outside the gated community of the university. Critical thinking has the potential to challenge the authoritarianism of the teacher. Pedagogically, as Habermas (1989: 8, 9) argues, even the need to transmit information presupposes reflection, compelling the teacher to undertake interpreting and translating it in a specific context. Such reflection does not focus on the results of inquiry towards utilitarian goals, for it is not a process of justification or deductive reasoning. Rather, for Habermas, it involves

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methodological discussions of the utility of an analytic framework, the expedience of research strategies, the fruitfulness of hypotheses, the choice of methods of investigation, the interpretation of the results of measurement, and the implicit assumptions of operational definitions not to mention discussions of theoretical foundations of the fruitfulness of different methodological approaches. (Ibid.: 6–7)

When the teacher initiates such reflection, the possibility of critical discussion with students is opened up. The teacher becomes a democratic figure ushering in the normativity of intersubjective free discussion between teachers and students.21 In Habermas’s spirit, one can think beyond the instrumentalism and absolutism of teachers in universities through discourse ethics as underlying the circulation of knowledge. Critical thinking requires a teacher to be someone who is not simply an invincible repository of information, but an agent who initiates discussions with moments of vulnerability in seeking answers to questions along with the students. In this process, the students also acquire agency. Such solidarity between professors and students destabilises the teacher as a central figure of control. It opens up the university as a porous space within the larger context of civil society, so that the social dimensions of knowledge (and information), as well as identity, are problematised. It discerns the role of social power and hierarchies in generating knowledge and information. It enables the academic community to debate, rather than justify existing policies (Habermas 1989: 10). Habermas is also well aware that such a blurring of the dichotomy between the larger social world and a professionalised university does have its share of problems. There is, for instance, the danger of authoritarian social trends attempting to strangle free thought and expression on campuses.22 However, these dangers have to be contested to achieve democratic cultures through rational discussions that are free from domination (ibid.). Thus, rather than the autonomous system-world, the life-world of communicative practice offers prospects for democratising teaching.

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An alternative ideal of the teacher requires moving beyond the notion of the university as a site for the production and transmission of what is useful (Habermas 1989: 2–6). Habermas notes how the university transcends its functions by default through several excesses that reveal its rootedness in the horizons of the life-world. Professionalisation requires going beyond the merely instrumental, as the decision-making skills of doctors and executive skills of judges demonstrate. Such extra-professional skills cannot be acquired through explicit instruction. Moreover, universities have been informally understood as interpreting and transmitting the cultural traditions of society. Hence, for Habermas, hermeneutic sciences have the task of turning to active traditions with the intent of reproducing them or critically transforming them. Further, student activism—which has not been a formal part of the university system—has exploded the instrumental logic of universities to open up the possibility of wider discussions with student bodies and organisations. The ‘force of reason’ (ibid.: 7) in science opens up the possibility of its self-reflection, which also makes its ethical dimension explicit by unifying ‘theoretical and practical reason’ (ibid.). Philosophy has the potential to reflect on the sciences, which have become compartmentalised into expert domains, and thus bring them into dialogue. Habermas cites the instance of doctors learning about the family from psychoanalysis and sociology to transcend the biologism of disease as exemplifying such philosophical mediation. He also quotes the example of philosophers learning about the relationship between speech and language going beyond semantics. Thus, Habermas’s discourse ethics is relevant in the Indian educational context. His critique of the bureaucratisation and regulation of the educational system can speak to institutionalised pedagogy in India.23 Discourse ethics is not committed to any specific account of the good, nor does it advocate substantive ends. For plural societies—such as India—offer various competing conceptions of ends, which cannot be arbitrated. Discourse ethics focuses on

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the mechanisms of intersubjective communication (Habermas 1998: 293). It explores the possibility of solidarity between arguing participants in dialogue who are not necessarily bound through prior social convention. Rather, their solidarity emerges in the course of their dialoguing with each other, which in turn is possible because they inhabit intersecting life-worlds.24 Thus, the meaning of speech acts can be discerned if reasons are offered to justify, defend or critique the claims put forward. The perspectives of truth, normative validity and sincerity can be adopted in the course of arguing. The content is what emerges in the course of dialogue which is accessible to all those it affects. Such a formalism has the ability of accommodating social pluralism. Moreover, such ideal dialogue is also a utopian perspective from which one can critique social inequality. Discourse ethics, thus, has the potential to address the problems of instrumentalism and hierarchy plaguing Indian education. It enables teachers and students to practise an ethics of dialogue, which problematises the information that is transmitted in the classroom. Moreover, its principled unrestrictedness appears to allow everyone an equal access to discussion. However, there is an obstacle to Habermas’s notion of ‘pure and exclusive linguistic recognition of diversity’ (Papastephanou 2010: 44) grounded on the rationality of critical thought.

Is Critical Argument Adequate? Over the years, Habermas’s feminist critics have argued that his model of critical theory has an exclusive focus on grounding dialogue in reason (see Cohen 1995; Dean 1995). Habermas’s critical dialogue mandates that its participants exchange roles so that each can think from the point of view of the other. Such ideal roletaking is meant to ensure impartial outcomes in critical dialogue. This is deeply significant in the context of the classroom, where the teacher and learners need to exchange roles to reflect expansively

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in alternate ways. The teacher who thinks from the point of view of the student ceases to be an authoritarian force who merely transmits information, given the interactive dynamics. The latter enables reflection of the information through interpretation and evaluation. However, Habermas’s critical dialogue cannot exclusively support such expansiveness, given its focus on rational argumentation. In the phenomenon of critical dialogue, each participant takes turns in speaking and listening to the other; speakers have faith in themselves to speak and respond with reasons and arguments. Habermas does not interrogate how speakers arrive at their claims and arguments through the tensions and contradictions in their lived worlds in affective contexts. He does not probe the extent to which the speech situation itself is mired in power and also influences the claims made. Habermas does not examine the power hierarchies that silence voices and restrict role reversals between participants (Dean 1995: 218). For instance, the gender inequality between men and women inhibits them from adopting each other’s roles (ibid.). The former typically occupy a public, rational position of authority, while the latter are confined to a private emotive space. Such a gender divide affects the specific logistics of dialogical interaction, giving men an edge over women. Hence, Habermas’s feminist critics note that he fails to interrogate the role of patriarchal power in moulding identities at the conventional level (ibid.: 218–219). Habermas’s neglect of women in articulating the terms of ideal dialogue has a bearing on the pedagogical context. The teacher who is implicitly male initiates a dialogue with learners on rational grounds, without guarantee of its being grounded in the attachment of the webs of relationship of which empathy is a constitutive feature. An overtly rational cognitive dialogue sidelines those who do not focus on the world logically, but are nevertheless emotively expressive; feminists argue that the latter are for the most part women. Research on feminine identity formation by Brown and Gilligan (1992) points to the extent to which girls go during their developmental

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years to maintain the attachments and empathy in relationships. They pretend and deny their genuine feelings to avoid the plight of being abandoned and alienated, notwithstanding the inequality in their situation (Dean 1995: 221). Given the vicissitudes of social vulnerability, women efface and silence themselves to avoid being isolated.25 Girls and women are not simply in hierarchical frames, but are also attached to such relationships (ibid.: 220). Women attempt to remain connected to their relationships, while at the same time trying to meet societal expectations and remaining responsible to themselves. They straddle the poles of self-sacrifice and the desire for freedom. Yet, the expectations they attempt to live up to are premised on the unequal relations between men and women, where men automatically command social authority (ibid.: 218). Brown’s empirical research buttresses the thesis of the attachment of girls. She narrates the development of girls from the second grade to the tenth.26 Typically, this revealed their desire to be nice—to be reciprocated (second grade), to safeguard against isolation (fifth grade); in delinking ‘nice’ from notions of unfairness they gradually think of ‘nice’ as social acceptability (seventh grade). Girls finally went on to doubt their own expectations by the time they reached the tenth grade. The pedagogic situation which adheres to the rules of Habermas’s discourse would clearly reflect such a gap. Girls might not be able to assert and articulate their experiences as clearly as their male counterparts while conversing with their teachers. Thus, the developmental psychology of girls reveals that the socialcognitive perspective is not sufficient for engaging with the world as Habermas assumes (Dean 1995: 222). As Dean notes, there is ‘a difference between having a perception and having the confidence to acknowledge that perception as one’s own’ (ibid.). The latter is possible only through relations of mutual recognition that forge a sense of self-confidence, reflexivity and recognition. Such mutual recognition alone enables ideal role-taking between men and women. Further, mutual recognition is not the outcome of rational choice

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or deliberation. Habermas believes that individuals automatically acquire self-confidence by turning to the post-conventional level and critiquing conventions. As Dean notes, Habermas does not examine how a transition can be made from the conventional to its radically different domain of post-conventionality. Given the hold of conventional identity through the force of attachments, it is difficult to simply cast it off. Moreover, as Dean notes, there is an inherent indeterminacy in the conventional which has to be negotiated while attempting to undertake ideal role-playing (ibid.: 223–225). In the specific context of education, Papastephanou (2010) notes that Habermas’s emphasis on rational deliberation poses a challenge in the domain of adult education. Prior to deliberation, there is an articulation of a specific aspect of the life-world, but such articulation may not always be possible. Moreover, certain aspects that need to be articulated could very well be sidelined. Further, as Papastephanou argues, Habermas overlooks how inhabitants of the life-world do not always linguistically articulate their experiences and points of view (ibid.: 44). They impact each other in indirect ways through gestures, emotions and practices. Moreover, they are entangled in hierarchical ways, often inhibiting those who are at the receiving end of power from speaking articulately in a dialogue situation. Habermas overlooks the possibility of participants who, despite having access to the dialogue situation—like students in a classroom—fail to impact the situation in effective ways. Thus, those who are dominated by or challenge the group, despite being included, have fewer chances of being heard. This is especially true in educational contexts where female students who question male teachers would have little hope of being heeded. Often those with fewer argumentative skills to convince their listeners do not get taken into account while trying to reach an intersubjective consensus. The dialogue situation, despite its freedom and equality, could very well mete out discriminatory treatment to those who have been disempowered in the life-world. Hence, it is not enough to simply have the requisite formal conditions

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of dialogue spelled out. The material obstacles to dialogue need to be investigated while taking the treatment of participants in dialogue into consideration. This requires an ethics that goes beyond the ethics of dialogue. Papastephanou suggests a ‘re-education framework’ (ibid.) that examines the treatment of those who have been traditionally marginalised—women, working classes and the like. She suggests an introspective self-reflection and ideology critique as a part of such an examination. Thus, to make possible a discussion between free, equal and responsible partners in dialogue, ‘concrete Best Ways to becoming able to take part in dialogue’ (Papastephanou 2010: 40) have to be explored. Such a ‘re-education’ would open up a primordial dimension to the norms of freedom, equality and responsibility. Habermas has himself acknowledged the need for the reflexive-self and ideology critique in his earlier writings (see Habermas 1971). Besides, as Dean (1995: 220) acknowledges, he has made passing references to empathy as the other dimension of communicative ethics. Habermas critiques Gilligan for overlooking ‘the cognitive problem of application and the motivational problem of anchoring moral insights’ (Habermas 1991: 179; also see Mahadevan 2014: 123–129). Thus, for Habermas, a speech act is governed by two conditions: the first being an individual’s entitlement to get past his or her subjectivity to raise a claim or respond to those of others in a speech act (Habermas 1991: 202). He notes that consent is merely factual at this competitive level of putting forth arguments.27 Hence, his second condition is what Dean has termed as the cooperative clause (1995: 219–220). This requires sensitivity based on empathy so that a genuine consent can emerge from dialogue (Habermas 1991: 202). This shows that Habermas is certainly aware of how feelings are integral to moral reasoning and dialogue. Yet, his failure to integrate feminist insights on this theme makes him introduce empathy in a cavalier way as a ‘motivational supplement’ (Dean 1995: 220), rather than constitutively. Empathy is integral to ideal

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role-taking, which is crucial to an educational ethics of discussion. The teacher and student should rotate their roles to comprehend the other’s specificity and difference. Yet Habermas does not discuss empathy as integral to dialogue or as its precondition. Hence, in the moral ‘re-education’ of discourse ethics, women can become equal partners in dialogue with men, as Papastephanou notes. This would require engaging with empathy in a constitutive manner. However, in moving beyond Papastephanou’s argument, such a ‘re-education’ would also have to introduce the neglected dimension of care and storytelling conversations. However, before proceeding to alternative modes of conversation that transcend rational argumentation, Sumner’s (2010) argument for the possibility of reconciling the activity of care (with its dimension of affect) and reason needs to be considered. Sumner’s argument appears to belie the criticism that Habermas neglects care. She attempts to engage with Habermas’s communicative action as a resource for nursing education. She proposes the paradigm of the teacher as a nurse. She argues that nurses who are primarily caregivers cannot dispense with reason. They have to think in flexible, critical and quick ways as per the patient’s situation, balancing reason with affect. However, nurses tend to feel invalidated despite providing care, in a world that is increasingly instrumentalised and unequal. Nurses acquire their identities through socialisation processes that open the possibility for misunderstanding and doubt about their own validity. It is at this point Sumner believes that Habermas’s communicative ethics becomes relevant. She upholds that since nursing is a relationship between the caregiver and patient, it requires sensitivity to human vulnerability through communicative interaction. For this, Sumner suggests forging relations of solidarity through repeated use of communicative language and critique. She attempts to connect the intrasubjective personal self of the nurse with that of the patient in an intersubjective way that attends to the patient’s needs (ibid.: 187). She maintains that nursing is a scientific practice that requires

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understanding the body, disease, ways of mitigating pain and so forth. Hence, the professional subjectivities of the nurse and the patient are rational and science oriented, while their personal selves are affective and relational. Sumner maintains that balancing both dimensions leads to a communicative relationship between nurse and patient. The teacher could be put in the position of the nurse as a figure who balances the emotive side with the rational to reach scientific information to students. But this would have to be qualified because the nurse bears a greater responsibility for the patient’s overall well-being. The teacher’s focus on the overall well-being of the student can be construed as interference. The distance between the teacher and the student is more pronounced than that between the nurse and patient. However, Sumner does not explain how two diverse aspects of subjectivity—the rational and the affective—can be brought together. She also equates care with communication, against Habermas’s own specific distinction. When translated to teaching, the teacher remains in the rational dialogue mode without necessarily having made an effort to care. Thus, one needs to explore possibilities for alternative modes of dialogue.

Caring Education Noddings (2002: 131–146) offers a way out of the impasse between rational critique and affective care through caring conversation in classrooms. She laments the dearth of conversations in educational institutions, despite there being ample opportunities. Noddings distinguishes three types of conversations—as formal scholarly debate, conversation is rational and formal, while as informal talk it can integrate emotions to dialogue on the profound questions of life, or dialogue on everyday matters. Although these three strands of conversation are entangled, pedagogical contexts in India (if at all they have taken conversation seriously) have privileged the formal model. The Habermasian model of critical thinking is conversation

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as scholarly debate with an emphasis on information (ibid.: 136). Although such debates are important in classrooms and public life, Noddings notes that they are inadequate because information alone cannot bring participants together. Moreover, educational institutions also reel under the excessive burden of information. Noddings notes that philosophers typically adopt debate to defend their position against counter-arguments (ibid.: 135). Rather than present information, they invoke abstract possibilities—‘stories called philosophical fictions’ (ibid.)—to make theoretical points. She notes that in following the conversation pattern of scholarly debate, discourse ethics acquires a rational formal tone (ibid.: 118–119).28 It assumes that each individual enters the conversation with a predetermined, fixed point of view. Each of the speakers in the discourse situation—teachers and students in the context of this chapter—acquires the competence to offer, refute and modify claims with independent arguments. Moreover, each has the ability to listen to others as well. The proficiencies of speaking and listening are preconditions for engaging in any discussion. Yet, as Noddings observes, for discourse ethics the participants acquire these proficiencies well in advance. Discourse ethics assumes that individuals are primarily cognitive and have the confidence to put forth their claims. In this respect, discourse ethics is grounded in the Kohlbergian psychology of individual autonomy. Yet it ignores the web of attachments in which individual identity is shaped, as Brown and Gilligan’s (1992) account of women reveals. It is in the wider network of attachments that individuals acquire or lose their sense of confidence. Discourse ethics has no place for those who hesitate to come forward with their claims or refutations; such people are often those who are socially vulnerable due to caste, gender or class. Noddings also notes that formal conversation overlooks the possibility of emotions overruling what is arrived at logically. Besides, it sidelines the difficulties of resolving vast differences between participants through consensus. The exclusion of women documented by Brown and Gilligan would continue on this model. Formal conversation

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does not sufficiently contest the centrality of the teacher nor forge a relationship of solidarity between teachers and students. Noddings, therefore, explores other modes of conversation that are not entirely grounded in logic as alternatives in education. Noddings suggests that conversations, both ‘immortal’ (2002: 136) and ordinary, be explored so that patriarchy is resisted in classrooms.29 Such conversations are based on attachments and affects. They are informal and flexible in being open to those who are silent, slow or hesitant. In a pedagogic context, the teacher becomes sensitive even to reticent learners. Indeed, the teacher is not simply an imparter of knowledge, but a learner as well. Noddings suggests that the content of such conversations could be discussions about larger issues of life, emotive debates between thinkers and stories (ibid.: 137).30 The concrete dimension introduces the passionate aspect as a constitutive feature of conversation;31 the latter brings together teachers and learners in a mode of solidarity and attachment through critique and care. The element of empathy that is crucial to both the form and the content of conversation allows for care and critique to co-exist in an open-minded way. Such storytelling, following Noddings, will enable Papastephanou’s process of ‘re-education’, drawing attention to the way we treat others, and inculcating empathy. It does not demand the presence of singular subjects who are absolutely sure of what they have to say. Rather, by accommodating vulnerability and hesitation, it introduces empathy and the possibility of dialoguing in more egalitarian ways. For instance, despite its professed inclusiveness, the Indian educational system has been out of reach for Dalit women who have struggled against both imperial and Brahminical patriarchies to acquire knowledge.32 The colonial project of education that privileged cognitivism and scientism, which continues to this day, failed to accommodate Dalit women as agents in the production of knowledge. This is ironic, since the first school for women was started by a Dalit woman, Savitribai Phule (1831–1897), in 1848, along with her husband Jyotiba Phule. Dalit women over the decades resisted and struggled

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against the impediments to their growth in innovative and imaginative ways to assert themselves as agents in pedagogical contexts.33 In such a context, the teacher has a responsibility of introducing works written by Dalits to create a consciousness of the intersectionality of caste and gender. This, in turn, would contribute to greater inclusiveness in the classroom. Given their struggle to enter academic contexts, Dalits often wrote autobiographies revealing the materiality of casteclass-gender struggles. They challenged the format of debate to raise critical consciousness about social identity from an emotive literary perspective. Thus, Urmila Pawar’s autobiography introduces the activity of weaving or aaydan34—derived from the Mahar community’s caste-based occupation of weaving household articles from bamboo— as a powerful metaphor (2009: ix–xii). Aaydan also means utensil and weapon. Pawar puts the multiple uses of this term to work in her autobiography, in which she ‘organically’ (ibid.: ix) connects her act of writing with her mother’s act of weaving. She believes both to be connected through ‘pain, suffering, and agony’ (ibid.). Pawar’s work brings in sensitivity to everyday activities through which she opens up the themes of casteism, religious conversion, Buddhism and globalisation. She critiques the hierarchies of caste and gender through the notion of ‘weave’, and also opens prospects for egalitarian modes of social solidarity. The ambivalence of the aesthetic term ‘weave’ or aaydan and emotive responses to it enable the cognitive task of learning about entering institutions of education and pursuing creativity by resisting the obstacles of caste and gender oppressions. Pawar’s autobiography both critiques and nurtures to open up Noddings’s conversations from the everyday and profound points of view. It also illuminates formal conversations. The rational and the emotive are connected through the act of telling a story; in this instance, the story of Pawar’s own life. Such a literary text has the power to sensitise through an emotive engagement, unlike a merely cognitive social science narrative of caste. A social science teacher who discusses Pawar’s work while discussing caste and gender in the classroom would be able to

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expose students to the agency of Dalit women who write in nontheoretical ways. The conversations that emerge from such texts have the potential of forging solidarities that critique caste and patriarchy, as well as nurturing new modes of community. It is through such conversations that those who hesitate to speak find their voices and acquire self-confidence. Such conversations do not merely transmit statistical information about caste and gender on a clinical note (Noddings 2002:142). Literary texts offer an alternative way of conversing in the classroom, especially in India where the cognitive-scientific paradigm dominates.35 However, to guard against stories that are potentially autocratic, there has to be a commitment to the normative assumptions of Habermasian dialogue. Yet such a commitment need not necessarily emerge from intellectual reflection. Following Stephen White (2017), it can be the outcome of emotive attachments as well. As White notes, such dialogue does not (and need not) aim at consensus, but at inclusiveness and dissent. Teachers and students would have to select texts together in a spirit of such dialogical solidarity. They would listen to diverse points of view and disagree with each other. Consequently, both teachers and students would move beyond the classroom to the lived world of society. They would be able to do so via dialogic empathy. Students and teachers get to know and feel for each other through such conversations. They ‘learn about one another. But they also learn from one another’ (Noddings 2002: 142). Conversations around stories, thus, have the potential to counter the authoritarianism of the teacher and instil an ethics of inclusion. Such conversations, importantly, integrate feeling and reason.

Notes 1

I thank Siby George for his detailed discussion of an earlier draft of this chapter from which it has benefited. My gratitude to the participants of the collaborative conference ‘Ethics of Teaching in Plural and Unequal Societies’ organised by the Department of Humanities and

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Social Sciences, IIT Mumbai, and the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, New Delhi, held on 22–24 November 2018 at IIT, Mumbai, for their responses. Many thanks to Aarti Valia and Kavita Pai for their substantial and helpful feedback. I am obliged to Tejashree Trimakhe and Sampada Sawant for their kind help. Needless to add, the limitations of this chapter are entirely mine. 2 Murphy and Fleming (2010) is one of the few book-length systematic studies. Some of the journal essays that have engaged with Habermas’s relevance to adult education include Welton (1991), Connelly (1996), Pietrykowski (1996), Englund (2006), Fleming (2006) and Marojević and Milić (2017). 3 This chapter extends Habermas’s thesis, made in the Israeli context, to India. His reflection is on the scientistic model of the university provoked by Israel’s plan in 1967 to create an industry-oriented university in a desert so as to tap its resources (Habermas 1989: 1). Habermas has not referred to the Indian educational context in his writings. For an account of the Indian education system and the prevailing challenges, see Chowdhury (2017). Kumar (2011) discusses the market domination of education under neo-liberalism in India. 4 This is akin to Freire’s (2014: 72) ‘banking’ approach. Despite such a stress, science education in India is wanting and its benefits have not spread on a mass scale (see Ramaswamy 2013). 5 Arnold notes that the East India Company, founded in 1600, was as old as modern science (2004: 19); he observes how the Company’s rule in India coincided with the rise of natural history and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). 6 See Arnold (2004) and Raina and Habib (2004) for extended accounts of institutions of science and technology in colonial India. The British engaged in what Arnold (2004: 16) terms as the ‘evangelising’ mission of disseminating Western science and technology in India. Yet, India had alternative science practices during this period of colonial rule, as Arnold notes (ibid.: 2). These included its indigenous technologies and sciences (emerging through exchange with other cultures), Western science practices in India and, finally, practices that integrated both Indian and European science traditions. 7 Also see Powell (2011) for a detailed account of the integration of Sanskrit and Arabic classical texts for ethics education in colonial India.

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Powell notes that some of the British administrators did appreciate classical Indian texts on a neo-orientalist note. Moreover, the cultural specificity and pluralism prevailing in India persisted as the colonial attempt to prepare a uniform textbook on moral education failed. This discussion is based on Kumar (2005, 2018) and Powell (2011). Habermas distinguishes the system-world from the life-world of communicative practices of dialogical interaction, arguing for their separation. The dichotomy between college and school teaching, where the former was invested with greater intellectual worth, also arose with colonial institutions (Kumar 2005: 76). However, this chapter does not track this dichotomy, adopting a generalised approach to educational institutions as covering schools, colleges and universities. Multiplication tables were taught in the form of music. The teaching of numbers mattered, given the importance of land and property records (Kumar 2005: 74). ‘Textbook culture’ involves simply repeating what is in the book through rote learning without critically engaging with it. As Kumar notes, such an emphasis continues till date, ‘helping students to learn the content of a lesson so well that they can reproduce it in the examination’ (2005: 88). Kumar cites the writer Premchand as observing that ‘[u]nfortunately, the government thinks that a lot of inspection must take place irrespective of whether instruction takes place or not’ (2005: 77). Kumar (2005: 84) notes that training to teach was confined to picking up rituals such as writing on the board and questioning the student’s knowledge base. A major contributor to the lack of prestige was the meagre salary that cut off the teacher from community donations and gifts (Kumar 2005: 78). Kumar characterises this as a ‘Colonial-Nationalist Homonymy’ (2005: 43). Many of the nationalists belonging to the Western-educated elite strata of Indian society endorsed the idea of British modernity (Arnold 2004: 16). This percolated to the educational context. When nationalists differed with the British on education, they did so by turning to the Brahminical model of moral development. Many of the nationalist leaders—such as Tilak—who were from privileged castes integrated the modern framework of education with the Brahminical indigenous framework. As Paik (2014: 118) notes, Tilak also opposed the idea of

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universal education for girls. Paik also documents the casteist aspects of the nationalist intervention in education (ibid.: 109–145). Additionally, nationalists who differed with colonisers and overt Brahminism—like Gandhi who engaged with manual labour and the local as crucial for schools—did not find a strong reception for their pedagogical ideas (Kumar 2005: 47). Kumar cites the neglect of Tagore and Gijibhai who offered critiques of imperial education. The alternative model proposed by Gandhi, Tagore and Gijibhai adopted the Western child-centred ideal in the Indian context (ibid.: 121–122). 16 See Srinivasan (2018) for an account. Srinivasan posits the Gandhian model as an alternative to Bildung. 17 See Kumar (2005: 32–37) for a discussion of the morality of science in colonial education. See also Srinivasan (2018). 18 Habermas critiques Jaspers’s invocation of this paradigm. He agrees with the Frankfurter Allgemeine’s assessment that clinging to such a paradigm in the hope of a formative framework is a ‘life-lie’ (Habermas 1987a: 4). 19 Jaspers notes that the university is owned by the State in a public capacity, while it is a part of the nation from the perspective of those who enrich it privately (1959: 134). It has therefore to transcend both politics and nationalism, although both can be objects of its research. 20 This is clear from Jaspers who, despite maintaining the centrality of communication to pedagogy (Habermas 1987a: 63–64), confines it to a dyadic model of speaker and listener with a common calling and expertise (ibid.: 53). 21 The works cited in note 2 develop such a Habermasian model of education. 22 Habermas cites the neo-Nazi National Democratic Club at the University of Frankfurt as an instance (1989: 10). 23 See Habermas (1987b: 368–373) for a critique of treating schools along the framework of the system-world. 24 As Habermas observes, ‘Even strangers who encounter one another in foreign lands, will in emergencies, expect from each other a readiness to help’ (1998: 303). 25 See Brown and Gilligan (1992) for their research on girls losing their voices and connectivity because of the force of patriarchal norms at the conventional stage. Gilligan and Brown meticulously reveal how the

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girls in question cope with gender inequality by self-inflicted erasure for the sake of social approval and also struggle to acquire a voice. Also see Dean (1995). This is cited by Dean (1995: 218). The term ‘competition’ is derived from Dean (1995: 220). Kohlberg’s development psychology has been critiqued by feminists such as Gilligan for neglecting women’s experiences (see Gilligan 2003). The so-called ‘big’ questions about life, death and immortality are certainly significant. However, discussions on everyday contexts matter as much because it is often via the every day that such major questions emerge. Thus, the intersection between the seemingly profound and ordinary needs to be taken into consideration. These are literary fictional narratives, autobiographies and biographies with concrete characters, rather than abstract philosophical arguments as is the case with the ‘stories’ in philosophy. Slote (2013) argues that Noddings’s model of care does not value creativity. However, he overlooks the relationship between creativity and storytelling. See Paik (2014) for a detailed account. Paik (2014) gives a pioneering narration of such attempts. Also see Pawar (2009) for an autobiographical account of a Dalit girl’s struggle to acquire education. This is the Marathi title of Pawar’s book. Zachariah (2001: 3689) maps the trajectory of the ‘uses of scientific argument’ in India from the colonial to the postcolonial period.

References Arnold, D. 2004. The New Cambridge History of India, Volume 5: Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, M.L. and C. Gilligan. 1992. Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girl’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chowdhury, S.R. 2017. Politics, Policy and Higher Education in India. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Cohen, J.L. 1995. ‘Critical Social Theory and Feminist Critiques: The Debate with Jürgen Habermas’. In Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse, edited by J. Meehan, 57–90. New York: Routledge. Connelly, B. 1996. ‘Interpretations of Jürgen Habermas in Adult Education Writings’. Studies in the Education of Adults, 28(2): 241–253. Dean, J. 1995. ‘Discourse in Different Voices’. In Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse, edited by J. Meehan, 205–229. New York: Routledge. Englund, T. 2006. ‘Introduction: Jürgen Habermas and Education’. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 38(5): 499–501. Fleming, T. 2006. ‘The University and Democracy: Habermas, Adult Learning and Learning Society’. In What Price the University? Perspectives on the Meaning and Value of Higher Education from the National University of Ireland Maynooth, edited by T.A.F. Kelly, 81–95. Maynooth: NUI Maynooth. Freire, P. 2014. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury. Gilligan, C. 2003. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Habermas, J. 1971. Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. 1987a. ‘The Idea of the University: Learning Processes’. New German Critique, 41: 3–22. Habermas, J. 1987b. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. 1989. Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. 1991. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. 1998. On the Pragmatics of Communication. Boston: Beacon Press. Jaspers, K. 1959. The Idea of a University. Boston: Beacon Press. Kumar, K. 2005. Political Agenda of Education: A Study of Colonialist and Nationalist Ideas. New Delhi: SAGE. Kumar, K. 2011. ‘Teaching and the Neo-liberal State’. Economic and Political Weekly, 46(21): 37–40. Kumar, K. 2018. ‘Introduction’. In Routledge Handbook of Education in India: Debates, Practices and Policies, edited by K. Kumar. New York: Routledge.

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Mahadevan, K. 2014. Between Femininity and Feminism: Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives on Care. New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research & DK Printworld. Marojević, J. and S. Milić. 2017. ‘Habermas and Freire in Dialogue: Pedagogical Reading of Habermas’. Croatian Journal of Education, 19(2): 605–635. Murphy, M. and T. Fleming, eds 2010. Habermas, Critical Theory and Education. New York: Routledge. Noddings, N. 2002. Educating Moral People: A Caring Alternative to Character Education. New York: Teachers College Press. Paik, S. 2014. Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination. New York: Routledge. Papastephanou, M. 2010. ‘Communicative Utopia and Political Reeducation’. In Habermas, Critical Theory and Education, edited by M. Murphy and T. Fleming, 33–46. New York: Routledge. Pawar, U. 2009. The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoir. New York: Columbia University Press. Pietrykowski, B. 1996. ‘Knowledge and Power in Higher Education: Beyond Freire and Habermas’. Adult Education Quarterly, 46(2): 82–97. Powell, A. 2011. ‘Old Books in New Bindings: Ethics and Education in Colonial India’. In Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India, edited by I. Sengupta and D. Ali, 199–226. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Raina, D. and I. Habib, eds 2004. Domesticating Modern Science: A Social History of Science and Culture in Colonial India. New Delhi: Tulika. Ramaswamy, R. 2013. ‘Science, Education, and Research in India’. Economic and Political Weekly, 48(42): 20–23. Slote, M. 2013. Education and Human Values: Reconciling Talent with an Ethics of Care. New York: Routledge. Srinivasan, S. 2018. ‘Education and Structures of Moral Formation: The Limits of Liberal Education in India’. In Critical Humanities from India: Contexts, Issues, Futures, edited by D. Venkat Rao, 26–56. Oxon: Routledge. Sumner, J. 2010. ‘Jürgen Habermas, Critical Social Theory and Nursing’. In Habermas, Critical Theory and Education, edited by M. Murphy and T. Fleming, 185–198. New York: Routledge. Welton, M. 1991. ‘Shaking the Foundations: The Critical Turn in Adult Education Theory’. In Canadian Journal for the Study of Higher Education, 5: 21–42.

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White, S. 2017. A Democratic Bearing: Admiring Citizens, Uneven Injustice, and Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zachariah, B. 2001. ‘Uses of Scientific Argument: The Case of “Development” in India, c. 1930–1950’. Economic and Political Weekly, 36(39): 3689–3702.

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‘Why Johnny Can’t Read’: Seeking a Response through the Art of Teaching Ranjan Kumar Panda While discussing the progressive decline of education, particularly school education, in the United States of America, Hannah Arendt in her essay ‘The Crisis in Education’ asks ‘why Johnny can’t read’ (2006: 171). ‘Johnny’ in this question represents an illiterate student whose life in the institutional form of learning seems to be going through a critical phase. Johnny’s struggles to become literate represent many cases of children worldwide who have been going to school but return home without any learning. A recent World Bank study in the seven sub-Saharan African countries found that nine out of ten children are enrolled in school, but it is not an impressive picture as these children learn nothing. The study further shows that three out of four children in these African countries cannot read simple words (Indian Express 2018: 17). These schoolgoing children do not find appropriate teachers who can help them in learning. To support the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which target the completion of primary education by all children across the globe, computers have been deployed on a large scale in education—known as ‘ed-tech’—in developing countries. Under this scheme, lessons are taught using computers, with minimal help from adults who replace teachers in remote areas. The report suggests that ed-tech has a fair success rate, but it depends to an extent upon the pedagogic set-up of the schools; unless that changes, it is difficult to ensure 197

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smooth progress in learning in the existing school system (ibid.). The pedagogic practice will always need self-motivated, caring and trained teachers to carry out teaching. If teaching is not conducted meaningfully, then children like Johnny might fail and be appended to the dropout statistics. Johnny’s failure is an indicator of a cluster of problems that are often encountered by students across historical and national boundaries. In a globalised society, education represents a general problem that affects the whole world; hence the problem of Johnny’s failure is not restricted to the American society to which Arendt belonged. Rather, the question projects a general concern about ‘why the scholastic standards of the average American school lag so very far behind the average standards in actually all the countries of Europe’ (Arendt 2006: 175). The scholastic standard of schools in American society may certainly differ from the standard that we have in India. Given the extraordinary diversity in the Indian educational system, one finds that some schoolgoing children are privileged and some are not. The gap is wide if one considers the ‘disparities and stratifications’ that persist in Indian society (Drèze and Sen 2013: 128–129). The standard of government schools differs from one region to another. There are remote areas where schools do not have a permanent structure and are flooded by reluctant teachers. Proxy teachers run most of these schools. Teachers’ absenteeism is also a grave concern in India (ibid.: 131). Apart from this, the medium of instruction and the language of the textbook remain a burden for children whose mother tongue is different. Hence, formal learning in elementary school becomes a ‘battleground’ for children as they struggle to gain ‘self-confidence’ (Miri 2014: 87). This lacuna is an indication of a crisis as it divides the society, which in principle upholds the value of equality and advocates equality of opportunity for its citizens. In this chapter, an attempt is made to show how the pragmatic concern of the science of teaching might overlook some of the problems that affect teaching and learning in the Indian context.

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Krishna Kumar argues that, in a ‘textbook culture’, if powerless professionals conduct teaching, it reduces teaching to a narrow, curriculum-centric activity. Sole reliance on ‘textbook culture’ and overemphasis on the ‘science of teaching’ affect the process of learning adversely. In this chapter, the method or the science of teaching is not separately discussed; rather, it is accepted as integral to a textbook culture. The teaching of the textbook is conceptualised as a skilled activity which needs to be accompanied by the required theoretical grounding. Lack of this grounding will affect the sense of authority that attaches to educators. The teacher’s authority is not just about epistemic/academic ability, but also involves moral and aesthetic sensibility. These sensibilities would empower an educator to inculcate the spirit of the art of teaching, where teaching is a creative act that facilitates child-centric learning and can be carried out within the normative framework of education. Such an effort might culminate in enabling Johnny to read.

Arendt on the Crisis of Education: An Appraisal Arendt (2006) highlights how several issues like an uncritical pedagogy, an abnormal relationship between educators and children, and more importantly the political attitude of the state are some of the reasons instrumental in spreading the crisis of illiteracy. Relating the crisis with teaching, Arendt writes, ‘Under the influence of modern psychology and the tenets of pragmatism, pedagogy has developed into a science of teaching in general in such a way as to be wholly emancipated from the actual material to be taught’ (ibid.: 178– 179). The pedagogy of teaching guided by psychology emphasises scientific dissemination of knowledge. The focus on the process of dissemination is the central idea of the science of teaching. But, does such teaching emancipate learners from the lessons of the textbooks? This is one of the major concerns in contemporary societies. Often, educators are concerned with the development of the methodology

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which governs the process of learning to aim at easy dissemination of information to children during schooling. Knowledge dissemination focuses on the cognitive or intellectual development of children, where textbooks are to be treated as mere facilitators. The pragmatists also support the science of teaching because of their practical and democratic concern with imparting education to the majority. They have not completely given up the use of textbooks in their pedagogic practices. Moreover, methodological dissemination has been productive in achieving certain desirable consequences, such as the democratic intent of passing on information to a large number of students in the class. But then, what kind of crisis is involved in teaching that does not help Johnny to read? Teaching and learning are the responsibility of the school. Normally the child is first introduced to the world in school (Arendt 2006: 185). Schooling is essential for children because they learn various things such as language, arithmetic, physical education, music, drawing and crafting; more importantly, in the elementary stage, they begin to learn reading, writing and counting. School provides opportunities to introduce children to formal training in these areas for their physical and intellectual growth. Children play at school; they do some drills and exercises as they need to develop healthy bodies. They learn gradually about numbers, addition, subtraction and tables. The rudiments of mathematical knowledge naturally generate ‘the concept of right and wrong’ (Russell 2010: 165). Children are also taught about the value of good habits and imparted the spirit of learning. Hence, the school is an institution between the home and the world (Arendt 2006: 185). As an institution, it has an agential function in society. Children must be taught and introduced to the world more responsibly. This responsibility is bestowed on the school because children come from various backgrounds. The economic, cultural, linguistic, religious and social conditions of the children do matter. These differences reflect various kinds of inequalities present in our society. But the school is a different space; it accommodates divergence because of its

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institutional status. The school as an institution does not merely carry out its institutional agential function; rather, it performs a certain role in the realisation of new possibilities to which students aspire. Thus, ‘education should be aimed at preparing the young to a life of action, to a life of involvement in and transformation of the world’ (Gordon 2008: 53). Children are to be trained to pursue careers in particular fields. Hence, their interest and curiosity must be studied to comprehend their involvement. If children’s interests are ignored and their involvements are undermined, then it would be inapt to look forward to them as a resource for a better world. The educators who run the school must foster children’s aspirations in their most creative engagement, namely teaching. Teaching as an occupation is carried out by teachers in schools and other institutions. Its sole purpose is to make students understand the subjects taught and accomplish learning by them. As Dewey says, Teaching and learning are correlative or corresponding processes, as much so as selling and buying. One might as well say he has sold when no one has bought, as to say that he has taught when no one has learned. And in the educational transaction, the initiative lies with the learner even more than in commerce it lies with the buyer. If an individual can learn to think only in the sense of learning to employ more economically and effectively powers he already possesses, even more truly one can teach others to think only in the sense of appealing to and fostering powers already active in them. Effective appeal of this kind is impossible unless the teacher has an insight into existing habits and tendencies, the natural resources with which he has to ally himself. (1997: 29–30)

As a correlative act, teaching and learning unfold a mode of engagement more than a process of buying and selling commodities. Children go to school for learning, but they need to be further initiated, and their intent needs to be facilitated by sensible teachers. Effective teaching can be carried out if the teacher allies with the children, tries to understand students’ interests and abilities, which itself is a challenging task.

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Reflecting on Dewey’s pragmatic motivation of teaching and the entrenched challenges involved in the job of a teacher, Philip Jackson (2007) remarks that genuine teaching is carried out by a teacher who must always try to teach—a teacher in action. Expert teachers, for Jackson, do see teaching from a perspective. They are expected to be thoughtful in comparison with the non-expert teachers. Their thoughtfulness can be reflected in many ways; at least they see things differently. The expert teachers have a knack of spotting attentive students (ibid.: 340). Teachers are trained and habituated in teaching, but sometimes such training may fall short. Therefore, following Dewey, Jackson urges that teachers ought to be thoughtful while talking and listening to children. And that is an indication of how a teacher is in action. Teaching becomes more of a passive engagement if the pedagogy heavily emphasises only on the transmission of information. Teaching here would be nothing but indoctrination. Teachers would concentrate mostly on drill and demonstration (Rich 1971: 96). Children start memorising the information or gather the facts presented to them. They cannot interpret or think through the concepts or question the information and, most importantly, they fall behind in developing concepts critically. As a result, they turn out to be passive listeners. Arendt’s concern, therefore, has been how to engage children creatively and initiate them into learning through doubting, questioning, thinking about the information (Gordon 2008: 56). Only a curious learner can have all these. Curiosity as a feature of knowing or learning is common to human life. In the case of teaching and learning, both teacher and students express it in various ways. There are three stages of curiosity, according to Dewey. In order of ascendance, they are physical, social and intellectual curiosity (Dewey 2010: 30–33). A thoughtful and genuinely involved teacher possesses intellectual curiosity—while being critically involved in teaching. At that stage of curiosity, the teacher may question the existing methodology,

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might use her or his imagination creatively to explain things to children.1 Children, though, primarily exhibit physical and social curiosity. Still, intellectual curiosity is also found among children, where they continue to think upon certain things and are alert to new information and experiences. At the elementary level of learning, children keep exploring and testing activities. They show overflowing energy to venture into the new world of information and acquisition of knowledge. Children are supposed to learn, but the learning space must be accommodative and receptive to sensing ‘their expressive impulses, artistic and communicative instincts’ (Dewey 2008: 34). Children love to sit in a classroom which is well organised, decorated with various learning items, good, colourful benches, desks to sit and work at, with adequate gaps between benches for easy movement. And, more importantly, the learning space in the school must offer them scope for exercising their freedom—their social life in school needs to be enlarged. By giving them activities and exercises, their impulses and interest are opened up. For instance, give them coloured crayon pencils and papers or cooking utensils, building blocks and so on. According to Dewey, this opportunity will help the child to realise instincts and potentials and the motive of perseverance. Teachers must guide them when they are working out something. The teachers must be trained to seize the communicative intent of children. Arendt shares this pragmatic concern for learning, where children are involved in doing and thereby learning—that is, doing for learning. The teacher must explain what is being done in the process of learning. The process of learning is a spontaneous and playful engagement between students and their studies/learning materials. If the child is interested in cooking, then while exploring how utensils are set, they learn how the stove is operated, water is boiled and so on. This entire process creates an opportunity for a child to experience the preparation of the dish directly. If this spontaneity is broken down, then the learning process is breached; sometimes a blunt ‘no’ could

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push the child into the complex feeling of a minority. The apparent physical gap is widened by the mental attitude of educators or other adults who are closely associated with the child. It is important that teachers, as adults, create an environment of learning where children are treated equally in front of them (Arendt 2006: 179). If the children sense that they are being ignored, neglected and deprived or not being attended to fully, then they are left to their own resources, and thereby the teacher’s authority remains ineffective (see ibid.). As professional functionaries, teachers are powerful and exercise their authority while teaching students. The right form of authority comes from their ability to respond adequately to the queries and problems raised by the children. Their sense of authority would be enhanced and enriched if teachers were given the autonomy to design their own curricula based on the everyday needs of students. Though teachers’ authority is a temporary phenomenon, so far as students’ learning in the school is concerned, it is the teachers’ (or schools’) responsibility to help in introducing a child to the world. On the one hand, teachers express their passive attitude by mechanically responding to children, and their failure to provide explanations suppresses the curiosity of a learner. On the other hand, their lack of responsibility and authority does create a condition which makes a schoolgoing childlike Johnny vulnerable. This vulnerability increases when children start feeling that their freedom is restricted. The passive, cold attitude of the school widens the gap between the school and home. The vulnerability compounds into crisis if the medium of teaching/instruction is different from Johnny’s mother tongue, and the school becomes an unsafe place for the child. In the classroom, if teachers perpetuate discrimination in terms of gender, caste or race, or social status, and express insensitivity to inequality, then it worsens the crisis. Any form of implicit or explicit discrimination adds up to students’ everyday experience of life. An unsafe environment of learning could dehumanise the learner. The medium of teaching is an essential feature of learning in

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elementary education, one which affects Johnny immediately when he fails to read the textbook (Arendt 2006: 170).

Teaching in a Textbook Culture Now, one might ask where Arendt’s Johnny fails to associate with the process of learning. Imagine a case where Johnny in India is an illiterate migrant worker’s son whose mother tongue is different from the language of instruction in school. But the illiterate parents wish their child to read and write, and thus learning becomes a great challenge for Johnny. He looks forward to school with hope, rather than to his illiterate parents knowing well that they will be helpless in extending any support at home in reading and writing. Hence, teachers in the school are his only hope. Johnny’s enthusiasm and motivation to learn may not last long if the teachers in the school do not care for his learning. Given the Indian scenario, he might lag in comparison to other fellow students in the class. With reference to this kind of typical case, particularly in a textbook culture, a teacher seems to be helpless. As Krishna Kumar puts it, ‘A teacher is tied to the prescribed textbook. She has no choice in curriculum or materials or assessment. A textbook is prescribed for each subject, and the teacher has to teach it lesson by lesson until there are no lessons left’ (2011: 24–25). The content of the prescribed textbooks is bound to be taught without any consideration of being critical in relation to it. In other words, as a professional functionary in the system of education, the teacher has no right to question the content of the curriculum. Rather, teachers must teach and finish the syllabus on a prescribed schedule of the academic year. Teaching in such a prescriptive form can only leave the learner behind. Generally, when the average number of students in a class is considerably high, it becomes difficult to attend to the specific needs of every child. In a textbook culture, teachers have no power to formulate the curriculum, design the reading materials, or carry out teaching freely. Teaching as a dutiful vocation seems to be justified

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solely in terms of timely completion of prescribed lessons from the syllabus. Teaching is thus conducted helplessly in compliance with a textbook. The textbook, Krishna Kumar clarifies, ‘symbolizes authority under which the teacher must accept to work’ (ibid.). This acceptance is an outcome of colonial education, where teaching as a professional vocation is still carried out without freedom and autonomy. Lack of autonomy is evident in the structure of the curriculum prescribed by the education board. The syllabus, curriculum and examination are centralised, and teaching is carried out in a mechanical fashion that only succeeds in delivering rote learning. To cope with the challenges of learning, Johnny may begin to read mechanically. In the early phase of learning, often children are found memorising sentences so well that they can successfully recite them, but they sometimes fail to recognise the letters or the meanings of the words and sentences written in the textbook. Since the culture of teaching at the elementary level is a language-centric enterprise, it is a matter of concern why ‘children at the age of 6 and 7 fail to internalize whatever is taught using language’ (Kumar 2011: 59–60). The child is required to master the syllabary by sounding out the names of all the letters and practice writing them correctly over and over again. When the syllabary has been mastered in this manner, the child is called upon to recognize the different letters forming a word given in the primer and to pronounce the word. The words he is asked to confront at this stage are part of a long convention of pedagogy, and have nothing to do with a child’s perception or curiosity. (Ibid.)

Language teaching is considered central to the literacy programme at the school. Primary school children are taught the alphabet and then to spell out words. Finally, these children are taught to apply these words to form sentences. The children go through drill exercises right from starting to learn the alphabet. This activity becomes difficult if the language taught in the school is not the child’s mother tongue, but rather a second language. The pedagogy of language learning has been followed traditionally

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(Kumar 2011: 61). Colonial education did not reform this approach. In this scenario, if reading becomes the sole end of the literacy programme, then it becomes difficult to achieve. At the early stages of learning in school, children are curious to make sense (meaning) of the world. Instead, they relate mechanically to the words and sentences written in the textbooks. As a result, their immediate desire to know the meaning gets suspended. Meaning could be easier to understand if language learning could be activity-centric—if children are engaged in communication. They are allowed to talk about something; their desire to understand unfolds in communication, which could be carried out in the form of storytelling, talking, drawing, playing, narration and so on. Children must sense that they are free; this generates a sense of self-sufficiency. The teacher must observe the students and keep them creatively engaged in various activities. Kumar urges that ‘loving and encouraging teachers’ would find alternative techniques to make the children competitive readers (2011: 62). There is an opportunity for teachers to show their abilities particularly in developing an alternative approach and responding to the queries of the students. So, involved teaching is not only beneficial for children but also enhances the teachers’ authority. Johnny will benefit from such teaching, typically while getting associated with a teacher who cares for and supports children. The large class is a challenge for the teacher. Most teachers thus follow the traditional method of drilling students and having them memorise the alphabet and words. Children initially may feel academically competent, but some of them gradually become trapped by the pressure of learning. In such a situation, the students do not feel socially connected with teachers who maintain distance. A study of feelings of young children in school shows that ‘[a] close and comfortable relationship with the teacher may be even more important for younger children who are more used to adults as caretakers than as individuals concerned primarily with their

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academic skills’ (Valeski and Stipek 2001: 1200). Classroom learning for children in class one is a new phenomenon, because most children do not have the opportunity to go to kindergarten schools, particularly children who belong to villages in rural areas. The learning space has to be more accommodative, particularly teachers’ attitudes towards these students. And if they find that school does not offer adequate learning opportunities or is not hospitable enough to ‘solve problems’ that they perceive to be meaningful, they might lose the motivation to learn. As Valeski and Stipek suggest, ‘children who perform relatively poorly in school, or at least they think they do so are doubly disadvantaged’ (ibid.: 1210). Sometimes, children’s failing interest could also derive, as Krishna Kumar observes, from ‘teachers [who] are aggressive or show their desire to appear tough’, which might induce fear in the children’s psyche, particularly in the case of girls (2011: 84). Fear and apprehension in the initial phases of schoolgoing can act adversely, causing absenteeism and gradually ending with students dropping out of school. Referring to the hospitable condition of the school and the agenda of teaching that is carried out in elementary schools, Kumar’s intervention is indeed thoughtful. He does not agree with the idea that dropout at the very early stage is related to a culture of poverty. Rather, schools’ failure to retain children is due to the lack of an ‘absorbing environment’ in the school (Kumar 2011: 66). Going to school is not an attractive idea for children who belong to this age group, because of the poverty of teaching materials in the classroom. To overcome this kind of poverty is expensive, because appropriate spaces for learning and playing a musical instrument or with toys are necessary for absorbing the attention of children. Primary-level learning requires not only books but also activities and equipment as a source of learning. Certainly, the Indian government gives no added significance to ‘playful learning’. In the Indian context, classroom activities become diminished, not merely due to the textbook culture but also because of the burden of other administrative duties that are demanded from teachers, besides teaching. One such everyday activity which is being currently

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undertaken is the duty to feed children in the school under the midday meal programme. Teachers’ responsibility has increased as they have to maintain a record of groceries, look after hygiene, the safety of preparation of food and its distribution. With this additional duty, a teacher’s job becomes the job of a semi-manager. It is doubtful whether in such a scenario, teaching could be carried out sufficiently and thoughtfully in the school. Over and above this, since feeding is also used as a means of attracting children or increasing enrolment in the school, it becomes worrisome to imagine what kind of environment this activity of feeding brings to the learning environment of schools. As such, the school environment is such that there is nothing for these children who can freely touch, manipulate and exercise their effort in making something. These elementary schools not only lack activities but also are in bad condition; many children might not have even seen a library or playground at this stage. Storytelling, which does not require expenditure as such, is also not officially introduced in the curriculum. In Kumar’s view, storytelling opens up a democratic space for oral communication. ‘Hence, as an organizing principle, oral communication imparts immediacy and directness to human relationship both of which are important ingredients of democratic order’ (Kumar 2011: 80). Children like listening to stories. As a medium of oral communication, storytelling helps in improving their concepts, vocabularies, and above all establishes their affinity with the teacher. The pedagogy of teaching, therefore, must take a look at what kind of practices or culture the teachers largely adopt. Looking at the dropout and illiteracy rates in general, one can well imagine the absence of both a physical as well as a cultural environment of learning in the school; hence, it is a matter of grave concern how teaching is conducted in such a scenario.

Absenteeism and the Poverty of Teaching Teaching in these primary or lower primary schools is carried out by ‘teachers who are powerless in terms of their opportunities to exercise

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judgment and imagination in terms of curriculum and preparation of text materials’ (Kumar 2011: 66–67). Thus, even if we trained teaching professionals in the existing textbook culture, the teacher is still theoretically isolated. Teachers’ activities thereby are reduced to only passing on information, as mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, in the Indian scenario, even this is not carried out efficiently, as many schools are run by untrained contract teachers. According to Kumar, Teacher training and examinations continue to be two ‘weak’ areas of the system. Since school teaching continued to be a low-status profession, teacher training remains a poorly rated academic field. The training of elementary-level teachers in particular and all school teachers in general, remains largely untouched by an academic grounding in modern childcentred pedagogy. Such grounding might dilute the patterns of teacherpupil interaction associated with textbook culture. (Ibid.: 38)

By merely providing training to people, the state may not produce professionals. Professions develop through culture, and in the existing culture, the work of elementary schoolteachers and anganwadi2 workers is not recognised as contributing significantly to the development of society. There is no safety net that the existing pedagogy offers to deprived classes of young learners. Johnny’s negotiation with learning becomes difficult if he undertakes it in the spirit of rote learning and fails in the examination. Krishna Kumar says, ‘In practical terms the examination system required students to rehearse endlessly the skill of reproduction from memory, summarizing and essay type writing on any topic. Students were examined on their study of specific texts, not on their understanding of specific concepts or problems’ (2011: 31). Repeated hearing and recitation help in memorising information, but not in internalising meaning. Lack of professional training hampers the overall cognitive development of learners. Teachers, in general, lack the motivation to teach and thereby induce the spirit of learning in Johnny. Studies conducted by Drèze and Sen show ‘large cases of incidence of absenteeism by teachers and they are reluctant to teach’:

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There is something quite chilling in the thought that large numbers (possibly as high as half) of the country’s children are sitting idle in the classroom on an average school day—eager to learn but deprived of any guidance, and condemned in many cases to leave the schooling system without even being able to read and write. (Drèze and Sen 2013: 131)

Teachers’ absence and their non-involvement in teaching are a matter of grave concern so far as individuals’ sense of duty towards their profession is involved. It is a failure not only in terms of fulfilling one’s professional commitment but also fostering the deprivation of children’s basic rights to education (ibid.: 120). This also creates a psychological gap between teachers and aspiring learners. ‘Worst is the condition of learning in those schools which have got only one teacher, and in these schools, no teaching is conducted’ (ibid.: 119). The absence of teachers and absence of teaching not only hurt reading and learning but also, critically, cause inequality in society. This engenders a crisis in education. Given this kind of critical situation, Johnny certainly finds himself helpless. Arendt further warns us that ‘[a] crisis like this becomes a disaster if we respond to it with a preformed judgment, that is, with prejudices. Such an attitude not only sharpens the crisis but makes us forfeit the experience of reality and the opportunity of reflection it provides’ (2006: 171; emphasis added). To my mind, there are different kinds of prejudices prevailing in the Indian scenario; language is taught, in sarkari (government) schools, the way it has been taught traditionally, passed down through the colonial period to the present. The teaching methodology of elementary sarkari schools is yet to be modernised. With the advancement of cognitive science and psychology, we have no prejudices about the brain’s capacity of retaining information. Still, this has not lightened the psychological stress of learning. Rather, greater importance is given to the precise and perfect dissemination of information to children using various techniques and technology. Pictorial and PowerPoint presentations in the classrooms of many sarkari elementary schools

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are conceptualised as part of the modernisation of teaching. This has possibly opened a channel for the memorisation of facts. But it is doubtful whether such children are attentively cultivating the information given to them, and how long they succeed in retaining the creative energy that is required for knowledge formation. However, apprehension remains whether, in the name of teaching, children are being indoctrinated. Teachers make children drill and demonstrate to impart learning skills; we need to see how this environment of learning is conditioned (Rich 1971: 96). Indoctrination occurs when the teacher is careless and incompetent so far as the content of the syllabus is concerned. Knowingly or unknowingly, teaching is conducted with an ersatz sense of authority, without any concern for truth and democratic principles. False ideas get introduced as sometimes teaching materials do not provide supporting evidence. There is a possibility that some children may reject the way in which teaching is conducted in the class, because curious minds will look for evidence and the teachers intentionally try to shift their attention to something else. This happens particularly when a teacher not only lacks the ability, but also the intent to engage in teaching; this situation eventually ends up with rejecting ‘the students’ intellectual integrity and the capacity for independent judgment’ (ibid.: 100). It is indeed a matter of grave concern how Johnny would survive in this culture of poverty of teaching where the ethics of teaching is declining. One might ask whether the ethics of teaching is enough to safeguard the interests of Johnny.

An Element of the Ethics of Teaching In the culture of learning, a learner is a seeker of knowledge. He or she not only aspires to learn but also aspires to educate others who are willing. When we learn, we educate ourselves, and when we teach, someone else is educated; and sometimes if this engagement is genuine, then we are doubly educated—this applies to all teachers

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who try to teach. Genuine teaching fosters students’ intellectual ability and their capacity to form judgements. In this connection, the intent of the teacher is considered significant in facilitating this culture of learning (Rich 1971: 100). The teacher’s intent may also be observed by students, but a genuine engagement with teaching is such that it releases one from personal trouble and offers relief (see Deutelbaum et al. 1998: 18). The intent of genuine teaching is elevating, that is, while engaged in teaching the teacher transcends his/her personal life. Thus, teaching shows, as Rhodes puts it, knowledge at work (1983: 1426). The transaction opens up an intentional field of experience in which both teacher and student are engaged in learning. For instance, a doctor learns from his or her patients and vice versa. Both need each other, not only for their profession to survive but to resolve certain challenges of life as a whole. Hence, at a deeper level of acceptance, the pedagogy of teaching requires harmony for the proliferation of the culture of learning. If a teacher acts like a dictator and shows power that dominates the will of the other, there would be resentment and disharmony (see ibid.). Johnny could be a victim of the resentment that comes from the existing pseudo-pedagogy. He fails to negotiate with the pedagogy where there is poverty of the ethics of teaching. Johnny not only needs information but also depends on how the teacher interacts with him as well as his fellow students in the classroom. In that situation, it matters a lot how the teacher communicates with him. That is the mode in which the teacher invites Johnny to share his experience and meaning. This mode of engagement makes a teacher a performer where she is the author, producer and director of her performance. She is not bound entirely by the textbook—though the pedagogy is textbook-centric. Her authority lies in the beauty of delivering the content—that makes teaching a communicative art. Thus, teaching could be conceptualised beyond a fixed methodology that very much figures while getting trained as educators. Yet each episode of the performance of teaching is unique and must be attentively delved into while carefully engaging the students. Referring to Miel Alice’s work

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Creativity in Thinking, Rose Mukerji writes, ‘Teaching is participation at the point of another’s experience. Teaching is an active, helping mediating, transaction. It may be verbal or nonverbal, a demonstration or behavior model’ (1968: 274). Teaching as a communicative art helps not only in transmitting content or meaning, but also in soliciting the interest of the learner. Therefore, such an art of teaching aims at effective teaching where Johnny might cope successfully with the task and grow along with it. Not all children are intellectually sound or come from informative family backgrounds that help them to grasp the teaching or the lessons in the textbooks promptly. There could be many like Johnny who lag in comparison and try to absorb information as per their ability. Gradually, these slow learners become victims of textbook culture and end up as school dropouts. They fail to live in school, which is one of the essential pragmatic concerns that Arendt shares. Living in the school is an essential condition of Dewey’s philosophy of education, where he sees the school as an enlarged picture of home (2008: 26). Living in the school and living at home respectively are different so far as children’s engagement with teachers and parents is concerned. The home offers a unique condition for the growth of children; Arendt and Dewey are both concerned with whether such conditions could be created at school. Explaining the nature of the suitable condition that defines the sense of being at home, John Russon writes, ‘This being at home, however, is not simply “given”; it does not naturally occur, but is developed and accomplished through our practices’ (2017: 38–39). So ‘home’ is about more than its physical existence; it is cultural creation developed and nurtured by parents or other adults, which offers an opportunity for children to feel at home. This feeling is essential for children to obtain self-confidence (Miri 2014: 87). And this is gradually developed while taking part in everyday life at home and in the community. The child feels a sense of belongingness and that becomes a source of developing his/her identity.

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Newly joined students in elementary schools have a sense of self and self-identity, but if the school becomes a strange place for them, then this identity is threatened. There should be a drive to abolish this feeling of strangeness by imbibing child-centric education that emphasises activity-centric learning. And, more importantly, teachers’ attitude towards the students and their profession must be gracefully cultivated, which might help in creating a homely environment of learning in the school. Referring to the importance of building and sustaining the self-confidence of children in school, Miri emphasises the necessity of having the mother tongue in education. He writes, And if we add to the strangeness of the school’s environment, the elimination of the child’s mother tongue in its formal proceedings, the child’s confidence in its delicate grounding in the life of the community is more than likely to come under very serious threat. The more alien the language of the school is, the more powerful will this threat be. (Miri 2014: 87–88)

Encountering the difference in language and more precisely in the medium of teaching at school, the child like Johnny undergoes a battle-like experience to fight against this strangeness. It could cause an unnecessary hindrance to the cognitive and moral development of the child. Language is the home of being, as Heidegger rightly mentions. Miri and Russon have succinctly illustrated this notion of language, which offers a ground for the flourishing of personal and moral identity. Hence, the school should be one of the significant sites of exposure, in Russon’s (2017) terminology, which enables us to ‘make ourselves at home’. For Russon, the concept of home has a lot of significance so far as life is concerned. He writes, making ourselves at home means establishing a sense of belonging, a sense that we are legitimately of a piece with this reality. To act, we need minimally to feel at home in our immediate organic bodies—I must inhabit these limbs, such that my will is their will—but also we must find our natural setting as accommodating our actions. (Russon 2017: 37)

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Inhabiting ourselves at home not only shows our familiarity with the physical surroundings but also how the school as home offers a physical space for accommodating the individual’s freedom. Activities-oriented learning in the school requires free space for children to move, to carry out an activity in interaction with others in the class and, more importantly, to run and play in the grounds, contributing to the physical growth of the children. Expression of freedom through activities, games and playful learning positively develops the sense of belongingness. This belongingness is not limited to the children; rather it is grounded in the teacher. Everyday activities in the school ought to be maintained for a sustainable culture of teaching and learning. In the Indian scenario, schools do suffer not from powerless teachers but teachers who are unwilling to undertake to teach. Teachers’ absenteeism has become a hallmark of the poverty of teaching. Observing this situation, Drèze and Sen write: This is certainly not a picture that inspires confidence about school education in areas where it is most needed. While much of the rest of the world and even a significant part of the rest of the country, were humming with teaching activities half of the schools in those states did next to nothing to impart education to children, neglecting their duties as well as rights of the young students to receive elementary education and to join the modern world. (2013: 119–120)

The prevalent culture of absenteeism goes hand in glove with the state’s passivity towards the flaws in the education system. This culture has also accepted teaching merely as an act of imparting textbook information and has failed to impart literacy to a great portion of its children. Krishna Kumar writes, ‘If the school fails to impart literacy with lasting effect to great proportion of its students, it must be seen as a case of serious institutional disfunction in the overall social system’ (2011: 61). One can find traces of colonialism still prevailing in functions of the state that facilitate education. The duty of a teacher does not end with passing on information from the

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texts. Rather, there is something more to the story that needs to be told—the teaching/learning encounter is a humanising relationship (Mukerji 1968: 275). This encounter has nothing to do with the textbook, at least so far as elementary education is concerned. It requires confidence, love and trust to give a sense of security, freedom and dignity to children who are waiting for their teachers in the school. If ‘[t]eaching is the process of freeing the learner to live more fully’ (ibid.), then who will free Johnny from the school and the dominating pedagogy of textbook culture?

Pedagogy beyond the Ethics of Teaching Imagine a scenario where we tighten the norms and compel the teacher to come to school. We are sure they will. But one is not sure whether that would be enough to have the encounter of learning that is necessary to humanise this whole affair of teaching and learning. Humanising is no doubt an ethically pregnant concept, but equally an aesthetically healthy relationship that unfolds to understand the deeper meaning of harmony coexisting between a teacher and a learner. This coexistence turns a teacher into a learner—that is to say, a teacher becomes a co-learner along with the students. The dynamic of this aesthetic attitude of man, Friedrich Schiller thinks, is about ‘education towards art as well as education by art, which aims at realizing the moral improvement in man’ (Grossman 1968: 31). Schiller’s aesthetic education shows how the physical nature/ impulse gets harmonised with the demands of free reason (Grossman 1968: 34). The harmonisation is a transformative step taken by the person with ‘courageous will and living feelings’ (ibid.). For Schiller, beauty lies in understanding the spirit of the other. The teacher must reach out to students and help them understand the content of the ideas. Reaching out here requires aesthetic sensibility. A teacher’s interaction with students is an example of the ‘aesthetic mood of

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engagement’ which will help in transcending reason as a source of moral imperative. Human ‘aesthetic sensibility is a gift of nature’ (Schiller 2016: 99). And it is above mere sensuous engagement with anything in the world. Schiller suggests that ‘contemplative thinking’ is necessary to reach the ‘supersensuous level’. The contemplative thinking of a teacher would help him enter into the realm of knowing that bridges the gap between the knower and the known. The aesthetic unity is conceived here by Schiller as the mood of engaging oneself in the activity, but ‘the possibility of uniting both natures, the realization of the infinite in the finite (including the possibility of most sublime humanity) is proved exactly this way’ (ibid.: 98). The beauty of such teaching is that the teacher as a co-learner, while engaged in teaching, enters into the infinite realm of knowledge. It is a pure ‘autonomous deed’. The beauty Schiller refers to lies in situating ourselves as well as in undertaking the deed (ibid.: 97). Only reason as a source of moral imperative cannot help in overcoming falsehood and superstitions and bring changes to life. Rather, as Grossman summarises, Only in the education of man’s feelings, therefore, lies hope that reason ultimately will prevail. But as reason, according to Schiller, cannot act immediately upon feelings—‘man cannot pass directly from sensation to thought’—a new power has to be introduced as a power which creates a balance between the rational and sensuous forces and brings out the intermediary stage. In assigning to art the power to educate mankind lies Schiller’s original contribution. Art can act upon man’s feeling immediately. Schiller introduced into man’s cultural evolution a stage for which he found his term: ‘If we call the condition of sensuous determination the physical, and that of the rational determination the logical and moral, we must call this condition of real and active determinacy the aesthetic.’ (Grossman 1968: 35)

Thus, by emphasising the aesthetic, Schiller tries to show that moral awakening requires an aesthetic sensibility.

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The artistic ability develops with reflective feeling or contemplative thinking that unfolds a space for creative engagement with oneself as well as with the other. Mukerji, while defining teaching, refers to Tagore who ardently believed that ‘a lamp can never light another lamp unless it continues to burn its flame’ (Mukerji 1968: 273). In this connection, it could be said that if teachers have to have authority over teaching, then they need to enlighten themselves not only with the epistemic virtue of seeking knowledge in a particular subject, but with a moral and aesthetic sensibility that actually transforms their engagement with students in developing the latter’s creativity as well (see Gordon 2008: 57). Therefore, Johnny would want to have such a teacher who could creatively engage him in learning and enable him to read. There is a need to develop a culture of aesthetic sensibility and understanding, not just for appreciation but for a normative engagement in our everyday life. It would unfold in forming authentic value judgements, as Robert Audi (2013) suggests, referring to the complementary relationship between aesthetic perception and moral perception. ‘Perception per se here is construed as not only having an experiential condition of knowing but also a response to what is experienced’ (ibid.: 104). The virtue of response is that it maintains harmony. The beauty of teaching thus lies in initiating the learner to take an interest in learning and keep her creatively engaged in a harmonious way till she comes to know the content. To conclude, Johnny’s creativity and curiosity might get muted in the pedagogy of textbook culture; rather, his ability needs to be nurtured and protected so that he realises certain possibilities that he is hopeful of and renews them creatively for a better life. Therefore, Arendt’s concern has been to develop a culture of pedagogy which is not just democratic, but also critical. He expects that a ‘critical educator can engage in reading and discussing any texts’ with the students creatively (Gordon 2008: 59). Learning in this mode of creative

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engagement demands freedom; that is, not freedom from teaching. Rather, the appeal is for developing the art of teaching which is not strictly bound by a methodology as the science of teaching maintains. The art of teaching sets up a harmonious living space where teacher and students can make learning a playful activity. If plays are to be included in the medium of teaching, as emphasised by Arendt (2006), Dewey (2011) and Kumar (2011), then it would transform the entire discourse of learning. The process of learning is a spontaneous and playful engagement between the student and their studies/learning materials. Play is associated with spontaneity of expression, where ‘learning through play does justice to his lividness’ (Arendt 2006: 180). Children have a joyous experience while engaged in play. Playing is not merely a demonstration of physical activity; rather, as Dewey says, ‘Experience has shown that when children have a chance at physical activities which bring their natural impulses into play, going to school is joy, management is less burden, and learning is easier’ (2011: 210). Therefore, play could be a medium of engaged learning which may enlighten both the educator and the child. If Johnny is failing to read, then we must at least try to engage him in playful learning. Such engagement might attract him to attend classes where learning becomes a joyful experience. Theorising the playful impulse, Schiller maintains that such engagement in learning creates an aesthetic stage for both learner and educator. Play elevates humans from their natural grounding. It unfolds freedom and shows ‘a step toward the achievement of aesthetic culture in an irreversible evolution tending towards the moral stage of mankind, the realm of the true and the good’ (Grossman 1968: 38). This play could be a medium of the art of teaching that has the power of creating a new bond between Johnny and the school. And it may also succeed in transforming the teacher into a creative and thoughtful professional co-learner who could be instrumental in building confidence in Johnny and enable him in reading. This would certainly make all of us happy. But we have to wait till Johnny says with confidence, ‘Yes, I can read!’

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Notes 1

2

A teacher purveys wonder—‘we must become little children to enter into the kingdom of science,’ Dewey says, referring to Bacon. The engagement is such that ‘the teacher has usually more to learn than to teach’ (Dewey 1997: 33). Anganwadis are rural childcare centres, established in 1975 by the Government of India in the villages and rural and semi-rural areas.

References Arendt, H. 2006. Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin. Audi, R. 2013. Moral Perception. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Deutelbaum, W., C. de Saint Victor, B. Scholes, M. Merriman and S. Deligiorgis. 1998. ‘The Art of Teaching: Interviews with Three Masters’. Iowa Review, 28(1): 1–29.  Dewey, J. 1997. How We Think. New York: Dover. Dewey, J. 2008. The School and Society. New Delhi: Aakar. Dewey, J. 2011. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New Delhi: Aakar. Drèze, J. and A. Sen. 2013. An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions. New York: Allen Lane. Gordon, M. 2008. ‘Hannah Arendt on Authority: Conversation in Education Reconsidered’. In Hannah Arendt and Education, edited by M. Gordon, 37–65. New York: Penguin. Grossman, W. 1968. ‘Schiller’s Aesthetic Education’. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2(1): 31–41. Indian Express. 2018. ‘Ed-Tech: Click to Download Teacher’, 21 November. Jackson, P. 2007. ‘Real Teaching’. In Philosophy of Education: An Anthology, edited by R. Curren, 336–346. Oxford: Blackwell. Kumar, K. 2011. What Is Worth Teaching? New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan. Miri, M. 2014. Philosophy and Education. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mukerji, R. 1968. ‘Teaching Is …’. Young Children, 23(5): 272–275. Rhodes, P. 1983. ‘Teaching’. British Medical Journal, 286: 1426–1427. Rich, J. M. 1971. Humanistic Foundations of Education. Ohio: Charles and Jones.

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Russell, B. 2010. On Education. London: Routledge. Russon, J. 2017. Sites of Exposure: Art, Politics and the Nature of Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Schiller, F. 2016. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Keith Tribe. New Delhi: Penguin. Valeski, T.N. and D.J. Stipek. 2001. ‘Young Children’s Feeling about the School’. Child Development, 72(4): 1198–1213.

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Reconstructing a Critical Ontology of Education through an Ethics of Care: Critical Pedagogy, the World View of the Ao Naga Tribe, and Care Ethics in Dialogue Amrita Banerjee and Karilemla The last few decades have witnessed an explosion of scholarship from hitherto marginalised intellectual spaces around critical pedagogy and the dilemmas of teaching in societies which are riddled with inequalities and structural injustices. We argue that the project of critically rethinking education and pedagogies and, by implication, the ethics of teaching, involves two components— critical and reconstructive. Critique involves decoding how problematic hegemonies and structural inequalities get coded into apparently benign educational systems, and ways in which education might actively contribute to the maintenance of hegemony, thus degenerating into what Paulo Freire and bell hooks call a ‘practice of domination’ (hooks 2003: 130). Reconstructing a philosophy of education in an emancipatory mode constitutes the other half of the project. The latter involves rethinking education as a ‘practice of freedom’, ‘resistance’ and ‘hope’—new terms of discourse offered by scholars such as Freire (2005) and hooks (2003). If we approach the project of reconstruction from a philosophical lens, then various ontological, epistemological and moral dimensions come to the fore. First, a philosophical intervention would involve rethinking the very terms in which discussion is framed as well as reconceiving 223

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the basic elements of an educational ontology. It would also involve envisioning novel ways of framing the relations between an individual teacher/learner and the larger community, and thinking through issues of diversity and community. Our chapter aims to contribute to this project of philosophical reconstruction by offering conceptual elements for a critical ontology of education, and reconfiguring epistemologies and ethics of teaching based on it. Our philosophical engagement encompasses three traditions—critical pedagogy from the Americas, the world view of the Ao Naga tribe from India, and the Western feminist philosophical framework of care ethics. In the first section, titled ‘Notes towards a Critical Ontology of Education’, we engage work in critical pedagogy in order to develop certain ontological, epistemological and moral directions from them. We broadly place and read these works in dialogue with the philosophical framework of care ethics.1 While we urge the reader not to reduce all of critical pedagogy to a hermeneutic of care, our rationale for adopting the hermeneutic of ‘care’ as rooted in the care tradition is threefold: (a) philosophical definitions of ‘care’ from care ethics enable us to expose the radicalness of the conceptual link between teaching and care that critical pedagogists such as hooks try to forge; (b) the interpretive frame of care enables us to develop several other conceptual connections following from the link between care and teaching; and finally, (c) a dialogue between critical pedagogy and care ethics, and the kind of hermeneutical exercise we undertake in the course of this chapter, affords a rich opportunity to critically revisit existing resources in the care tradition so as to highlight potential contributions from women of colour feminisms and critical race theory, from which much of critical pedagogy emanates. Continuing with the theme of care, the second section titled ‘Züki/Tzüki as a Caring-Space-in-Between’ focuses on developing conceptual resources for a critical ontology of education and an ethics of teaching from the knowledges of the Ao tribe of Nagaland in north-eastern India.2 The rich and heterogeneous world views of

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India’s numerous tribes have typically found themselves outside the domain of mainstream Indian philosophy and are often relegated to a realm which is curiously designated as ‘philosophy of culture’. In this chapter, we reflect on an Ao institution called Züki/Tzüki3 and develop it as a philosophical frame with ontological, epistemic and ethical significance. Züki/Tzüki as a philosophical frame is a somewhat idealised abstraction from the institution of Tzüki/Züki, which historically served as a space of teaching for young women of the Ao tribe (albeit on a very different model than most contemporary educational spaces). We first offer a reading of the figure of the teacher in this space (namely the Zükikivola/Tzükibutsüla) as performing the dual role of teacher and caregiver for Ao children and the community as a whole. Second, we conceptualise Züki/Tzüki as an intriguing kind of blended or between space of: (a) care and teaching; (b) personal and political; (c) home and world; and (d) individual and social transformation. Züki/Tzüki is construed as a caring space of teaching and learning to be a free and hopeful person, and a between space for the formation of a social person. We argue that specific conceptual elements of Züki/Tzüki help us to reconstruct a critical ontology of education and provide new trajectories into epistemologies and ethics of teaching. Finally, Züki/Tzüki also enables us to evolve a robust conception of what we call ‘caring spaces’ within an ethics of care on the one hand and critical pedagogies on the other.4 We must issue a note of caution to the reader regarding our engagement with Züki/Tzüki and the Ao Naga world view. Our analysis is not geared towards empirical or historical representation of the institution; neither does it aim at a romanticised revival of a lost form of life. Rather we see our project as one of normative construal, which involves developing specific conceptual possibilities in/from Züki/Tzüki for reconstructing a critical ontology of education and for imagining epistemologies and ethics of teaching in a free, inclusive and hopeful mode. Such analysis becomes all the more interesting, yet challenging, precisely because structurally Züki/Tzüki appears to be

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very different from the kinds of educational spaces as well as caring spaces that we are typically familiar with.5 We argue that Züki/Tzüki as a philosophical frame is capable of disclosing a novel kind of moral sensibility and a philosophically refreshing standard for imagining spatial configurations between the individual and her community on the one hand, and for the formation of a social person on the other. The project of normative construal demands a certain level of theoretical abstraction from the given, that is, we imagine Züki/Tzüki despite and beyond what it may have been in practice. Consequently, a gap (a misalignment of sorts) is bound to persist between our conceptual iteration of Züki/Tzüki (that is, Züki/Tzüki as a philosophical frame imbued with onto-epistemic-ethical significance) versus its instantiation in the everyday lives of the Ao. This kind of gap is not a problem, but rather the intended goal of analysis. Therefore, our work does not issue any claims concerning authenticity or historical accuracy of the institution. Finally, we recognise that there may have been problematic aspects of Ao life associated with the practice of Züki/ Tzüki. However, such problematic elements are precisely the ones that are to be held in abeyance for the purposes of a normative construal so that the work does not reduce to a project of nostalgic revival. It must be noted that knowledges concerning the Ao world view/s, like many indigenous traditions across the world, have primarily been transmitted orally. Since the usual media of philosophical knowledge, namely written texts with analysis and argumentation, are absent, philosophical engagement of the Ao perspective comes with numerous methodological challenges. It demands stretching out towards non-traditional sources such as narratives, testimonies, stories and songs, some of which have now been documented. It also demands relying on memories of village elders and other authoritative sources, all of which come with quandaries concerning translation, interpretation and authenticity. Our own speaking and hearing positions from outside and within the tribe respectively are also points of negotiation. In light of these considerations, we urge the

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reader not to take our analysis as offering an essentialised conception of Züki/Tzüki or as articulating a universal Ao philosophy. Regarding care ethics, the dominant versions and primary conceptual genealogies of the tradition continue to be located primarily within white-stream Western feminist philosophy. Through our engagement with the concept of care through the dual lenses of critical pedagogy and the Ao tradition, we hope to expose potential theoretical contributions from women of colour feminisms, critical race theory and non-Western tribal traditions on the link between care and pedagogy on the one hand, and care and space on the other. While hooks claims a link between care and teaching, she neither develops nor anchors this philosophically within an ethics of care. As we flesh out the philosophical implications of her claims and conceptually work out this link between care and teaching in the first section, and care and space from the Ao perspective in the second section, we also issue a claim regarding non-white and non-Western lineages for the care tradition.

Notes towards a Critical Ontology of Education: From Teaching as Caring to Teaching Community In this section, we attempt to draw up a philosophical trajectory for critical pedagogy. The broad aim is to build up ontological, epistemological and ethical bases to help ground fundamental insights from critical pedagogies. We highlight concepts such as relationality, community and hope, in relation to teaching and learning. In interpreting and developing these concepts, we read these alongside a larger theoretical framing of teaching as a caring profession that shows up in bell hooks’ book, Teaching to Transgress (1994) and the idea of ‘teaching community’, which she highlights in Teaching Community (2003). Let us begin by centring and philosophically developing a fundamental insight from feminist pedagogies, which is the idea that

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teaching is a practice in care or a caring profession (hooks 1994). We would like to reflect on the radicalness of this insight before it is lost on us, and in order to do so, we will read the connection between teaching and care in relation to the philosophical frame of care ethics. However, before doing so, we would like to note that in framing the idea of education as a practice in/of care, this perspective may be construed as directly talking back to dominant male-stream conceptions of education in the Western intellectual tradition, which take education to be primarily about training the mind. The emphasis on the mind as the fundamental target of education, in turn, must be grasped in light of the mind/body and reason/emotion oppositions pervading much of male-stream Western philosophical thought. The implicit hierarchy within these dualisms that often privileges the mind/reason side of the binary also propagates an intense suspicion of affects, emotions or anything that has to do with the body. It may not take much for educational practice, thus conceived, to degenerate into a practice of domination rather than freedom, given the fact that educational practices have always been situated amidst vast structural inequalities and hierarchical relations between social groups. The threat intensifies in contexts where marginalised groups have historically been mapped onto the body side of the binary while dominant ones have been mapped onto mind.6 Furthermore, the dominant conceptual edifice, with its mind/body binary, typically categorises care as mere affect or emotion, and keeps it confined to the private sphere. Pushed thus into the private realm, and finding itself within a binary classification of spheres into private and public (of which the latter is held to be of primary significance from the point of view of moral and political theory), care is not only stripped of cognitive and moral worth, but also finds itself at odds with learning (when the latter is conceived purely as an activity of the mind). At this point, it is worth recalling Freire’s characterisation of dominant modes of contemporary Western education, and then considering how these might be burdened by some of the conceptual

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lineages outlined earlier. Freire characterises the dominant model as the ‘banking concept of education’ (2005: 72), while hooks (1994: 13) characterises it as the ‘rote assembly line approach to learning’. Both argue that these models are cut off from social reality (ibid.: 51) and result in education becoming a ‘practice of domination’. To go back to Freire’s definition of the banking model, ‘Education … becomes an act of depositing in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat’ (Freire 2005: 72). Given this structure, the banking model according to Freire remains fundamentally ‘antidialogic’ (ibid.: 110), and is based on the belief that students alone are at the receiving end in the classroom, while the teacher only gives. Philosophically reflecting on the banking model, we now outline some key features that we think underlie its ontology and epistemology. First, a certain social atomism appears to be at the heart of the ontology of the banking model, in so far as its simplest elements appear to be discrete, self-interested individuals who are bound within the terms of a contract. These individuals (teachers and students) are engaged in what may be taken to be a predominantly distributive project, namely that of distributing, consuming and storing knowledge (‘knowledge’ may be characterised as the primary good here). It is worth pondering over the connotations that ‘knowledge’ may take in this scheme. When defined in distributive terms and packaged in the modality of a contract, ‘knowledge’ threatens to reduce to ‘information’ and is commodified. A consumerist understanding of knowledge, of course, intensifies further in contemporary times as education all over the world becomes heavily corporatised and implicated in transnational capital flows. Let us, therefore, characterise the basic ontology of the banking model as an ‘individual-first approach’. Second, we find that the ontological atomism of the banking model is accompanied by a lack of epistemological reciprocity between actors. This is because the direction of epistemic flow becomes unidirectional and linear

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when the teacher is conceived of as only giving, while the student is construed as only receiving, memorising and repeating. Third, the individual-first approach with its embedded epistemic values of impartiality and detached rationality obstructs/discourages teachers and students from seeing themselves as embedded in larger communities, socio-political structures and networks of power. In these ways, the individual-first ontology of the banking model threatens to de-socialise and depoliticise teaching and learning. It is, therefore, incapable of anchoring any understanding of educational spaces as communities, which may be social and political actors in their own right. We think that when Freire and hooks note how ‘dominator culture’ (hooks 2003: 131) seeks to sever the link between individual and community, similar concerns are looming large on the horizon. Fourth, the link between learning and lived experience suffers deeply in the ontologies and epistemologies of the banking model. This is only heightened as knowledge gets reduced to information to be consumed by the mind, and as embodied aspects of teaching and learning are excluded from the picture. Finally, and if we read aspects of critical pedagogy in line with philosophical insights from feminist epistemology on the limits of detached and individualistic rationality, we also see how the banking model would be vastly illequipped to include any narrative of care, or to even coherently argue for the intertwining of the cognitive and the affective as part of an educational ontology. Various elements of the conceptual edifice of the Western philosophical tradition come to be challenged by feminist philosophers and critical race theorists as they undo some of the traditional binaries (private/public, mind/body, reason/emotion), and try to rethink epistemology, ontology and moral theory from hitherto neglected sites. In the philosophical discourse of the late 20th century, ethics of care is proposed as a new paradigm in moral and political philosophy to counter the dominant ways of understanding social cooperation through the metaphor of a social contract. It draws

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care out of the private realm, situates it as epistemically and morally worthy, and subverts its traditional understandings to generate an ontology as well as a moral and political epistemology that is radically different from the dominant justice-based paradigms of moral theory. Among its many contributions are the centring of the concepts of relationality and interdependence (as opposed to self-interested individualism), responsibility (as opposed to obligation), vulnerability and relational autonomy (as opposed to an individualistic notion of autonomy), and care (as opposed to a dry principle of justice) at the heart of moral and political theory.7 In order to develop the conceptual link between teaching and care, let us now theorise this connection in dialogue with the frame of care ethics. Foregrounding the link between care and teaching allows for the recentring of the body and emotions within processes of learning and teaching in emancipatory ways, and destabilises the understanding of education as primarily being about training the mind, or at least reconfigures the project of training the mind. No wonder the linkage between the affective and cognitive on the one hand, and between learning and lived experience on the other, receives a great deal of attention in feminist writings on critical pedagogy. The following observation of hooks deeply troubles any disembodied and dry rationalistic approach to teaching: ‘To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin’ (1994: 13). Sandy Grande (2004), inspired by insights from Native American traditions, further argues for maintaining the mind-body-spirit connection, even while developing rationally based critical theories of liberation and emancipatory pedagogies. According to her, while critical scholars (and this may be said of Freire to some extent) focus predominantly on the intellectualpolitical and somewhat on the aesthetic-affective, they hardly draw attention to the spiritual aspects of liberation. Although examining this critique is not a primary task of this chapter, we are reminded

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of hooks’s observations at this point. Hooks writes, ‘Whereas Freire was primarily concerned with the mind, Thich Nhat Hanh offered a way of thinking about pedagogy which emphasized wholeness, a union of mind, body, and spirit’ (1994: 14).8 The new framing in terms of care allows us to define education as an embodied praxis, thus reiterating the need for ‘union of theory with praxis’ on the one hand, and ‘practical wisdom’ on the other (hooks 2003: x). A model predicated on the close tie between care and teaching enables us to conceive of the ontology of education along relational lines. Let us, therefore, characterise this as a ‘relation-first approach’. Within this ontological framing, we can productively place hooks’s emphasis on the need for ‘self-actualisation’ of the teacher (1994: 47) and Freire’s emphasis on ‘conscientisation’ (2005: 14). A relational ontology is able to overcome the characteristic lack of reciprocity implicit in the banking model since it allows for knowledge to flow in multiple directions. As hooks writes, Teaching is a performative act. … To embrace the performative aspect of teaching we are compelled to engage ‘audiences’, to consider issues of reciprocity. Teachers are not performers in the traditional sense of the word in that our work is not meant to be a spectacle. Yet it is meant as a catalyst that calls everyone to become more and more engaged, to become active participants in learning. (1994: 11)

The reconfiguring of the basic elements of an educational ontology along relational lines also translates into an insistence on ‘engaged pedagogy’ (ibid.: 15) and practices of mutuality in many feminist and anti-racist pedagogies. The goal, as poignantly captured in Freire’s words, is to yield a ‘communicative’ model (2005: 110). Emphasising relationality and framing teaching as a practice in/of care helps in revitalising the communal dimensions of teaching and learning and ‘the likelihood of collective effort in creating and sustaining a learning community’ (hooks 1994: 8). These dimensions range from learning to think critically about one’s subjectivity in relation to one’s socio-political situation and discerning how teaching

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and learning are embedded in larger communities or networks of power, to a recognition of how these activities deconstruct and/or reconstruct the very communities they are a part of. Writes Freire, ‘apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other’ (2005: 72). We think that the ontological relationality emphasised by critical pedagogists pertains to various spheres—among individuals as members of educational communities, between teachers/learners and the world, and between educational communities and the larger communities or social structures they are a part of. It also reiterates the close connection, and indeed the reciprocal relation, between theory and practice as well as between experience and knowledge. Writes hooks, When our lived experience of theorising is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. Indeed, what such experience makes more evident is the bond between the two—that ultimately reciprocal process wherein one enables the other. (1994: 61)

In the light of these elements, both Freire and hooks define the very purpose of education as being about the ‘practice of freedom’ (hooks 2003: ix). On hooks’s view, education is a potential catalyst for social transformation, a ‘counter-hegemonic’ act (1994: 4) and ‘a movement against and beyond boundaries’ (ibid.: 12). In its emphasis on troubling boundaries and its connection to larger goals of transformation, this vision for an educational ontology yet again departs from the detached individualism and social atomism of the banking model. In Teaching Community, hooks begins to emphasise how teaching potentially becomes a catalyst for not only social transformation, but also for hope, in agreement with Freire (hooks 2003: xiv;

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Freire 2005: xiv). While making a systematic connection between teaching and hope, hooks writes, ‘Educating is always a vocation rooted in hopefulness’ (2003: p. xiv). Indeed, education becomes a practice of freedom ‘via a pedagogy of hope’ (ibid.: 8). Taking our start from hooks’s observations, we would like very briefly to draw out certain aspects of a phenomenology of hope, which can anchor hooks’s pedagogy of hope.9 First, a certain temporality seems to underlie a pedagogy of hope. Phenomenologically speaking, hope is capable of drawing us towards a vision of a future that is not yet. By allowing us to stand outside of ourselves—temporally (towards the future), ontologically (towards the Other and the world) and imaginatively (the utopic element in it)—hope becomes a potential site of ‘ecstases’.10 Furthermore, in its call to project into the future, a pedagogy of hope can also be considered to have a transformative potential built into it—this is perhaps what hooks has in mind when she describes it as ‘life-sustaining’ and ‘mind-expanding’ (2003: xv). Therefore, a phenomenology of hope holds up an active sense of agency in us as opposed to a phenomenology of fear implicit in a pedagogy of domination. Second, hooks’s version of a pedagogy of hope emphasises the need to reanimate bonds among members of an educational space as well as between the academy and the world beyond it. Observes hooks, ‘I work to recover our collective awareness of the spirit of community that is always present when we are truly teaching and learning’ (2003: xv). A pedagogy of hope links education with larger projects of identity formation and, as mentioned before, with caring for the soul according to hooks and for the spirit according to Grande. A pedagogy of hope, thus construed, is capable of grounding a more holistic notion of individuality as including body, mind and spirit; and more importantly would emphasise the integration of these elements for an ontology of education. Third, a phenomenology of hope as an aspect of a pedagogy of hope is an antidote to despair and fear, which typically animates a

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pedagogy of domination. According to hooks, a culture of despair is a key instrument through which dominator cultures perpetuate a phenomenology of fear and cut bonds between people. The Other, therefore, becomes a perpetual threat to the self. ‘When despair prevails we cannot create life-sustaining communities of resistance’ (hooks 2003: 12). The ecstatic character of hope that we emphasise, on the contrary, has the potential to reverse such a phenomenology of fear by reinstating the bond of the Self with the Other, with the world, and with a new kind of future. We believe that once a robust phenomenology of hope is built into a pedagogy of hope, it will be able to take us out of self-interested individualism and chart out new directions for critical ontologies, epistemologies and ethics of teaching. Furthermore, we emphasise the link between teaching and hope as a key conceptual aspect of teaching defined as a practice in/ of care, and as a novel conceptual contribution to the very concept of care. With these elements in mind, we now turn towards a philosophical consideration of the Ao world view so as to further argue for the conceptual links between care, teaching, community and hope on the one hand, and to evolve a robust conception of ‘caring spaces’ on the other.

Züki/Tzüki as a Caring-Space-in-Between: Teaching Community, Teaching Hope This section tries to map out potential points of contribution to a critical ontology of education along with epistemologies and ethics of teaching from the Ao Naga perspective by reflecting on the conceptual potential of an Ao institution called Züki/Tzüki. The institutions of Arju and Züki/Tzüki can roughly be defined as communal dormitories that were designed by the Ao tribe as a continuation of home spaces for Ao children and adolescents. While Arju served as dormitories for boys and young men, Züki/Tzüki served as dormitories for girls and young women. In former times,

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there were many Züki/Tzüki (girls’ dormitories) in all the mefu/ mepu (colonies) in a village. It was here that young unmarried girls began their adolescent lives by acquiring training and knowledge in the Ao way of life under the guardianship of a female figure, namely the Zükikivola/Tzükibutsüla.11 In the space of the Züki/Tzüki, young girls also got an opportunity to interact with young boys of the tribe.12 Continuing with the theme of care and the conceptual link between care and teaching that we are philosophically developing for critical pedagogy, we proceed by, first, reading the figure of the teacher in this space (namely the Zükikivola/Tzükibutsüla) as performing the dual role of teacher and caregiver for Ao children and the community as a whole. Second, we conceptualise Züki/Tzüki as an intriguing kind of blended or between space of care and teaching (especially for teaching community) on the Ao world view. Through its specific structure and modalities of functioning, we argue that Züki/Tzüki can also be conceptualised as an intermediate space between private and public, between home and world, and for self-actualisation of both the individual and the community. As with our previous work on Arju, we believe that engaging philosophically with Züki/Tzüki as a material-symbolic space, and exposing its orientation towards care, enables us to evolve a robust conception of what we call ‘caring spaces’ within an ethics of care—a dimension that remains undertheorised within dominant articulations of care ethics. On the other hand, hooks in Teaching Community yearns for non-traditional spaces, that is, spaces outside of institutionalised classrooms, for the purposes of democratic education and in order to actualise a pedagogy of hope (2003: 41). However, no systematic theorisation of such spaces emerges in critical pedagogy and, especially, none in relation to an ethics of care. Again, we argue that the Ao perspective has much to bring to the table. Of course, our reading of Züki/Tzüki as a space for teaching and learning is inspired by a wider conception of education underlying much of critical pedagogy, which is beautifully expressed by hooks: ‘learning must be understood as an experience that enriches

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life in its entirety’ (ibid.: 42). A normative construal of Züki/Tzüki throws up interesting implications for the philosophical link between care, teaching, community and hope on the one hand, and between care and space on the other, which we are trying to develop as aspects of critical pedagogy. Structurally, Züki/Tzüki comprised groups of young girls and was headed by a guardian figure, namely the Zükikivola/Tzükibutsüla. The latter was a widow and was also the legal owner of the Züki/ Tzüki under whose responsibility and teaching, young unmarried girls slept over the night at Züki/Tzüki. According to oral tradition, her candidacy for leadership was based on her status as a woman of wisdom, who knew the history and lore of the tribe and possessed good command over her demeanour. Züki/Tzüki was a communal space that young Ao girls inhabited from a certain age. It was a complex structure, although there was no clear-cut hierarchy in terms of seniority, unlike Arju (see Banerjee and Karilemla 2016: 98). It was a space of learning, and yet appears to have been a continuation of a home-like space (a home away from home), characterised by intimate bonds of friendship and care established through shared living and being-with as a close-knit network. Ontologically, therefore, we can think of Züki/Tzüki as a unique kind of intermediate space between the home and the world on the one hand, and between something of a modern-day boarding school and family on the other. We read the figure of the Zükikivola/Tzükibutsüla as a unique blend between a teacher and a caregiver. Under her guidance, the girls learnt handicrafts, social etiquette, different songs and ballads that were used in various social events and festivals, and the traditions and lore of the Ao. She also educated them in matters of women’s work, family norms, and women’s empowerment in the socio-political sphere, among others. Through training in Züki/Tzüki, the young girls learned the dignity of labour both for self-cultivation and for the larger community. Apart from being an educator, the Zükikivola/ Tzükibutsüla was interestingly a broker of marriages for these young

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girls. The Zükikivola/Tzükibutsüla nurtured young girls into their individual and social identities. Tako Jamir remarks that the Zükikivola/Tzükibutsüla’s job was equivalent to a university professor of the modern period. Her job was to train [students in] social etiquette and to teach the great valour of their cultural history. She would teach songs and ballads to the girls, how to weave and knit yarn, and teach them to respect their parents and elders in the society.13

Thus, there were numerous activities that took place at Züki/Tzüki under the guardianship and teaching of the Zükikivola/Tzükibutsüla. At Züki/Tzüki, ‘they deal mostly with activities related to matrimony, domestic, social, cultural, educational, economics, and so on. All sorts of competition take place in this learning institution in the evening’ (Jamir and Lanunungsang 2005: 103). We think that another way to read the figure of the Zükikivola/ Tzükibutsüla is in terms of the concept of an ‘Other-mother’ offered by Patricia Hill Collins (2009: 192) to designate the importance of women-centred networks within African-American communities, that is, ‘women who assist bloodmothers by sharing mothering responsibilities’. A similar motivation associated with various goals and responsibilities of raising and training a child seems to have been assigned to the Zükikivola/Tzükibutsüla. Her presence played a significant role in imbuing the space of the Züki/Tzüki with its caring character. Moreover, the caregivers from the community who inhabited these spaces had no expectation of a reward in return for the services rendered to the community—they offered their services voluntarily in the interest of building the community.14 While the figure of the Zükikivola/Tzükibutsüla can be read as an ‘Other-mother’ as well as a blend between a teacher and a caregiver, our conceptualisation of Züki/Tzüki as a caring space is not based merely on the fact that caregivers and care-receivers are present in this space. We argue, additionally, that the ontological character of the space is such that it can be conceived as a system of intraand inter-dependence of the clan, and eventually of the tribe as a

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whole—a distinctively relational space imbued with specific material and symbolical values which, on the Ao world view, orient it as a space of both care and teaching. We push for a reading of Züki/Tzüki as a caring space in terms of the fact that it appears to perform many tasks and labours that we associate with care,15 especially of training the young in various ontological, epistemic and moral virtues, and thereby contributes to the material, emotional and spiritual growth of Ao children. It cultivates a relational sense of space in them, along with a dual sense of moral self that sees itself as both caring and being cared for.16 At the same time, Züki/Tzüki can be thought of as an alternative space of learning, growth and self-development for the tribe as a whole, thus directly animating the bonds between the individual and community. Reflecting on the institution of Züki/Tzüki (in terms of both its structure and functions), it appears to embody distinctive sets of epistemological, ontological, moral and social virtues which, in turn, it seeks to imbibe in its inhabitants. Inculcating these virtues becomes indispensable for self-growth and self-actualisation of the individual, and for cultivating a sense of caring self towards an individual Other as well as the community as a whole (the clan and eventually the tribe). A caring self within an ethics of care is a self that ideally sees itself as engrossed in directly meeting the needs of the Other and is, therefore, animated by an embodied sense of responsibility towards the Other (as opposed to a purely rationalistic sense of obligation). Züki/Tzüki taught boys and girls how to live in community, where they could work together in partnership with a sense of care and responsibility. It opened up a collective space of inclusion and mutual growth, where young boys and girls allowed the Other to share one’s own space, and it prepared them to embrace the reality of the Other. We find that care in the space of the Züki/Tzüki gets deeply connected to the idea of friendship. During the Moatsü and Tsüngremmong festivals, for instance (the former is considered the biggest and most important festival of Aos and the latter the second

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biggest festival), all the girls at Züki/Tzüki would make chepli for the boys in Arju, an artefact needed for the occasion to complement their talent. Chepli is worn by the Ao boys around their waist to mark the festivities with dancing. The girls in Züki/Tzüki would make chepli for all the boys in Arju and would gleefully watch the dancing movements of the boys with chepli around their waist. At Züki/Tzüki, an intimate conceptual linkage between friendship and care seems to have materialised among young boys and girls. Friendship not only helped in the process of socialisation to communal life, but ‘both ‘friendship’ and ‘care’, thus conceived, demand the opening up of the self. A self that is willing to engage or meet the other can very well be characterised as a ‘communicative self’ (Banerjee and Karilemla 2016: 99). The shared space of Züki/Tzüki, in fact, becomes a kind of communicative space and offers immense conceptual possibilities for envisioning the kind of shared spaces which can facilitate the development of a communicative sense of self. Generally, after working in the fields all day long, the boys from Arju would refresh themselves and visit the girls at night to get acquainted with them. The girls too anticipated the arrival of the boys at Züki/Tzüki for entertainment and exchanging ideas and tasks of social responsibility in the village. ‘In the evening, this institution becomes busier with singing, menial works, and learning theoretical and practical works from each other’ (Jamir and Lanunungsang 2005: 104). What draws our attention is the fact that the institution of Züki/ Tzüki appears to be a robust communicative platform of interaction and social exchange, which is epistemologically important at the same time. It can be conceived of as a site of entertainment, friendship, care, trust and responsibility on the one hand, and a key site of preserving, teaching and transmitting the knowledge systems of the tribe on the other. Of course, when the process of knowing becomes deeply embodied as in the case of Züki/Tzüki, it also has to negotiate real quandaries of gender and other social relations. These negotiations, in turn, highlight the communicative energies, a communicative

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intent so to say, embedded in this space. Here we are reminded of hooks’s emphasis upon the importance of conversation as the central location of pedagogy for the democratic educator. ‘Talking to share information, to exchange ideas is the practice both inside and outside academic settings that affirms to listeners that learning can take place in varied time frames … and that knowledge can be shared in diverse modes of speech’ (hooks 2003: 44). During the visitations in Züki/ Tzüki, boys and girls would exchange songs and learn the history of the tribe from each other through stories and conversations. An interesting aspect of conversations that took place in Züki/Tzüki is some of the alternative media through which knowledge seems to have been transmitted—in the form of narratives, ballads and stories, for instance. Narratives and songs evoke powerful emotional content, which has multiple resonances. Here the cognitive and the affective interweave, and ‘[t]he emotions embodied in the songs also evoke a strong sense of oneness with the culture’ (Miri and Karilemla 2015: 3), thereby also emphasising the spiritual dimensions of knowing. The aesthetic is as much in focus as the rational in this approach to teaching. A communicative intent is deeply embedded in the relational space that is Züki/Tzüki. A striking aspect is that the development of both a knowing and a caring self, in this case, does not appear to be simply about developing a relational sense of self (predicated on recognising and meeting the needs of the Other) as care ethics typically emphasises, but hinges on the additional abilities to cultivate both communicative and narrative senses of self at the same time.17 On analysing the figure of the Zükikivola/Tzükibutsüla and considering the space of the Züki/Tzüki, several interesting trajectories for epistemologies and ethics of teaching may be articulated. Teaching on the model of Züki/Tzüki is not confined to a unidirectional flow of information from a single source of authority invested in the figure of Zükikivola/Tzükibutsüla. Rather, epistemic authority seems to be embedded in a complex web of interactions

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between participants, such that they collectively contribute to the project of knowledge formation, in which scheme the Zükikivola/ Tzükibutsüla appears to be a primary facilitator. The epistemic flow being multidirectional, it allows for the generation of a collective wisdom regarding the Ao world view. Epistemic responsibility, therefore, can also be construed as multipronged, transactional and democratic on this model. We, therefore, believe that Züki/ Tzüki as a conceptual model and a conception of the teacher as Zükikivola/Tzükibutsüla is better equipped to uphold ontological and epistemological reciprocity among agents, compared to the individual-first approach of the banking model. The epistemic and moral worth of the Other is upheld on this model and, in so doing, Züki/Tzüki also offers us an ideal for a spatialised exercise in recognition. Interestingly, responsibility in the space of Züki/Tzüki appears to have both moral and epistemic dimensions. In one sense, responsibility is stipulated in terms of learning the practices of the Ao. In another, there is a demand that learning itself ought to be accompanied by an ever-increasing sense of responsibility for the well-being of the community as a whole, and the moral goals of preserving a collective identity and collective wisdom for future generations. Satiba Jamir holds: whatever history and lore they exchanged at Züki/Tzüki, it was so engraved in their mind at a tender age that each of them became a source of information and a reference point as and when they wanted to authenticate and represent anything about the community’s life and culture. It is through the institutions of Arju and Züki/Tzüki that they preserved and shared the world view of the tribe, which normally passed on from one generation to the other through the oral narratives.18

Here the deeply epistemic intent in the moral and the moral orientation in the epistemic clearly come to the fore, and we would like to emphasise this link for critical pedagogy and for epistemologies of care, broadly speaking. Furthermore, we believe

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that the moral epistemology in place here is also one of care, since Other-orientedness is built into it—the spatial configuration of Züki/ Tzüki orients the epistemic agent towards the individual Other, one’s clan, and eventually one’s tribe. The projects of individual knowing and self-transformation get directly connected to the ability to see oneself in terms of a social whole. Züki/Tzüki becomes a space not only for teaching, but also for building community—a space of intra- and inter-dependence for a specific clan as well as a space of interaction and peaceful negotiations between separate clans, thus contributing to the fashioning of an identity as a single tribe. Züki/Tzüki, interestingly, was a primary site of political negotiations for the community in matrimonial alliances. Being a guardian and an advisor to the young boys and girls, the Zükikivola/Tzükibutsüla played a powerful role in the community’s matrimonial alliances. At Züki/Tzüki, clan exogamy was strictly maintained both in old and modern times. Züki/Tzüki, therefore, served as an intriguing blend of a private space characterised by intimate bonds of living together, and a dynamic political space at the same time, which contributed to the process of building families, ensuring a future for the different clans and facilitating their peaceful coexistence. Again, in and through the interactions of their inhabitants, the twin institutions of Arju and Züki/Tzüki exerted a tremendous influence on the moral lives of each other. For instance, the girls at Züki/Tzüki were very selective about their partners, and they would prefer a partner who was a trained and disciplined person, and was willing to shoulder responsibility. This motivated the Arjunünger to be diligent and virtuous in order to secure a good match. The Zükir/Tzükir’s influence on Arjunünger taught the latter to appreciate the dignity of hard labour, inculcated in them the virtue of bravery and service to the village, and motivated them into becoming men of good character. It is very interesting to see how Züki/Tzüki became so instrumental in developing moral character and a sense of collective identity among the Arjunünger.

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The Arjunünger, in a similar vein, also played a role in the moral training of girls at Züki/Tzüki. The most important impact of Züki/Tzüki in modern times and of the conceptual legacy of the Zükikivola/Tzükibutsüla is perhaps the way in which it has facilitated the formation of various women’s organisations in contemporary Ao society, which are engaged in teaching and building community. Examples are the formation of Elangtsür/Patsalar (a closed women’s group of the same clan), and eventually of the Watsu Mungdang (the apex organisation of Ao women). According to Tako Jamir, when a girl attains a certain age, she joins a women’s group known as Elangtsür/Patsalar.19 She has to pay a membership fee in order to become a member of the group. A new member of the clan becomes equivalent to a boy who is a Süngpur in status at Arju.20

One finds multiple groups in a given village because of the different clans forming a group exclusively of their own. Unanimously, they appoint a leader, a secretary and a few other members from the group in order to make the group functional in both social and political spheres. Each group of Elangtsür/Patsalar extends the support of free labour and monetary assistance to individuals and families of the same clan, especially in times of distress. Most importantly, they act as educators and advisors to young members of the clan and teach them social etiquette, history and the lore of the clan. They also contribute to the formation of welfare groups in the community. Further, the group becomes a centre for exchanging ideas among womenfolk. ‘In modern days, they form even as a vote bank and as such the politicians would seek support from them. Women’s movement and their awakening at present society has deeply rooted in the institution of Tsüki’ (Jamir and Lanunungsang 2005: 110). The formation of Elangtsür/Patsalar has its roots in Züki/Tzüki, and especially in the initiatives and multiple roles that a Zükikivola/Tzükibutsüla contributed to Ao society. Women’s organisation at the grassroots level such as this closed group of the same clan has also led to the formation of the Watsu

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Mungdang to represent the Ao tribe. Watsu Mungdang is the apex organisation of Ao women. In contemporary times, they have campaigned for women’s representation in civic bodies. Their success story is having women representatives on both the municipal councils and the village development boards. The organisation also deals with gender-related issues in Ao society and works towards sustainable livelihoods, especially for women belonging to economically weaker sections of the society. These contemporary formations highlight the intergenerational significance of Züki/Tzüki—how it helped build communities (carrying them on from the past into a new kind of future), and how it, therefore, became a catalyst for both social reconstruction and hope. Our analysis highlights how Züki/Tzüki as a blended space of care and learning can be conceptualised as a community at various levels—ontological, epistemic, moral and socio-political, and how, in turn, it contributes fundamentally to teaching and maintaining community. It is a space of coming together; a space of belonging which is not just personal but political at the same time. It can be thought of as an epistemic community, engaged in the shared goals of knowing, understanding and acting upon the world. Bound by intimate bonds of care and responsibility, and facilitating the development of an ethical self (a caring sense of self), it can also be construed as a moral community. Züki/Tzüki, on our reading, also becomes a political community of the highest order in the Ao context. Encompassing these different senses, we further propose construing Züki/Tzüki as a community in the dual senses of a ‘community of hope’ and a ‘community of memory’, which can be ideal ways of conceptualising educational spaces (Banerjee 2018: 253). These figurations are, in turn, predicated on a conception of communities as being products of temporal and narrative processes, whereby individuals and communities co-constitute each other through interpretations and narrations unfolding in time (ibid.: 249–50). This temporal ontology of a community allows us to conceive of

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it in terms of a shared vision of the past as well as common hopes for the future. The underlying temporality of Züki/Tzüki appears to be precisely of this nature. On the one hand, it allows individual members to come to an Ao identity through the ways in which they poise themselves in relation to the community. On the other hand, Ao as a community (Ao knowledges and a sense of identity as Ao) ‘is written into existence, defined, affirmed, rejected, and modified through the constant interpretations, translations, and deeds of its members’ (ibid.: 251) in the space of Züki/Tzüki. Not only are gender and clan relations negotiated in this space, but Züki/Tzüki serves as a conceptual foundation for key political formations in contemporary Ao society which continue to work for women’s empowerment. In this sense, Züki/Tzüki as a blended space of teaching and care becomes a socio-political actor in its own right, thereby contributing to the sustenance of the Ao as a people, raising a community, and serving as a catalyst for social hope. Teaching and learning community in the space of Züki/Tzüki appears to be fundamentally linked with an ability to cultivate an ethics of care and a relational sense of self. Since the development of this ideal appears to be critically connected to the ability to see oneself in terms of a social whole (as Ao), it additionally demands the development of communicative and narrative senses of self in order to teach and learn in a caring mode. A philosophical analysis of Züki/Tzüki throws up interesting implications for the conceptual link between care, teaching, community and hope on the one hand, and caring spaces on the other, all of which we have emphasised in this chapter in reconstructing a critical ontology of education, along with imagining novel trajectories for epistemologies and ethics of teaching.

Notes 1

The tradition of care ethics/ethics of care is a relatively young and fast-expanding tradition of moral and political philosophy, which has been developed by feminist philosophers in the West as an

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alternative to the more male-stream traditions in Western moral and political theory. While care ethics is a complex tradition, a preliminary overview of it can be obtained from works such as Noddings (2013) and Held (2006). Key writings in the tradition and its dominant genealogies continue to be concentrated within white and Western feminist philosophy. 2 For more details on the Ao tribe from Nagaland, see Banerjee and Karilemla (2016); Jamir and Lanunungsang (2005); and Miri and Karilemla (2015). 3 In different ranges of the Ao territory, there is a slight dialectical variation within both Chungli- and Mongsen-speaking groups. In Jamir and Lanunungsang (2005), for instance, ‘Tzüki’ is used as ‘Tsüki’. We use Züki/Tzüki simultaneously throughout our analysis to reflect such dialectical variations. 4 We previously argued for the need to evolve a robust conception of what we designate as ‘caring spaces’ within an ethics of care in Banerjee and Karilemla (2016). This work engaged philosophically with another Ao institution by the name of Arju, which historically served as a space for teaching young boys of the Ao tribe. 5 We reflected theoretically on some of these differences, and, consequently, the conceptual peculiarity of such spaces in relation to dominant understandings of both spaces of education and spaces of care in the Western imaginary in the context of our philosophical work on Arju. See Banerjee and Karilemla (2016: 94–95 and 101–103). 6 For more on this, see Young (2011). 7 See, for instance, Held (2006) and Noddings (2013). 8 Thich Nhat Hanh was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk whose work is cited by hooks as being a central influence on her thinking, apart from Freire’s work. 9 We hope to pursue the link between a phenomenology of hope and a pedagogy of hope in greater detail in our future work. The space constraints of this chapter allow us to include only some brief reflections at this point. 10 See Heidegger (1962). Heidegger writes in Being and Time that ‘We therefore call the phenomena of the future, the character of having been, and the Present, the “ecstases” of temporality’ (ibid.: 377). For him, Dasein involves itself in the three ecstases of the past, the present and the future.

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11 The owner of the Züki/Tzüki is known as Zükikivola in the Mongsen dialect and Tzükibutsüla in the Chungli dialect. Again, we simultaneously use both formulations to reflect this dialectical variation. 12 Of course, the gendered division of the dormitories immediately stands out, as we have also noted in our work on Arju (Banerjee and Karilemla 2016), and such gendering itself demands careful scrutiny. For instance, the space of Arju was restricted to boys, and Zükir/Tzükir were not allowed to visit the boys’ dormitory. On the other hand, the inhabitants of Arju were allowed to enter Züki/Tzüki. Therefore, the gendering of the two spaces exhibited certain differences, which may have had important implications for gender relations among the Ao. However, theorising these is beyond the scope of the current chapter. Our focus here is on abstracting from the institution (as it was practised) to a great extent so as to construe it in the mode of a philosophical framework. 13 Interview and transcription by Karilemla, Chuchuyimlang village, Nagaland, 6 January 2016. 14 Our definition of ‘mothering’ also works with the understanding that mothering is a role and not an identity, and is associated with certain labours/practices such as preservative love, fostering growth and training for social acceptability (Ruddick 1995). 15 Here, again, we have in mind the definition of care as labour, which was first systematically put forward by Ruddick (1995). 16 Incidentally, care ethicist Noddings (2013) emphasises how a normative/ ethical self emerges from relations of natural caring by inculcating the ability to see oneself as both one-caring and being cared-for. 17 To some ears, the Ao world view may imply the existence of a primarily homogeneous community at the time when Züki/Tzüki existed. Arguments for such a claim can be found in some Ao literatures. ‘Unlike other tribal areas of our country, the Naga villages are more homogenous, self-sustaining and independent’ (Jamir and Lanunungsang 2005: 37). This could be partially true. However, if one delves deeper into the socio-political system, especially the ownership entitlements each clan is expected to strictly follow, and practices in social and political governance, a significant degree of heterogeneity can be found. More importantly, since we are interested in a normative construal of Züki/Tzüki which allows for unique ontological, epistemological and ethical possibilities that may not have been reflected

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in the institution as practised, there is ample opportunity to build in critique and heterogeneity of epistemic perspectives into the model. In other words, while Züki/Tzüki in a particular instantiation of it could end up promoting a homogenised understanding of Ao femininity (for example), the general epistemic and moral ontology drawn up by us in/through the philosophical framework of Züki/Tzüki with its emphasis on developing caring, communicative and narrative senses of self would, in fact, serve as a vantage point for critically evaluating such practices. 18 Interview and transcription by Karilemla, Mopungchukit village, Nagaland, 9 January 2016. 19 A closed women’s group of the same clan is known as Patsalar in Mongsen dialect and Elangtsür in Chungli dialect. 20 Interview and transcription by Karilemla, Chuchuyimlang village, Nagaland, 6 January 2016. There were different rungs in the institution of Arju. Children belonging to the age group of eleven to thirteen years were placed in the group of Süngpur. They were considered to be the junior-most in status at Arju. Their duty was to collect firewood from the jungle, to fetch water and to trim their elders’ hair. After three years of successfully performing their assigned duties, they were promoted to the next rung known as Tenapang.

References Banerjee, A. 2018. ‘“Diversity” as “Poise”: Toward a Renewed “Ethics of Diversity”’. Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 32(2): 243–262. Banerjee, A. and Karilemla. 2016. ‘Arju as “Caring Space, In-Between”: Philosophical Reflection on “Care” from Ao Naga, India’ (Special Issue: ‘Mothering from the Margins: Critical Conversations’, edited by Amrita Banerjee and Bonnie Mann). Philosophy in the Contemporary World, 23(1): 91–105. Collins, P.H. 2009. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Freire, P. 2005 [1970]. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum. Grande, S. 2004. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Heidegger, M. 1962 [1927]. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Held, V. 2006. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. New York: Oxford University Press. hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. hooks, bell. 2003. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Routledge. Jamir, N.T. and A. Lanunungsang. 2005. Naga Society and Culture: A Case Study of the Ao Naga Society and Culture. Lumami, Mokokchung: Nagaland University Tribal Research Centre, Department of Sociology. Miri, Sujata,. and Karilemla. 2015. Ao Naga World-View: A Dialogue. New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research and D.K. Printworld. Noddings, N. 2013. Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ruddick, S. 1995. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon Press. Young, I.M. 2011. Justice and the Politics of Difference. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

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11

Environmental Education in Schools: Perspective and Challenges Rinzi Lama Environmental education represents a challenge to existing patterns of schooling. Its inquiry orientation is a challenge to habitual patterns of teaching; its interdisciplinary character is a threat to conventional disciplinary curricular structures; its emphasis on outdoor education presents problems for existing organizational patterns. —Ian Robottom (1985: 34)

Environment education (EE) secured a firm footing in the Indian context from 1972 with the setting up of the National Committee on Environmental Planning and Coordination.1 Environmental concerns were incorporated in the Constitution of India through the 42nd Amendment Act in 1976,2 and became a priority with the establishment of the Ministry of Environment and Forests in 1985. The act also rendered the state responsible for promoting EE. In fact, it was held that. Environmental education should start at the very earliest. Children should be trained to observe and to enjoy the loveliness of the ordinary things that surround us—trees, flowers, hills, beaches, animals, even stones. They must be brought up to love animals and their natural environment and also to see how they can be preserved, keeping the utility also in mind. I am sure when the group gets working, it will go into greater detail and evolve a plan and how to include these things in schools, colleges, and all training institutions, specially of our teachers, social workers, health workers and so on. (Gandhi 1986: 214)

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A visionary Supreme Court directive in December 2003 stipulated making the study of environment compulsory at all levels of education in the country. Over time, EE has become a central focus in the school curriculum. Ian Robottom points out that EE is an ‘innovation’ rather than a mere subject, where the innovation involves ‘political processes by which it seeks to become institutionalized … involving deeper questions of ideology’ (1985: 34). Given its political nature and its emphasis on change in the status quo, EE involves ‘competition for time, finances, and involves value judgments about such things as the relative importance of the “new” program and established subjects on the part of the students, teachers, administrators and parents … in what it substantively seeks to do in an educational sense’ (ibid.: 34). Thus, EE, in seeking to change the status quo, involves both educational decision-making (the decision to introduce an innovation like an EE programme) and environmental decision-making (EE as an attempt to resolve environmental issues). This makes EE a programme that has a socially critical quality, involving people in an investigation of environmental issues with a view to understanding and critiquing these issues through evidence and taking value positions on them, and working in a problem-solving mode. It is this quality itself that Robottom suggests will pose a challenge to the existing educational system. ‘Education’ is a social institution which enables and promotes the acquisition of skills and knowledge, and seeks to broaden personal horizons (Giddens 2009: 834). As a social institution, it can manifest in various forms. One such manifestation is the institution of the school, which is predominantly construed as a formal, physical and an intellectual space where knowledge is created and disseminated through a pre-designed curriculum. At the least, the dominant discourse on the introduction of EE during its initial phase in the school curriculum followed the rationale that EE be a part of the formal process of schooling as a disciplinary curriculum in line with other ‘major’ subjects in the curriculum. However, the school, apart from being a formal space for schooling, is also a site for education—

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as a space for the production of a certain kind of sociality and self in an individual. It is precisely in this second layer of its disclosed nature—as a social institution—that this chapter seeks to position the phenomenon of EE where the environment is cardinal to one’s sociality and of constitutive interest to one’s very self. Environment education, when thus imagined, puts forth a demand for a specific kind of outlook. This outlook, however, runs counter to its actually accorded status of EE post 2003 rendering it a ‘legitimate’ yet an ‘additional’ subject within the present school curriculum, in contrast to the ‘major’ subjects. How does this oppositional relation between the aims of EE and its incidental status within the institution of the school unfold? Situating EE in the location of Darjeeling,3 West Bengal, this chapter investigates this oppositional dynamic and foregrounds the peculiarities that emerge from it. Environment education, when imagined as part of the school curriculum, puts forth a demand for a specific kind of outlook— one that locates the environment as a focal point in the execution of a newly envisioned project where the self is consciously imagined and projected as a locus in the school curriculum. As part of the curriculum, EE thus demands a sociality wherein the environment holds a cardinal position, with the aim of developing responsible environmental behaviour and dedicated environmental citizens with a specific set of skills and ‘a sense of ownership toward [environmental] issues needing resolution and a sense of empowerment with respect to helping with that resolution’ (Hungerford and Peyton 1994). Therefore, it becomes necessary to address questions regarding what constitutes this ‘legitimate’ knowledge that EE signifies and what would be the mode of communication of this knowledge. These inquiries occupy a special place in the case of EE, since, unlike the ‘major’ subjects, EE emerged as an ‘additional’ subject born out of a felt necessity, a product of an afterthought post the experience of environmental ‘crisis’. The emphasis on what constitutes legitimate knowledge and the mode of communication of that knowledge centralises ‘the human’

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as a figure who constitutes, comprehends and communicates this knowledge for a better future at the time of crisis. This emphasis on the human as an integral part of the environment and the environmental crisis has been accepted as a fact. Rachel Carson’s pioneering book, Silent Spring (1962), was one of the early works that initiated a national debate on the use of chemical pesticides, the responsibility of science and the limits of technological progress. In the face of such catastrophe, Carson identified the integral role of a human as part of the system which consisted of the human, their culture and the biophysical environment, where he/she, as much as was responsible for the catastrophe, alone had the ability to alter the relationships of this system. The only way to save humans from such a disastrous fate was, therefore, to take the road less travelled, which of course might ‘be the only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth’ (ibid.: 177). The road less travelled would entail two important principles, the ‘right to know’ and the ‘right to decide’, which are then taken as the foundational principles of EE by Carson. Built on these two principles was the implied ‘right to act’ with awareness. Based on these fundamental principles—the ‘right to know’ and the ‘right to decide’, along with the ‘right to act’— humans, though responsible for the crisis, were also the agents of change who ought to have the knowledge and awareness to become informed citizens and thus be a part of the decision-making and active participants in problem-solving. The Intergovernmental Conference on Environment Education (1978) endorsed some essential elements that characterise EE— awareness about social and ecological systems; drawing on disciplines like social sciences, humanities and natural science; the potential to reach beyond the organic and physical phenomenon to contemplate other aspects of environment, like the political, economic, social, cultural, aesthetic and moral; and an emphasis on the skills of critical thinking and problem-solving desirable for taking personal decisions and public actions.

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Thus, EE with its emphasis on the ‘right to know’ and ‘right to decide’, and therefore, the ‘right to act’, emphasises the fact that people ought to be taught about environment, that is, made aware of the environment and its current crises so that they are able to contemplate and think critically about environmental issues and are, therefore, able to take conscious decisions and actions that will help improve this crisis situation. Schools are viewed as the most fertile ground that can enable such knowledge creation and socialisation wherein environmental concern is sought to be inculcated through EE becoming a cardinal part of the curriculum. The education system in India incorporated certain aspects of environment education in school curricula. The Supreme Court, based on the petition filed by M.C. Mehta against the Union of India (M.C. Mehta v. Union of India AIR 1992 SC 382), provided various directions to the central and state governments for ensuring mandatory EE for students at the school and college levels throughout the country. The University Grants Commission for higher education, the All India Council for Technical Education and the National Council of Educational Research and Training for school education were the nodal agencies appointed by the Supreme Court to implement the verdict. However, the 1991 directive of the Supreme Court did not materialise in its entirety. In another directive issued in December 2003, the Supreme Court ordered that environment would be a compulsory subject to be taught at all levels of education in the country. Through such conscious initiatives over time, EE has become a central focus in the school curriculum. To date, much effort has been expended at the national and state levels to highlight the importance of incorporating EE in the curriculum in the face of environmental crisis. Focusing on the school level, if one were to ask if these visible efforts at the national level have in fact been able to bring about the desired attitudinal and behavioural change— essential elements of EE—through the pedagogic encounter, the answer would perhaps need some reflection and verification, given

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that EE had a late inception and was long considered the ‘other’ vis-à-vis the ‘major’ subjects. As a result, EE has always been in a situation of flux, occupying a marginal status vis-à-vis other subjects in the school curriculum and very often being arbitrarily included or excluded from the curriculum. On the face of it, the state of West Bengal has accepted the intent endorsed by EE, and since 2005 has been implementing EE in its schools as ‘environmental studies’ (EVS/ES) as per the Supreme Court directive. Schools engage with students in the classroom teaching of EVS. Notwithstanding this compliance, however, EE has had a scattered history even though prima facie the state seems to have accepted the need for EE as part of the curriculum. We are looking at all opportunities to do away with the extra burden on students [due to EVS/ES]. The syllabus has been restructured. Other central Boards have already done away with the EVS.… It adds to the pressure during exams since students have to spare considerable time for the subject. If they fail in EVS their entire effort for achieving good marks in other elective subjects will be wasted. (Basu 2012)

These remarks were made by the West Bengal Higher Secondary Council in 2012. Until then, environmental studies had been a compulsory subject at the school level. Implementation of EE in the state curriculum represents the state’s compliance in accepting this new form of sociality being constructed at the national level. However, the excerpt also highlights the discomfort with EE as a subject, despite having accepted it at the school level. It shows that, despite the earlier compliance, EE had not yet been able to secure the status of a ‘major’ subject. Rather, it was relegated to marginality by the very state which had accepted the subject as important. This marginality is evident not merely at the school level but also at the college level. A similar stance was taken regarding EE at Calcutta University (Times of India 2002), where the subject carried a total of 50 marks and was compulsory for all students. However, the boards of studies of various departments, primarily the Department of Commerce

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at the university, did not consider EE important, and appealed to the authorities ‘to replace environmental studies with entrepreneurship development… [since] most [students] prefer subjects more relevant to their respective specialization’ (ibid.). They believed that, more than a subject like EE, students would benefit ‘if they learn something that is of practical use’ (ibid.), and suggested that EE was more apt at the school level rather than the college level: ‘there should be an awareness about environment.… the subject can be taught more effectively in schools. We are putting extra burden on the students [at the college level] but it is not helping them professionally’ (ibid.). This treatment of EE at the school and college levels provides insight into how the subject is doing at the implementation level, and why. The rendering of the subject as a ‘burden’ or ‘not professional’ compared to other fields of study, and as having little utility for students, is evidence of EE having failed to materialise the philosophy it upholds. Until 2013, EVS had an independent status and was being taught as a compulsory subject at all levels. In schools, according to West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education, the subject was allocated a total of 100 marks: A minimum of 30 (Thirty) marks out of 100 (One hundred) has to be obtained by each examinee in the Higher Secondary Examination. Examinee failing to score 30 (thirty) marks in this subject will be declared as disqualified in the Higher Secondary Examination. Marks obtained in the subject of EE will be recorded in the mark sheet.4

This suggests that until 2013, EE held a somewhat important position in the curriculum, to the extent that the inability to secure passing marks in EVS would disqualify the candidate in the higher secondary examination itself. However, this reduced EVS to the level of marks and the student’s orientation towards the subject was driven more by the fear of ‘not qualifying’ in the higher secondary examination. It was this aspect of the subject that was perceived as an extra burden on the student. With such an outlook, where subjective learning was reduced to marks, EE was perceived as a hurdle and thus sidelined.

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In lieu of this, post 2013, the syllabus was modified in the direction of an ‘infused model’ rather than EVS as a separate subject. In order to remove the extra burden on students and to give due importance to the study of environment, EVS became a part of all the other subjects at the secondary level—physical science and environment, life science and environment, history and environment, and geography and environment. At the higher secondary level, EVS was changed from being a compulsory subject to an ‘optional’ subject. As a part of the infused model, unlike the dedicated textbook on environmental studies, as was the case earlier, the present textbook Environment and Science has an emphasis on both science and environment. But such a mode of silent infusion of EE within the ambit of science, unfortunately, encourages the understanding of environment as a ‘science’, and such a ‘scientific’ outlook fails to lay emphasis on the principle of EE—which demands an agency at the subjective level leading to a new form of sociality. For instance, the section ‘A Few Words’ of the Environment and Science (Class VIII textbook) reiterates the importance of science and ‘the need [for] competent science teachers and good science textbooks … [and] a constructivist method … to develop … science education through experimentation of thought and ideas generated from familiar environment’. Such infusion, though a constructive step, is unable to uphold the intent of EE or to motivate a teacher to understand and undertake EE as an equally important segment of the curriculum and, therefore, the prescribed textbook fails in its intended task. After all, the ethics of teaching EE demands that the teacher go beyond what he or she is motivated to do even within the curricular structure prescribed by the state/board that neither seems to recognise this demand nor facilitates the building of the capacity of schools to engage with EE. Consequently, given the nature of the curriculum today, the role of the teacher who engages with the student in the classroom is cardinal to the effectiveness of EVS. The nature of sociality that EE attempts to bring about centralises the role of the teacher in a

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situation where the state-run curriculum has not been able to bring about the desired end. Given that the mandate for EE was based on environmental crisis, the implementation of the mandate by the state through the school curriculum should have in fact led to some positive change. Unfortunately, the situation seems to have worsened, thus necessitating that other stakeholders, like non-governmental organisations (NGOs), take active part in organising extracurricular activities and awareness programmes with the schools, and the civil society at large, to encourage them in making the environment cardinal to not only EE but the landscape, as a need. What is the role of a teacher in such a situation? What is the motivation for a teacher to go beyond the curriculum? How has the state facilitated and maintained the vision it started with in 2005, and how has it tried to build the capacity of the teacher? Clearly the curriculum, in its current form as prescribed by the state, has not been a motivating factor in itself for the student and the teacher alike. Environment education then rests in the hands of the self-motivated few who engage more deeply with the subject. The route of engagement with EE for every schoolteacher is, first, through the textbooks. With the transition from a non-infused model to an infused model, textbooks for the latter model have been in circulation at all schools. As a mathematics teacher, Lama, working as assistant teacher at a government school in Darjeeling, who was allotted the EE course for teaching, pointed out that, in the way the textbook is structured, EE basically involves the teaching of chapters like pollution and another one chapter on the environment— all topics are related to science. Though I am a teacher of mathematics, I have been asked to teach EVS in the ninth and tenth standard. If we look at the first chapter in the textbook of tenth standard titled ‘Atmosphere’, I think that is all what environment is about.

Such a perspective clearly undermines the task of EE as a mode of producing a new form of epistemology and sociality. In a similar vein, the infused model also includes textbooks—history and environment, and

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geography and environment—giving due importance to environment in the study of history and geography. However, these too do not do justice to the inclusion of environment, in content or in practice. The central tenets of EE thus demand the engagement of the teacher with the concept of environment in relation to the other subjects in the infused model for an ideological turn with knowledge about the environment and its role beyond the textbook. This will be discussed in detail shortly. The state-prescribed infused model of teaching of EE thereby seems to adopt the general view that EE is nothing more than a form or a part of the natural sciences in the science-related textbooks, and a concept that is not elaborated upon or correlated to textbooks on history and geography. The textbook History and Environment for the tenth standard elaborates on the ‘Ideas of History’ in its first chapter where it includes a sub-section on ‘history of environment’ among other topics like local history, urban history and military history. This section on the history of environment indicates the important role of environment in the lives of the people, emphasising the works of those like Rachel Carson, Mahesh Rangarajan and Ramachandra Guha on environmental studies. However, the book fails to move into any further elaboration on the idea of history of environment and its enmeshment with history and the modality in which the student ought to engage and build a perspective on environment and history as a part of the infused model. Similarly, though the textbook Environment and Science for the seventh standard in its Foreword declares the ‘need to develop interest and inquisitiveness among the students about the gradual degeneration of biodiversity’ through the chapter ‘Crisis of Environment, Plants and Conservation’, within the present model of infusion of EE within other science subjects, the textbook content seems to have misfired. For instance, the textbook for the seventh standard has specific topics like heat, atoms, molecules and light discussed under the topic of physical environment, and two chapters—‘Crisis of Environment, Plants and Conservation’ and ‘Environment and Public Health’. For the chapter ‘Crisis of Environment, Plants and Conservation’, the instruction states that topics such as biodiversity, climate change

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and waste—waste products and the hazards to human health due to environmental damage—are included to make the student aware of the alarming effects of environmental damage. Though the chapter describes, at the outset, the problems of climate change and its effects which include topics like melting of glaciers, floods in Rajasthan, rise in average temperature and sea levels and destruction of coral islands, they now come to be construed as ‘facts’. As much as these are important pieces of information to be gathered by a student, one of the issues with such texts is that they do not seem to see these facts as immediately related with the individual and do not speak of the crisis as a problem that is affecting everyone including the student. The layout of the chapter is such that the teacher is directed to explain the topics through a ‘number of experiments’. Through these topics, the book narrates, ‘the teachers will help the students to conduct the experiments in classroom, discussing and analyzing the result of the experiments among themselves’ (Environment and Science: 316). In this manner, the textbook provides specific guidelines for teachers with instructions on the modality in which each chapter should be taught and the questions that should be raised. Further, a stated aim of the chapter is to ensure that ‘the students will take care of various plants thereby giving importance to conservation of environment’(ibid.: 317). As much as these chapters are specific, the textbooks provide even more specific instructions for teachers like, ‘It is advisable not to set questions on the Life of Newton (as mentioned in page 76)’ (Environment and Science: 316). This is just one instance among many which align with the traditional belief in the ahistorical and universal nature of scientific knowledge. This emphasis on the ‘scientific paradigm’ in EE has not gone unnoticed. Rai, an NGO worker who has been engaged in promoting EE in local schools and among students in Darjeeling, points out the immediate need for a paradigm shift in the teaching of EE: scientific orientation of EE in the curriculum is one of the biggest challenge[s]. People—teachers and schools—do not see a value in

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interdisciplinarity whereas it is precisely this interdisciplinarity that is at the heart of EE. Instead of this delineation of EE as science—discrete from language or history—it is its integrated nature that should potentially be made a part of EE programme.

It cannot be denied that facts about the environment and the crisis thereof are important to generate awareness among students. However, the idea that EE ought to move beyond the communication of facts in a classroom has been emphasised by people working in this field. As much as ‘facts of science’ should be gathered by a student, one of the issues with the texts mentioned earlier is that in providing these facts, they fail in explicating the interdependent relationship of these facts with the socio-political and economic aspects that are central to issues of the environment, and the possible measures that one could adopt, as a student, on an individual level. That is, such textbooks do not seem to represent these facts as immediately related to the individual as a concern in the present, but rather as facts that simply are. The chapter on environmental crisis, for instance, does not speak of the crisis as a problem that affects everyone, including the student. Included within a textbook of science, the chapter begins with the definitions of ‘weather’ and ‘climate’ and the difference between them, followed by a list of the effects of climate change. But what it misses is the entailment of such concepts in the everyday lives of students. Similarly, the book speaks of deforestation as a cause of global warming. However, it does not inform the student of the complexity in the concept of deforestation, which needs to be looked at through different frameworks—extractive and exclusive management, malfunctioning of the administration, systems, energy needs, and unemployment. The case is similar with the textbook Life Science and Environment meant for the ninth and tenth standards. Though the textbooks have a chapter dedicated to environment and allied topics, environment is understood and included as a component of botany and zoology—a life science book with a chapter on the environment included as an appendage, with a ‘scientific outlook’.

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With the infused syllabus of the ninth and tenth standards, EVS has lost its separate status. Though the infused model of EVS was developed to make it an inalienable part of the educational apparatus, in practice, this infusion has had the contrary effect of instilling the false belief that ‘EVS is now removed from the syllabus altogether for the last two years’, as confirmed by Roka, who is a teacher at a Higher Secondary school in Darjeeling. Further, only schools with a higher secondary level and teachers who are aware point out that EVS is available as an optional subject. However, one of the rules for taking EE as an optional subject at the higher secondary level in the Boys Higher Secondary School is that only students who have undertaken humanities are allowed to take ES as an optional subject. ‘Science students have been barred from taking ES as an elective. Among the science students [those] who have failed to score more than 35 marks in geography are allowed to take ES as an elective,’ confirms Sengupta. Such rules make it evident that EVS is in fact conceived as a part of science, and as an elective that may assist a student to pass the exam at the higher secondary level. Thus, in the process of providing general descriptions of various environmental issues, the prescribed textbooks on EE do not involve the student in discussions where he/she is able to think through the concrete, experienced environmental crisis, identify the problem as affecting him/her, and understand the possible measures she can adopt at the individual or the community level. The manner in which the texts describe various issues merely enables the student to identify the environment as a problem ‘that is out there’, and gives a sense that it is a problem of and for others—for instance, the government; thus, students do not feel the need to be engaged with the material at a subjective level. That is, these texts fail to animate their agency, and thereby fail to generate any new form of sociality. As I mentioned earlier, as much as these chapters are important in the dissemination of factual and basic information with regard to the environment, this information, if communicated only through texts, fails to effectively bring about the necessary attitudinal or action-oriented change.

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On a related note, neither the textbooks in the infused model nor the prior model that projected a separate disciplinary space for EVS, take into account the ‘interdisciplinary’ nature of EE. To do justice to the spirit and the philosophical basis of EE, given the failure of the state to uphold it in terms of its curriculum, demands that teachers engage with the subject through the lens of interdisciplinarity. This would entail that the teacher delves into issues that move beyond the limited content of the textbook and discusses topics relating this content to social, cultural, legal and psychological dimensions. Thus, what is missing in the textbooks is contextualisation, whereby the students can make sense of the issues and relate them to their own lives. It is important to factor in the historicity of landscape for students in a particular region so as to enable them to understand their landscape and the issues of biodiversity confronting it, in order to involve them as stakeholders who may support conservation and biodiversity in the future. It is precisely this lack of power of the textbooks to animate the student towards a transformed form of sociality that necessitates that teachers and the school as an institution go beyond the curriculum. Apart from teachers and schools, the complexity involved in EE is sought to be addressed by people outside the school system—NGOs who try to work with schools and local people. Therefore, whenever there is a discussion on biodiversity and conservation, NGOs lay stress on engaging students in activities outside the school, in the form of excursions or field visits, believing that a ‘direct experiential and interactive mode of education’ is the only way to build a connect between the student and the environment, as stated by Pradhan, a research assistant who has been working with organisations like WWF and Ashoka Trust For Research In Ecology And The Environment (ATREE) on EE. Rai states that the aim is to ‘build a critical mass of leaders who are aware about the issues that transpire in the local environmental set-up as a fallout of the larger environmental crisis’. He further states,

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these kids are a part of the samaj [local institutions] and a concrete engagement with the local environmental issues is the best mode in which the larger environmental crisis could be brought to their conscious recognition, thereby bringing about an attitudinal change. With some kind of engagement in EE, we feel that environmental issues can be mainstreamed in their everyday lives, moving beyond a few so-called environmentalists.

Thus, NGOs envision EE as cardinal to the daily lives of students. In the hills of Darjeeling, for instance, in speaking of issues of climate change, one may surely bring to the space of the classroom observable phenomena like the phenological changes which can be observed by students in their immediate environment, or the rise in temperature that is leading to changes in the vegetation pattern, whereby the vegetation of a warmer climate has now become a part of the region and the local food culture and diet. Or, for that matter, students may experience the more immediately felt and pressing contextual issues relating to soil erosion, leading to landslides, drastic variations in weather, and the depletion of water sources, the drying up of springs and the general rising scarcity of water in the hills of Darjeeling. The problem of solid waste being dumped downhill, and the pollution from waste and litter in the only catchment area in Darjeeling, is leading to the scarcity of water, thus necessitating certain actions for improvement. It is precisely in the projection of the crisis of the environment as a universal phenomenon that the diversity of its effects, which translates into particular variations in different regions of the globe, gets completely consumed by the universal approach to the content of EE. On a tangent, though related to the loss of local particularities in the universality of the crisis, non-contextualisation poses another problem whereby the hills of Darjeeling are sidelined, and the descriptions in the textbook pertain to Bengal in general rather than the hill districts of Bengal. This in itself demands extra effort on the part of the teacher in the hills to contextualise the subject to build relationality for the student.

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‘EVS is science—it is biology, chemistry and everything,’ Roka, a teacher in a Higher Secondary school in Darjeeling exclaims; EVS is science, ‘it is repetitive … what is extra to teach in this?’ The syllabus, as designed prior to the infused model or post the implementation model, has not been able to emphasise that environment needs a different orientation or a different kind of outlook. She further remarks, ‘there is only one chapter on environment, rest everything is science, so there is no point teaching the same thing again and again.’ She adds that she herself has been teaching EVS since the time she joined. Though she has a background in economics, she has taught EVS in primary and secondary classes. On whether she is qualified to teach the subject, she mentions that ‘it is a textbook that we have to teach and anyway we are never consulted by the school authority before being allotted that subject. My name appears as a part of the routine and I need to teach that subject. I am allotted environmental studies almost every year until it became a part of the infused model.’ Roka mentions that the school administration of another government school had made a request for an additional teacher trained in EVS for teaching the subject. The state education board rejected the demand, stating that the interdisciplinary nature of EVS meant that it did not demand a particular specialisation. Rather, the state held, any teacher could teach this subject. The principal of the school mentioned to us, ‘It is geography, it is life science, it is physical science, thus anyone can teach.’ As much as there is an acceptance of the fact that EE is interdisciplinary, and the state rolled out the infused model based on this fact, the textbooks of the infused model do not represent this compliance and downplay the very grounds on which EE is built—that of generating a new form of sociality. However, this downplaying also has another important aspect to it. It occurs not merely at the level of the curriculum, but is systemic to the very structure of teaching in schools. The post of an assistant teacher for the upper primary level in schools is sanctioned only in specific subjects—the mathematics and science groups (biological science

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and pure science); social studies group (history and geography); language group; physical education; work education. The criteria adopted for recruitment themselves disqualify anyone who has been trained in environmental science from becoming an assistant teacher at a school. This, however, is not to assume that anyone trained in environmental science is apt for teaching EE at the school level, or to argue that we need to change the recruitment rules. Rather, what I seek to point to here is the fact that people who are trained in the subject are not a part of the teaching fraternity as EVS teachers who are allotted the teaching of the subject. Since EVS is not a part of the recruitment itself, consequently people who are currently teaching EE in schools are located within the infused model—mostly science teachers or any teacher who is deemed available and fit by the school. And given the rationale of the state’s education board, described earlier, we now have ‘language teachers who are allotted the teaching of EVS at various levels’, as disclosed by Tamang, another teacher at a Higher Secondary school in Darjeeling. One could perhaps be led to believe that those who are trained in environmental science may be more apt for teaching EVS in schools, and perhaps they would go the extra mile to teach EE in its true sense, as was the case with Sengupta, a teacher at another Higher Secondary school in Darjeeling. He, I realised, was the most motivated teacher given his background (master’s) in environmental science. He was, however, recruited as an English teacher since he had done his bachelor’s in English. Though he had majored in English, he took up environmental science for his master’s degree post his recruitment at the school as an English teacher. He now teaches EVS in the twelfth standard. He mentions that, even when he undertook the master’s programme, many had commented on his choice saying, ‘Why are you taking a subject that has no scale [no pay scale at the school level]?’ Thus he maintains that now people are less interested in EVS since its scope is very limited as a discipline, at least in schools, and not much hope exists unless one undertakes the subject with passion

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and interest. His own passion and interest in the subject are reflected in his nature of his engagement with his students. I don’t give much importance to the syllabus, as it is limited to notes and question and answer. What I do is take the students for treks at Singalila National Park for nature study sessions—twice in a year, spring and autumn. I engage them in films on ecology, biodiversity, wildlife regularly. Bird-watching is another important component. Apart from them, any invitation from other local partners—the Zoological Park, other NGOs and environmental organisations, I always encourage my EE students to go and participate.

Rai, the NGO worker, points out: it is by sheer luck that a school may have an interested teacher; if there is no interest, teachers need a different kind of motivation.… even for the motivated teacher in a school, he/she is already engaged in a number of activities [and] thus [we] cannot really expect them to go beyond since they also have their syllabus deadlines to cater to.… individual initiatives for better EE programme have been taken by teachers at their individual level, but institutionally, as a curriculum, nothing has happened.

He further points out, the way EE is envisioned, one can clearly see that if there is a good environmental teacher, who has been taking initiatives, an extra effort towards excursions, tours, storytelling, the relationship between that teacher and student is definitely more cordial unlike the teacherstudent relationship in other subjects.

‘It is EE that allows the teacher-student bond to be nurtured in a certain way, if one takes the initiative,’ exclaims another social worker, Tamang. Thus, in the view of the motivated few in the region—including teachers and the workers from the NGO—EE was always a ‘subject that could not be treated in silos but a subject centrally focused on an individual and his/her relationship with the society and teaching EE always meant going beyond the classroom’ (as stated by Rai).

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Motivation towards EE started off when I realised the impact of sound environmental awareness in bringing a change in attitude and students’ behaviour towards their outlook to their environment. Changes can often be observed immediately if the concepts are explained well to students and when they understand the consequences of local activities at a global scale. This change in attitude can have multiple ripple effects when they start educating their families, teachers and peers. I have had some personal experiences where not just students but teachers have exhibited similar interest in getting more involved in exploring their surrounding and showing a concern for the environment. It is this concern that can be moulded and strengthened over time to bring about environment conscious actions in their schools, homes and communities. Through activities carried out to impart EE, students are frequently exposed to outdoor learning, critical and independent thinking and are made aware of their role in bringing changes in society. These skills are add-ons to their increase in environment consciousness. (Pradhan, EE educationist)

Even if there are motivated teachers, they face constraints in propagating EE as envisioned at multiple levels that range from ‘the extent of proactiveness of institution heads, the interest of the teacher, the timeframe to finish the syllabus’, to catering to questions from some students and parents such as ‘will it fetch marks?’ ‘Some parents believe that it is in fact a waste of time even if the student is interested,’ expresses Sengupta. Against the glaring failure of the state to produce a transformed subjectivity in relation to the environment, some hope arises in the slowly emerging eco-clubs and nature clubs in schools, with NGOs as their driving force. NGOs can help in providing capacity-building training to district education officers and school teachers to enhance their knowledge on local biodiversity, environmental issues and in motivating them to understand the importance of EE. NGOs through their research and experiences can impart  local specific learnings to teachers and help them understand their own landscape better. Only once the teachers understand the importance of EE, will they be able to share the same level of urgency and need to address the current environmental issues

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in their teachings. The role of NGOs can also come in content analysis of EE textbooks and in pushing the education department to revising content to make them more locale specific. Games, activities and workbook, etc. can also be developed by NGOs to supplement the EE textbooks to make learning fun and hands-on. (Pradhan)

Programmes involving field visits and regular lectures are organised as a part of the NGO activity. However, interest in these eco-clubs depends on the school and the few teachers who would help push such programmes in schools. There is no directive on the part of the state to enhance the skills and capacities of teachers, having included EE as a part of the curriculum. In addition, while local NGOs are putting in extra effort, they explain that such initiatives in EE by NGOs are usually time-bound due to ‘lack of funds, or are usually over and above the project.… for a long-term work, one would need to work solely and closely with EE as a project in itself,’ explains R. Rai. A situation in which EVS itself has not been able to motivate teachers, and the motivated teachers are bound by the educational structure, is evidence that the state has failed to fill the gap between the philosophy of EE and its actuality on the ground. As a philosophy, EE seeks to build an alternative kind of sociality through the imparting of knowledge, and particular skills with an emphasis on the ‘power to know’, and therefore, ‘a power to decide’, opening up a space for agents—teachers, NGO workers—who would empower individuals with this new attitude and the ‘power to act’. Therefore, EE demands a close engagement of teachers, students and other key stakeholders and the civil society at large towards building a contextualised rationality with the environment to effectively bring about the attitudinal or action-oriented change and a transformed form of sociality.

Notes 1 Environment policy was initiated in India in 1972, prior to which environmental concerns like sanitation and public health were dealt with by various ministries of the government. The Government of India

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established the National Committee on Environmental Planning and Coordination (NCEPC) in 1972. The NCEPC prepared the country report that was presented by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi at the Swedish Conference in 1972. Gandhi was the only head of government, other than the host prime minister, to speak at the first-ever United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in June 1972.  With the NCEPC in place, environmental concerns became a part of planning and development and were incorporated in the Five Year Plans. 2 According to Jariwala (1990: 2), ‘one of the directive principles added by the 42nd Amendment Act provides for the protection and improvement of environment. Article 47 provides for the improvement of public health as one of the primary duties of the state.’ Article 48A refers to the environment as the ‘external conditions and influences affecting the life and development’ of humans, animals and plants (ibid.), whereby the State may impose restrictions on the use of factors adversely affecting the life and development of living beings. ‘It will be difficult, if not impossible, for the State to fulfil [the] obligation [of improving the environment] in the modern industrialized civilization where man has so much surrendered his natural environment to the scientific achievements which have polluted the environment today’ (ibid.). 3 My engagement with ATREE initiated my work on EE from 2016. This led to several discussions on EE—formal and informal—with teachers, NGO partners and local government stakeholders supplemented with school visits and awareness programmes at schools and colleges. The interview citations in the chapter are an outcome of these conversations since 2016 at various points in time; the key informants who find mention here were revisited specifically during the phase of writing of this chapter. Prior consent was taken from the respondents to use their names and other details as a part of this work. I am thankful to my respondents for their valuable time and particularly to Sengupta for providing me the needed books and materials on EE circulated at the school level. I am also thankful to Pradhan who motivated me to work on EE. 4 Details drawn from the West Bengal Council of Higher Education website, https://wbchse.nic.in/html/guid_env_edu.html (accessed on 13 October 2019).

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References Basu, S. 2012. ‘No Compulsory Environment Studies in HS’. Times of India, 25 July. Available at: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/ No-compulsory-environment-studies-in-HS/articleshow/15133303. cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_ campaign=cppst (accessed on 12 June 2019). Carson, R. 1962. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gandhi, I. 1986. Indira Gandhi: Selected Speeches and Writings, vol. V. New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Giddens, A. and P.W. Sutton. 1992. Sociology. New Delhi: Wiley India. Hungerford, H. and R. Peyton. 1994. ‘Procedures for Developing an Environmental Education Curriculum: A Discussion Guide for UNESCO Training Seminars on Environmental Education’. Environmental Education Series no. 22, UNESCO. Jariwala, C.M. 1990. ‘The Constitution 42nd Amendment Act and the Environment’. In Legal Control of Environmental Pollution in India, edited by S.L. Agarwal. Bombay: N. M. Tripathi. Available at: http://14.139.60.114:8080/jspui/bitstream/123456789/1273/1/008_ The%20Constitution%2042nd%20Amendment%20Act.pdf (accessed on 30 October 2018). Robertson, C.L. and E.K. Smolska. 1997. ‘Gaps between Advocated Practices and Teaching Realities in Environmental Education’. Environmental Research, 3(3): 311–326. Robottom, I. 1985. ‘Evaluation in Environmental Education: Time for a Change in Perspective?’. Journal of Environmental Education, 17(1): 31– 36. Times of India. 2002. ‘CU Told to Remove Environment Studies as Compulsory Subject’. Times of India, 3 July. Available at: https:// timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/CU-told-to-removeenvironment-studies-as-compulsory-subject/articleshow/14899810.cms (accessed on 12 June 2019).

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Caste in the Classroom: An Ethical Interrogation P. Kesava Kumar Knowledge production and dissemination through educational institutions have an invariable relationship with hegemonic and dominant social forces in India and elsewhere. These social groups have control over other groups even though we have a democratic nation-state. In India, apart from class, gender, religion, language and region, caste is a dominant social and political force that operates subtly in regulating thinking, social beliefs and value systems. For many generations, Dalits (erstwhile untouchable castes) were denied education due to the Hindu social order and ethics of caste, and after India’s independence, dominant social groups used education to influence and control these groups that were earlier denied education. Thus, knowledge and education were used to maintain power relationships. In this way, education has been a concealed power that helps maintain social hierarchies. The liberal and modern education systems of the colonial and post-independence regimes in India allowed Dalits into public institutions of learning. But Dalit students feel discriminated against, humiliated and often marginalised in these institutions. A sense of alienation prevails as their social experiences are not part of the ‘knowledge systems’ of educational institutions. Most teachers and students of non-Dalit caste groups have not yet prepared themselves to be democratised. On the contrary, they identify themselves with existing social hierarchies and carry caste prejudice into the classroom. History 273

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reveals that it is difficult to maintain monopolisation of knowledge systems and education by hegemonic groups due to the contestations of less privileged communities against dominance. Moreover, the liberal democratic state engages with diverse social groups and aims to provide inclusive knowledge in public institutions on the basis of demand from the struggles of the socially marginalised. It believes that the purpose of education is not only sharing information but also making moral beings and good citizens. Theorists of critical pedagogy argue that education could be treated as a possibility for the liberation/emancipation of oppressed social groups. Education may be used for social transformation by creating a counter-hegemony against traditional and dominant hegemonies. Against this backdrop, this chapter addresses the issue of caste in the classroom and argues for the necessity of the annihilation of caste as a primary pedagogical practice in relation to the ethics of teaching in Indian higher learning institutions. The ethics of teaching involves creating a democratic space in the classroom. This chapter critically evaluates the role of caste in pedagogical practices from an ethical point of view with a focus on teaching philosophy in Indian higher educational institutions.

Democratisation of Education and Pedagogical Practices Education plays a key role in the acquisition of ideas, transmission of knowledge and social transformation. There are contesting positions on the function of education and pedagogical practices. Marx’s analysis explains the nexus between the dominant ruling class and education. ‘The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it’ (Marx and Engels 1976: 59). Bourdieu and Passeron contend that education is concealed power that dominates

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people and maintains social hierarchies. Concealing its proximity to social privilege is the time-tested strategy of education. In other words, the dominant class legitimises its political authority through influencing and imposing the content of education. ‘Bourdieu and Passeron see societies as hierarchically organised with upper and lower strata that support social inequalities. Teaching takes place in a hierarchical society and is used by the powerful to secure their privileges’ (Kupfer 2015: 32). Rather than being neutral, impartial and expressive of an independent logic and truth, what is taught in the classroom exhibits social privilege. Knowledge transmission is a mode of cultural reproduction in which social hierarchies and power relations play a determining role. Antonio Gramsci explains the function of hegemony in governing society. Hegemony could be defined as ‘an “organising principle”, or world view (or combination of world views), that is diffused by agencies of ideological control and socialisation into every area of daily life’ (Boggs 1976: 39). Hegemony is a commonsensical world view constructed by intellectuals belonging to a dominant class. Gramsci considers every relationship of hegemony as necessarily an educational relationship (2000: 348). He conceptualises education as a hegemonic system maintained by the ruling class, and argues that a counter-hegemony produced by subaltern organic intellectuals who emerge spontaneously from within society, rather than by an elite class cut off from the milieu, has the potential for transforming society. Considering the liberatory potential of education, critical pedagogical theorists argue for the democratisation of education. Paulo Freire considers ‘education as a specifically human experience … a form of intervention in the world’ (1998: 90–91). To make our education system democratic and to create a learning environment, we have to adopt critical, creative and transformative pedagogical practices rather than following traditional pedagogical practices. Critical pedagogy is ‘a radical approach to education that seeks to transform oppressive structures in society using democratic and

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activist approaches to teaching and learning’ (Braa and Callero 2006: 357). Fobes and Kaufman argue that rather than teaching the teacher the content and method of teaching, critical pedagogy advocates the use of teaching ‘to effect positive social change. This joining together of process, content, and outcome makes critical pedagogy uniquely problematic for both learners and teachers’ (2008: 27). While John Dewey advocated progressive, learner-centred and democratic education against traditional approaches, Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2005) emphasises that teachers and students must be aware of the culture of silence that promotes oppression and must sharpen their critical consciousness to rise above it. Freire writes: A group which does not concretely express a generative thematics—a fact which might appear to imply the nonexistence of themes—is, on the contrary, suggesting a very dramatic theme: the theme of silence. The theme of silence suggests a structure of mutism in face of the overwhelming force of the limit-situations. (ibid.: 106)

For this, traditional hierarchies must be broken and teachers must be prepared to be learners. Transformative pedagogy empowers learners to critically examine their contexts, beliefs, values, knowledge and attitudes with the goal of developing spaces for self-reflection, appreciation of diversity and critical thinking. A transformative pedagogy is realised when learning goes beyond the mind and connects hearts and actions, transforming knowledge, attitudes and skills. (UNESCO 2017: 4)

Michael Apple criticises the right-wing political tendency to commodify education because it ‘substitutes private gain (hidden under the rhetoric of “democracy” and “personal choice”) for the public good’ (2012: xxxvi). At the same time, Apple advocates educational reforms for the creation of a just society in the belief that education is necessary for social change. Ambedkar identified education as a moral weapon in the hands of Dalits for their emancipation, along with physical and political

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weapons. He argued that all these weapons were denied to the masses in India by chaturvarna (the system of four castes). In the words of Ambedkar: On account of the caste system, they could receive no education. They could not think out or know the way to their salvation. They were condemned to be lowly; and not knowing the way of escape, and not having the means of escape, they became reconciled to eternal servitude, which they accepted as their inescapable fate. (Ambedkar 2014: 275)

Ambedkar further problematised the relation between power and education while addressing the monopoly of education and knowledge by the Brahminical class, which systematically and consciously worked to establish its hegemony over the masses. On the one hand, Brahminical social forces denied education to the masses, and, on the other hand, they spread an education based on myths and irrationality. Ambedkar argued that Brahminical education was based on lies/myths and had no grounding in concrete life experiences. He encouraged Dalits to strive for education and propagation of knowledge which would unmask the Brahminical lies. Ambedkar observes in Untouchables or the Children of India’s Ghetto: Two things they [untouchables] must strive for is education and spread of knowledge. The power of the privileged classes rests upon lies which are sedulously propagated among the masses. No resistance to power is possible while the sanctioning lies, which justify that power are accepted as valid. While the lie which is the first and the chief line of defence remains unbroken there can be no revolt. Before any injustice, any abuse or oppression can be resisted, the lie upon which it is founded must be unmasked, must be clearly recognised for what it is. This can happen only with education. (Ambedkar 1989: 399; emphases added)

Ambedkar believed that power was needed for the underprivileged to destroy the power of the dominant social classes. He proposed alternative education against the monopolisation of education by the Brahminical classes, by considering education as a weapon to liberate the masses.

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Ambedkar and Critical Pedagogy in India Ambedkar identified education as the driving force of society and as the instrument of power. Knowledge plays a vital role in the development of personality. But in India, Ambedkar pointed out, knowledge remained the monopoly of a few privileged people and served the interest of the Brahminical class. On the role of the intellectual class, Ambedkar had the following to say: There is no exaggeration in saying that the entire destiny of a country depends upon its intellectual class. If the intellectual class is honest, independent, and disinterested, it can be trusted to take the initiative and give a proper lead when a crisis arises. It is true that intellect by itself is no virtue. It is only a means, and the use of means depends upon the ends which an intellectual person pursues. (Ambedkar 2014: 292)

Ambedkar looked for a just and democratic society that internalised the principles of equality, liberty and fraternity. To realise this society, he argued, there was an immediate need for the annihilation of the caste system. Annihilation of caste must be considered the primary issue of education in South Asia and its diaspora, and the issue of caste has to be addressed in the classroom to make the public university democratic. Taking Ambedkar as her source of intellectual inspiration, Sharmila Rege proposes a Phule-Ambedkarite feminist pedagogy as a critical pedagogical method. She argues: Phule and Ambedkar in different ways, by weaving together the emancipatory non-Vedic materialist traditions (Lokayata, Buddha, Kabir) and new western ideas (Thomas Paine, John Dewey, Karl Marx, for instance) had challenged the binaries of western modernity/Indian tradition, private caste-gender/public nation and sought to refashion modernity, and thereby its project of education. (Rege 2010: 93)

She explains further: [B]oth Phule and Ambedkar underline the preference for truth enhancing values and methods through an integration of critical rationality of modern science and the scepticism and self-reflection

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of ancient non-Vedic materialists and the Buddha.… The methods are those that seek to integrate the principles of prajna (critical understanding) with karuna (empathetic love) and samata (equality). (Ibid.)

Consequently, what distinguishes the Phule-Ambedkarite perspective of education from perspectives based on the binaries of reason/ emotion, public/private, objective/experiential, neutral/engaged is the democratisation of the method of teaching or impartation of knowledge. The philosophy and practice of critical pedagogy in general and the Indian variant of critical pedagogy in particular may be helpful in democratising the Indian education system, especially at the higher education level, by addressing the issue of caste in the classroom.

Indian Campuses: Brahminical Hegemony and Democratisation Struggles There is no doubt that the modern Indian education system acquired most of its features from colonial educational practices. In postcolonial India, at the policy level, there have been efforts to democratise and modernise education by increasing access for everyone. The Radhakrishnan Report on University Education (1949) saw the university as the means to realise the goals of the Indian Constitution, which primarily emphasises justice. The university has the hermeneutic task of reading, rereading and reinventing justice through the three axes of liberty, equality and fraternity. However, the dominant social elite have control over knowledge in both traditional as well as modern education systems. Social hierarchies and privileges have been reinforced in institutions of learning in India, a trend that went unchecked for a long time till the entry, since the late 1980s, of Dalit-Bahujans into higher education institutions. Hence began the contestation of the existing educational system by subaltern groups and the attempt to democratise it. At this historical juncture,

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university campuses became sites of contesting world views within a conflictual social environment. This situation demands inclusive and critical pedagogical practices. A democratising educational setup aiming at social change is a challenging task for everyone—the state, institutions, teachers, students and civil society. In recent times, the privileged public sphere termed the ‘university’ has occupied centre stage in Indian politics. The university is often viewed as a centre of learning that holds together diverse social and political communities; it is regarded as a centre for not only imparting but also producing knowledge. Needless to say, this privileged public sphere is located within the larger society. Knowledge produced in the society is channelised through the curriculum of the university to return to and invigorate the society. Specialising in the skill of knowledge production, the intellectual community which emerges out of the university is expected to provide direction and purpose to build a just society. In other words, the future of the nation is imagined and influenced through the intelligentsia. That is, what constitutes knowledge, and whose knowledge has been hegemonised and institutionalised as the public knowledge system, are crucial issues in debating pedagogical practices. For this, we need to understand the social context of the processing of knowledge and the political values of the existing domain of knowledge. When we look at the Indian education scenario from this perspective, there is no doubt that the idea of the university which still prevails in India is based on colonial premises. On the one hand, the Indian elite, the Brahminical class in its crudest form, wants to perpetuate the colonial knowledge system without decolonising the country’s education system. On the other, they have maintained their uninterrupted hegemony in the name of ‘Indian’ public education. From the late 1980s, the university as a Brahminical institution has been on the verge of collapse, if not under existential threat coming from subaltern social groups. This has been the time of the entry of Dalits, women and the rural poor into the elite university education

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system in large numbers. In the terrain of the educational system, we now often witness the contestation of the Brahminical idea of the university by the counter-knowledge claims of the marginalised. In the 1990s, students from diverse communities were mobilised and often polarised along caste lines on university campuses in the wake of the implementation of reservations for ‘other backward communities’ (OBCs) as per the Mandal Commission Report. The post-Mandal era has been marked by the emergence of student activism, especially from Dalit-Bahujan communities in the university. Such student activism has not only changed the discourse on campuses but is also significantly different from earlier student activism, which was mostly identified with the left politics of the late 1970s and early 1980s. These struggles have attempted to expose the inbuilt caste hierarchies in the university. The new contestation is between hegemonised and marginalised social groups. The conflict between the privileged and the marginalised has widened. The assertion of Dalit and Bahujan students against undemocratic and caste-based biases in the university system is often described by the intellectual community as the ‘crisis’ or ‘collapse’ of the university. However, this is a situation that demands the democratisation of higher education through critical pedagogical practices by addressing existing social prejudices in the education system. The privatisation and commercialisation of education and the policy of the state towards education in the time of globalisation have totally changed the very idea of education. The social sciences and humanities have been the first causalities of this kind of approach. Such fields are treated as non-productive and the State has no interest in strengthening these disciplines. Interestingly, large numbers of students from Dalit-Bahujan social backgrounds, entering the university system for the first time, are mostly enrolling in the disciplines of social sciences and humanities. At the same time, right-wing political forces are imposing the agenda of saffronising/traditionalising/Brahminising/Hinduising/Indianising

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education at the cost of marginalising the indigenous knowledge base of productive social groups. In this context, the issue of inclusion and exclusion of particular knowledge systems in the curriculum is often the focus of debates. Student activism in Indian universities in the 2010s has acquired complexity with the intertwining of various social and political factors. This demands a new language to explain the contemporary university space. Universities immediately reflect the social face and political voice of the nation as they take the lead in articulating the social and political aspirations of the people. The conflict among student groups thus has to be understood as social conflict. The political narratives circulated on campuses acquire their meanings within the social contexts of the respective campuses. Student struggles indicate the aspirations and social imagination of students in the context of the changing nature of Indian politics. The suicide of Dalit scholar Rohit Vemula at the University of Hyderabad and the country-wide student struggle after this event symbolise the caste-hegemonised higher education system and its contestation by democratic student struggles. Here we find a spontaneous, uncompromising, courageous, rebellious student struggle, which emerged as a collective meeting point for student activism in India. The student struggle after the death of Rohit Vemula also promises a new and progressive Indian politics that brings together diverse social groups and ideologies of liberation. It was a new form of social practice and protest against the State, the social system in general, and the university system of education in particular. Post-Rohit student politics on Indian campuses, however, faces several challenges in sustaining student solidarity. At the same time, a careful look at student struggles that followed in the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, Jadavpur University in Kolkata and the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai may be helpful for further substantiating the mood and politics of the Indian student struggle to democratise the spaces of higher education in the country (see Panikkar 2016: 4–5).

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The Ghost of Caste on the Campus and in the Classroom Caste on Indian campuses manifests in various forms in the curriculum, pedagogical practices and the everyday social life of students. It is important to realise how caste operates as natural commonsense on campuses, because the campus community of students, teachers and staff is already socialised into and embedded in a caste world view. A Dalit student’s narration of his life experiences on an Indian campus shows how he had to struggle as a Dalit to obtain an education while constantly facing discriminatory behaviours strongly entrenched in Indian institutions of learning. He recalls how he found classroom practices, textbooks, examinations and evaluations, interviews and recruitments prearranged to suit the Brahminical castes and discourage others. According to him, ‘universities especially were the “gate-keepers” to the upper caste kingdom in India’ (Tharu, Poduval and Kumar 1998: 2702). As the Anveshi report on caste-related violence at the Central University of Hyderabad highlights, the sense of self-worth is the first casualty of university life. Dalit students are embittered by the way they are perpetually on probation at a university that at best suffers their presence.… They are ignored in the classroom, invisible in the curriculum. Try as they might, their grades never improve. They are regarded as ‘unteachable’. They are watched while they eat, mocked at by teachers and students, suspected for their corruption, hounded for their misuse of hostel rooms for guests from the village, chastised for their inability to pay bills on time, condemned for their violence. (Anveshi Law Committee 2002: 1101)

The experience of Dalit students, as the Anveshi Law Committee reports, symbolically represents the mood on university campuses in the post-Mandal scenario. The constitutionally mandated practice of reservation is mostly resented and reviled by upper-caste students and teachers. This betrays the cultural reproduction of social hierarchies

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in the educational system; the attempt by conscientious Dalit students to resist this entrenched discriminatory system through the articulation of their concrete experience of caste on campus and their struggle against it must be lauded. The recent report of the People’s Commission on Shrinking Democratic Space (PCSDS), ‘Indian Campuses under Siege’, observes: ‘Dalit and tribal students are being denied equal access to institutions of higher education, including to hostel facilities. They are also often subjected to humiliation based on their identities within the campuses and action against the perpetuators of such attacks is rarely taken’ (PCSDS 2019: 45). The report also states that the use of criminal law against protesting and critical Dalit and minority students by higher education institutions in India has visibly increased in the recent past (ibid.: 43). Apart from targeting and victimisation of Dalits, a significant shift towards Hinduisation (saffronisation) of the syllabus in the name of restructuring and reforming of education can be seen across India in recent times. ‘The blending in of Hindu nationalist themes, content, and perspectives, into the various courses and their syllabi, has already begun.… [T]he forces and discourses of Hindutva have begun to make major interventions in pedagogical practices’ (ibid.: 101). Any assertion of Dalit students or any attempt by Dalit or progressive faculty to introduce courses or readings reflecting or representing Dalit life is violently undermined by Hindutva forces. The recent incidents of violent opposition to the inclusion of the writings of the Dalit theorist Kancha Ilaiah in the political science curriculum, and to the course Literature and Caste in the curriculum of English at Delhi University by Hindutva organisations reflect the academic and political environment of the campuses. The PCSDS report further points out: In many classrooms, teachers continue to privilege a majoritarian ideology in their teaching, failing to adopt an inclusive pedagogy that their students could relate to, leading to alienation in the classroom. The authorities appear indifferent to such anomalies and have done little to address them. Higher education, in an egalitarian society, must

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necessarily be diverse and reflective of the realities of various sections of society, particularly of those who have been marginalised in multiple ways. (Ibid.: 48)

It is no surprise that conservative forces are opposing the acknowledgement and rectification of the rampant caste-based discrimination existing in higher educational institutions, precisely the sites where it should not be found and where future social and political leaders are groomed.

Inclusive Curriculum and Cultivation of Critical Reason In pedagogical practices, the curriculum plays a crucial role. In normal conditions, the knowledge system of dominant social groups enjoys privilege, and the curriculum is a reflection of their socio-political hegemony. Hence, students from diverse communities are compelled to accept these dominant positions. Authoritarian classrooms and hegemonic curricula dominate traditional and normal teaching practices. Michael Apple in Ideology and Curriculum (1990) points out that their socialisation conditions students to accept rather than challenge social hierarchy and entrenched structures of power. Ira Shor observes in Empowering Education (1992) that in traditional classrooms, what prevails is teaching students to conform passively to social standards so that they are prepared to become manipulable members of the workforce. Antonia Darder in Culture and Power in the Classroom (1991), while proposing transformative teaching from a Freirean perspective, observes that students from marginalised backgrounds, such as Blacks and Latinos, are even more marginalised by formal education, despite the fact that they have already been marginalised. Social struggles for the transformation of society, on the other hand, often influence our world view and have implications for the production and propagation of knowledge. Dalit and women student struggles help students articulate their problems and contest

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the existing curriculum, in which their social experiences are unrecorded.1 Making the classroom democratic is a challenging task for teachers, students and institutions. First of all, a learning environment has to prevail. The ongoing social struggles of the oppressed may facilitate this environment to an extent. Rather than treating caste as a sensitive and delicate issue, there is a need for open and rational discussion on such issues. Rather than confining students to hegemonic positions of power, there is a need to encourage them to open themselves to alternative and progressive world views. The curriculum must represent social pluralism through the inclusion of the discourses and perspectives of marginalised social groups. Professionally, the teacher is a moral agent who mediates diversity in the classroom without prejudice and malice. Rather than conforming to her social position, a professional teacher transforms herself and adopts critical pedagogical practices. She creatively engages in intercultural dialogue by mediating the emotions, demands and contestations of a heterogeneous classroom. A responsible and socially conscious government takes policy decisions that are binding on public educational institutions. Creative, critical and transformative pedagogical practices may be helpful in creating a democratic system of education that makes the society as well as the nation democratic.

Pedagogy of Philosophy The Intersectoral Strategy on Philosophy (adopted by UNESCO in 2005) visualises philosophy as a field that can help realise the organisation’s central aim of peace in the following ways: By developing the intellectual tools to analyze and understand key concepts such as justice, dignity and freedom, by building capacities for independent thought and judgment, by enhancing the critical skills to understand and question the world and its challenges, and by fostering reflection on values and principles, philosophy is a ‘school of freedom’. (UNESCO 2006: 5)

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The significance of the discipline of philosophy lies in a comprehensive understanding of the world through a rational and ethical approach. Philosophy embodies dignity and the freedom of spirit. As a knowledge system, it has the potential of liberating the seeker from oppression and exploitation. Philosophy as open and free thinking is itself liberating. Ambedkar writes: Philosophy is no purely theoretic matter. It has practical potentialities. Philosophy has its roots in the problems of life and whatever theories philosophy propounds must return to society as instruments of reconstructing society. It is not enough to know. Those who know must endeavour to fulfil. (Ambedkar 1987: 286)

Universities were founded in India in 1857 in the Calcutta, Bombay and Madras Presidencies. Philosophy as a subject was introduced in the higher education system in the early decades of the 20th century between 1900 and 1920. Initially, Philosophy and Logic was introduced as a foundational course in affiliated colleges of Indian universities. It is interesting to note that till 1927, ‘Indian thought’ was not a subject of study in Indian universities. Many of the early colleges in India were started by Protestant missionaries, and the syllabi prescribed by the university were drafted by teachers trained in British universities. Many of the first teachers in these colleges came from Britain, and quite a number of them were themselves missionaries. The initial phase of philosophical education in India was nurtured by personnel, mostly trained in Scottish universities. The early colleges, such as Scottish College, Calcutta, and the Madras Christian College, are examples in this regard. Philosophy teachers who came from Britain to teach in India were influenced by some form of Kantianism or Hegelianism, more often by a mixture of both. Later, the idealism of Bradley and Bosanquet influenced philosophy teaching in India. So, the first generation of Indian philosophers learnt to look upon idealism as the last word in philosophy. It was also the period when the new Hindu world view that had emerged aided by orientalist research accepted Vedanta as the highest form

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of philosophy. Naturally, therefore, the entire first generation of philosophers who came out of Indian universities were idealists, influenced by Advaita Vedanta, or some form of European idealism derived from Kant and Hegel. Consequently, the older Indian academic philosophers were more or less favourable to religion, and in the thought of every one of them, there was a place either for the Absolute or for God (Murty 1972: xxxvii). Philosophy as a discipline is most marginalised in the Indian higher education system today. It is taught at the graduate and postgraduate level in a few colleges and university departments, and survives as a research programme mainly in such departments as Delhi University, Banaras Hindu University, Allahabad University, Jadavpur University and a few others. In south Indian universities, enrolment does not even reach double digits. Philosophy as a discipline in India is often preferred by the less privileged in order to stay on in university campuses. Though philosophy has a prime place in the human knowledge system, there has been no attempt to rejuvenate the discipline in India. Stagnation of the discipline of philosophy must be partially attributed to the social agency involved in the institutionalisation of the discipline based on a narrow framework, rather than democratising the subject matter and making it speak to the context and times. Without doubt, the function of philosophy is critical reasoning, but philosophy courses developed and taught in India never appealed to reason as the ground for thinking, whether these were courses in Indian philosophy, Western philosophy or ethics. Philosophy in India is institutionalised in a Brahminical and idealistic manner in accordance with the prevailing dominant social interests. According to this approach, philosophy is never viewed as social expression that seeks to understand, explain and overcome foundational crises in knowledge, science, society, polity, religion, art and world view. In typical Indian classrooms, philosophical ideas are presented without reference to their social context. Philosophical study is mostly

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conducted as textual study, but the texts are never discussed in relation to their social contexts. The social and political positions of the authors of these texts are never discussed with students. Moreover, conforming to the traditional value system, the philosophical texts prescribed in the curriculum often directly or indirectly support the caste system, or at least do not provoke students to challenge the absurdity of caste hierarchy. No attempts are made to problematise the issue of caste in the readings in philosophy courses, or to introduce alternative philosophical traditions that are critical of caste from within the discipline of philosophy. In other words, dominant and hegemonic social interests are masked in the name of Indian philosophy. It is evident that the canon of Indian philosophy is explicitly Brahminical, based on the Vedanta paradigm, and thereby excludes other Indian philosophical traditions. In fact, historically, Vedanta is a minor philosophical tradition, but was later established as a metanarrative of Indian philosophy after the orientalists translated and codified Sanskrit texts. A cursory survey of philosophy in India reveals that Vedanta occupies the position of privilege in defining Indian philosophy (Dubey 2017: 6–10).2 Major research in traditional Indian philosophy is centred on the field of orthodox as opposed to heterodox schools of Indian philosophy (ibid.: 28).3 In India, caste is a fundamental social reality that shapes and influences everyday life. It is a determining force in one’s perception of the world. As Pratima Bowes rightly observes, The philosophers in India failed in their task in as much as they did nothing towards developing political, social or moral philosophy in India. One reason for this non-development may be that philosophical thought was a monopoly of the Brahmin caste, whose privileges would have been under attack if questions were to be asked about the social system. (Bowes 1982: 8–9)

We find no development of social and political philosophy in India due to the Brahminical character of Indian philosophy. Courses on Indian ethics even today are confined to purusharthas4 and

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varnashramadharma,5 concepts that predominantly support the Brahminical social order without any critical outlook. Western idealism has occupied a major part in Western philosophy– related subjects in the curriculum. Western philosophical discourses associated with scepticism, scientific temper, critical reason and materialism were, on the whole, discouraged by the missionaries who initially set up philosophy as a modern academic area in India. Western philosophical movements such as analytic philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism and American pragmatism scarcely influenced Indian philosophers till the 1950s. Marxism was not introduced as part of the syllabus. On the whole, the concepts and tools of Western philosophy, we must say, were used to support the dominant hegemonic notions of Indian philosophy. According to the Indian philosopher D.M. Datta, philosophy in modern India was a by-product of Western influence and the teaching of European philosophy on Indian soil because even when it puts forward an indigenous point of view, the argument is sustained with reference to European philosophy. The same opinion is held by renowned scientists regarding Indian science as well (see Murty 1972: xliii). However, Satchidananda Murty remarks that in India, ‘the outlook and the attitude of the powers that be is much less favourable to philosophy than science’ (ibid.). K.M. Panikkar observes: ‘Not one of the universities has produced a philosopher of any distinction who has made a contribution of value either to the traditional systems of India or to the modern schools’ (Panikkar 1963: 135). The ‘Report of the Review Committee on Indian Council of Philosophical Research’ submitted by Mrinal Miri and Rajeev Bhargava in 2011 expresses the opinion that the quality of philosophy teaching both at the undergraduate and postgraduate level is very poor; consequently philosophical research is woefully inadequate.… [T]here may be another, perhaps even more serious, reason for the poor state of philosophy in the country; and this is the almost complete isolation of philosophy from all other academic disciplines. This isolation has led to philosophy’s loss of moorings in

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the intellectual environment of our times. (Miri and Bhargava 2011: 30–31)

Philosophy in India seems to survive either as exegetical repetition of traditional Brahminical ideas or as decontextualised reconstruction of Western metaphysical notions.

Conclusion: Democratisation of Philosophy Democratisation of philosophical education is a challenging task. To democratise philosophical training in India, the most suitable strategy might be to adopt critical pedagogical practices. However, such a strategy requires a social and political environment that emphasises the values of democracy. The democratic struggles of Dalits, Adivasis and women in India have created such a space to an extent by questioning the dominance of hegemonic forces. Dalit-Bahujans claim that they have been playing a major role in knowledge production, but the genealogies of their knowledge have been marginalised in the existing curriculum of education. The issue of caste has received some attention in the educational system due to such demands and struggles, and the state has been compelled to respond. In the education system of India today, there are efforts to redefine knowledge and to consider the knowledge systems of the marginalised. From the late 1990s, we can see that the courses introduced in universities have a visible relation to the life, struggles, culture and literature of Dalits and women. We have seen changes in the curriculum of the discipline of philosophy too. As a member of the faculty of philosophy and a conscious Dalit teacher, I have myself been involved in introducing new courses that counter Brahminical hegemony in the discipline of philosophy, while taking part in the development of the curricula of Pondicherry University and Delhi University. These courses are: Critical Philosophical Traditions of India, Approaches to Indian Philosophy, Materialistic Reading of Indian Philosophy, Philosophical Foundations of Contemporary

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Social Movements, and Philosophy of B.R. Ambedkar. These courses engage with social reality critically and conceptually. They contest the Brahminical paradigm of philosophy and offer alternative content for philosophical education, which is located in the concrete life experiences of the marginalised. These courses also underline that philosophy need not be abstractly metaphysical, but an abstraction that emerges out of the lifeworld of people and their zeitgeist. Students easily relate to such courses and philosophically engage with the content critically and questioningly, rather than as mute spectators. The dominant constructions and canon of Indian philosophy are idealistic, Brahminical and Vedanta-centric. Historically, indigenous, democratic and subaltern philosophical traditions of India have either been marginalised or negated. The course Critical Philosophical Traditions of India not only interrogates the dominant Indian philosophical traditions but also exposes the politics of inclusion and exclusion of philosophers in the canon. Indian philosophy itself must be redefined through the inclusion in the curriculum of Indian philosophy alternative conceptions and content, emanating from the subaltern and marginalised philosophical discourses of India. The course just mentioned primarily focuses on alternative and living philosophical traditions which are critical of the dominant constructions of Indian philosophy, from the Shramana tradition (non-Vedic tradition of spiritual ascetics from which arose Jainism and Buddhism) and radical subaltern Bhakti poets like Kabir and Veera Brahmam to contemporary philosophical traditions established by Phule, Periyar, Iyothee Thass, Narayana Guru and Ambedkar. This course views philosophy as a social praxis. The purpose of this course is to bring to the fore the potential of indigenous emancipatory philosophical reasoning that broadens and democratises the very idea of philosophy. The course on the Philosophy of B.R. Ambedkar is a bold attempt to understand Indian philosophy from an anti-caste perspective. Ambedkar’s approach to Brahminical Indian philosophy and its social reality was one of the boldest attempts to critique and

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democratise Indian philosophy from the perspective of reason, history and ethics. Apart from an inclusive curriculum, the role that the teacher plays in higher education institutions that impart and create socially relevant knowledge is crucial in engaging students in the classroom. Maintaining a critical distance from the issues she engages with in the classroom and teaching students to think, reason and to learn, the teacher acts as a moral agent in bringing about social transformation through education. The teacher has to invent a new language and disposition to engage in dialogue with diverse social groups in the classroom. Moral trust among students may be created through a rational and objective curriculum and evaluation, and through the commitment of the teacher who adopts creative and transformative pedagogical practices.

Notes 1 In the early 1990s, politically conscious students of the University of Hyderabad from the subaltern sections questioned the existing Brahminical education system and argued for changing the curriculum. They pointed out that most of the curriculum of MA English was dominated by British drama and prose, Shakespeare’s plays and the writings of Milton and Chaucer, at the cost of totally negating native experiences. Students demanded contemporary and culturally relevant course materials. 2 Sushim Dubey has surveyed and analysed data collected on research in philosophy in India from 1908 to 2011. He classifies 3,414 PhD theses surveyed into 86 thematic categories. Among these, most dissertations that worked on Indian philosophy (which was the favourite area among the surveyed researchers) focused on traditional Indian schools and concepts, and modern Indian thinkers such as Gandhi, Aurobindo, Vivekananda and Tagore. Only 9 dissertations were written on the philosophy of Ambedkar and only 20 on the general theme of justice and human rights. Regarding the overwhelming focus on ‘the glorious tradition of Indian philosophy and culture’ among the surveyed

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Teaching in Unequal Societies researchers, Dubey observes: ‘as can be seen from the ongoing analyses, enquiries into the Ancient Indian Tradition have been still the most favoured areas of inquiry amongst higher degree aspirants in Philosophy’ (2017: x). The survey shows that there is a conspicuous absence of philosophical interest in the injustice of caste hierarchy and only peripheral interest in feminist philosophy. In the field of Indian philosophy, Dubey’s 2017 survey of 3,414 dissertations counts 1,281 PhDs awarded in orthodox Indian philosophy and 578 in heterodox philosophy. The four traditional Brahminical objects of human pursuit or goals of human existence, namely dharma/duties, artha/wealth, kama/desire and moksha/liberation. The traditional Brahminical system of ethical duties based on the fourtier caste or varna structure of Brahmins/priestly class, Kshatriyas/ ruling class, Vaishyas/commercial class, Shudras/labour class and a fifth untouchable class of avarnas/outcastes; and stages of life of the brahmacharya/student, grihastha/householder, vanaprastha/retiree and sanyasa/renouncer.

References Ambedkar, B.R. 1987. ‘Riddles in Hinduism’. In Dr. B.R. Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, edited by Vasant Moon, vol. 4. Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra. Ambedkar, B.R. 1989. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, edited by Vasant Moon, vol. 5. Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra. Ambedkar, B.R. 2014. Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition, edited by S. Anand. New Delhi: Navayana. Anveshi Law Committee. 2002. ‘Caste and the Metropolitan University’. Economic and Political Weekly, 37(12): 1100–1103. Apple, M. 1990. Ideology and Curriculum. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. 2012. Education and Power. New York: Routledge. Boggs, C. 1976. Gramsci’s Marxism. London: Pluto Press. Bowes, P. 1982. ‘What Is Indian about Indian Philosophy?’. In Indian Philosophy: Past and Future, edited by S.S. Ramarao Pappu and R. Puligandla, 3–35. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

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Braa, D. and P. Callero. 2006. ‘Critical Pedagogy and Classroom Praxis’. Teaching Sociology, 34(4): 357–369. Darder, A. 1991. Culture and Power in the Classroom: A Critical Foundation for Bicultural Education. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Dubey, S. 2017. A Survey on Study and Research in Philosophy in India, Volume 2: Doctoral Research in Indian Universities. New Delhi: Indian Council for Philosophical Research. Fobes, C. and P. Kaufman. 2008. ‘Critical Pedagogy in Sociology Classroom: Challenges and Concerns’. In Teaching Sociology, 36(1): 26–33. Freire, P. 1998. Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy and Civic Courage. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Freire, P. 2005 [1968]. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum. Gramsci, A. 2000. Antonio Gramsci: Selections from Cultural Writings, edited by David Forgacs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kupfer, A. 2015. ‘Symbolic Violence: Education as a Power’. In Power and Education, edited by A. Kupfer, 26–40. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1976. Collected Works, vol. 5. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Miri, M. and R. Bhargava. 2011. Report of the Review Committee on Indian Council of Philosophical Research. Available at: https://mhrd.gov.in/ sites/upload‌_files/‌‌mhrd/‌files/‌document-reports/FinalReport-ICPR.pdf (accessed 3 October 2019). Murty, K.S. 1972. ‘Introduction: Modern India and Philosophy’. In Current Trends in Indian Philosophy, edited by K.S. Murty and K.R. Rao, xi–xlvii. Waltair: Andhra University Press. Panikkar, K.M. 1963. The Foundations of New India. London: George Allen and Unwin. Panikkar, K.M. 2016. ‘Nationalism and Its Detractors’. Social Scientist, 44(9– 10): 3–18. PCSDS (People’s Commission on Shrinking Democratic Space). 2019. Indian Campuses Under Siege: Knowledge, Resistance, Liberation—A Report: People’s Tribunal on Attack on Educational Institutions in India. New Delhi: PCSDS. Rege, S. 2010. ‘Education as “Trutiya Ratna”: Towards Phule-Ambedkarite Feminist Pedagogical Practice’. Economic and Political Weekly, 45(44–45): 88–98.

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Shor, I. 1992. Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Tharu, S., S. Poduval and P. Kumar. 1998. ‘Higher Education: New Agendas, New Mandates’. Economic and Political Weekly, 33(42–43): 2701–2702. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). 2006. Philosophy: Intersectoral Strategy on Philosophy. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). 2017. Transformative Pedagogy for Peace-Building: A Guide for Teachers. Addis Ababa: UNESCO-IICBA.

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Prejudice and the Pedagogue: Teaching in a Democratic Classroom Siby K. George The isolation and exclusiveness following upon the class structure creates in the privileged classes the anti-social spirit of a gang.… Democratic society cannot be indifferent to such consequences. —B.R. Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables? (2014, 9:285)

There is a wide agreement in contemporary philosophy that human individuality and sociality are at the very least ontologically inseparable. At the same time, it is also generally acknowledged that this truism does not preclude deficient modes of sociality taking centre stage in the actual life of persons. And so, one of the aims of formal education in modern societies is the mediatory role it plays in integrating persons to society. In the striking phrase of the 1996 Delors report (Delors 1996), this aim is ‘learning to live together’. The social mediatory task of education has at least two equally significant aspects: (a) eliminating to the extent possible the inhibiting role of family and the inherited circumstances of birth on the life chances of persons; and (b) minimising the stranglehold of prejudices and preconceptions on interpersonal relationships. The subject matter of this chapter is the latter aspect, which is not an easy task. Rousseau argues in Emile that it is impossible to unlearn a deep-rooted prejudice, learned before the age of twelve (1979: 93). On the other hand, formal or public education for Kant is the necessary instrument to form the character of citizens and to make them truly human, because private or domestic education ‘not only frequently brings forth family mistakes 297

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but also reproduces them’ (2007: 439). Likewise, Dewey enumerates several social functions of education: countering the perverse prejudices of society; fostering integration in modern multicultural nations made up of different social groups with their own traditional customs; reducing the distance between curricular learning in schools and social learning in the community; and ensuring that ‘each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born’ (Dewey 2004: 22). My purpose in this chapter is both to emphasise the potential of formal education settings to act as learning spaces that question and refuse prejudices, and equally to underline the difficulties inherent in this task, mainly because of the unavailability of a fully unprejudiced foundation, such as a perfectly transparent reason, which, as recent philosophy and postcolonial theory have convincingly argued, is an erroneous presumption of modern culture. This chapter follows a synthetic and eclectic approach, tactically bringing together certain philosophical strategies, while critically overcoming or rejecting certain others. In what follows, I begin with the Gadamerian question of the inescapability of prejudice in an attempt to defend the possibility of refusing unwholesome substantive prejudices. I then move to an analysis of the ambivalent views of Nehru, Gandhi and Ambedkar towards the colonial establishment of modern education in India for the purpose of demonstrating the persistent translational slippages even in the salutary educational goal of refusing tenacious social prejudices. Finally, I address the question of refusing prejudices specifically as a teacher intervention, relying on a real-fictitious Indian classroom story. Here, what I have in mind are average, everyday Indian classrooms, where the teacher must improvise if she is convinced of the refusal of prejudice as a social mediatory task of education.

Prejudice: Inescapable or Refusable? An important revelation of 20th century philosophical hermeneutics is the indispensability of prejudice or prejudgement to human

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understanding. Prejudice in this sense is tradition and history, which act as the unchosen, inarticulate basis of self-understanding and meaning that makes discretely transparent self-awareness ontologically impossible. Heidegger’s Dasein has ‘grown up both into and in a traditional way of interpreting itself’ and its past ‘already goes ahead of it’, whatever it later becomes or understands (1962: 41). Gadamer castigates the Enlightenment for its ‘prejudice against prejudice’, epitomised in the Kantian call to make use of one’s own reason without direction from another. He thus rehabilitates the disparaged notion of prejudice as the positive and ontologically inescapable horizon of any finite understanding whatsoever. ‘The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgements, constitute the historical reality of his being’ (Gadamer 1989: 278). It follows, therefore, that the finite ground/abground of moral validity, for example, is nothing other than tradition. The teacher as a finite, singular person with a historical understanding of the world, thus, can never come into the classroom, however liberated she is, without the horizon of a tradition; she has to be already prejudiced in order to teach anything. But Gadamer’s substantial claim is not really about this bland truism; rather, he argues that the prejudices that the teacher implants ‘are legitimized by the person who presents them’ (1989: 281)—that is, by the teacher’s authority—and that authority, which is discredited by the Enlightenment as irrational, can often be found to be sound on the basis of non-arbitrary judgements. For Gadamer, the ontological import of the thesis of the inescapability of prejudice implies that traditional horizons are constantly transforming by fusing with newer horizons that we constantly encounter, though the so-called ‘original prejudice’ can never be completely extinguished or discredited. ‘There is no more an isolated horizon of the present in itself than there are historical horizons, which have to be acquired. Rather, understanding

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is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves’ (ibid.: 305; emphasis in original). For us here, the question begged in Gadamer’s discussion of the fusion of horizons is this: do at least some aspects of tradition—not simply shared language and concepts, but deeply pregnant and substantive traditional interpretations of the world—have to necessarily survive even as horizons fuse? Disavowing all notions of voluntary and tangential relationship to tradition, Gadamer reiterates in his Foreword to the second German edition of Truth and Method (1965) that his philosophical purpose there ‘was not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing’ (1989: xxv–vi). Criticising Gadamer’s thesis of the inescapability of prejudice and its real consequences, Habermas points out that what is ‘mere domination’ in the authority of tradition can be ‘dissolved into the less coercive force of insight and rational decision’ (1988: 170). In response, Gadamer accuses Habermas of ‘dogmatic objectivism’ and a social scientific reading of his ontological thesis that the one who understands ‘can never reflect himself out of the historical involvement of his hermeneutical situation so that his own interpretation does not itself become a part of the subject at hand’ (1985: 282). But Habermas takes Gadamer’s strong interpretation of the thesis of the inescapability of prejudice to mean mere acknowledgement and rehabilitation of prejudice rather than its refusal. ‘Gadamer has in mind the type of educational process through which what is handed down is translated into individual learning activities and appropriated as tradition’ (Habermas 1988: 169). For Habermas, rather than challenging the student’s prejudgements, Gadamer’s teacher legitimates them with authority as the very basis of all possible knowledge and makes what was involuntary, voluntarily acceptable. Habermas fears that in such a framework, reflective knowledge can only make transparent the normative weight of tradition, thereby forcing the authority of tradition to converge with knowledge rather than be refuted by it. Tradition ‘working behind the back of the educator, so to speak,

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legitimates the prejudgments inculcated into the person growing up’ (ibid.). While one of the goals of modern education is a critique of the taken-for-granted, philosophical hermeneutics seems to be eager to show why critique is severely limited because of the historical depth of the entanglements of the knowing self. The accentuation of the ontological supremacy of linguistic tradition and contextdependency of knowledge in philosophical hermeneutics, Habermas stresses, does not acknowledge the role of force or power in bringing about what he calls ‘systematically distorted communication’ or ‘pseudocommunication’ (1985: 302). While Habermas’s own solution to the critique of prejudice and ideology is riddled with the problematic idealisation of rational consensus, conditioned on ideal speech situations,1 skirting the question of critical judgement is not one of his problems. Similarly, Derrida was concerned about Gadamer’s appeal ‘to the absolute commitment to the desire for consensus in understanding’ (1989: 52) during their 1981 Paris encounter, set up by Philippe Forget. Derrida replied tersely to Gadamer’s repeated reference to the tendency in dialogical situations to come to an understanding of the other as ‘that experience that we all recognize’: ‘I am not convinced that we ever really do have this experience that Professor Gadamer describes, of knowing in a dialogue that one has been perfectly understood or experiencing the success of confirmation’ (ibid.: 54). Forget argues that what Derrida calls ‘desire for consensus’ in Gadamer and what Gadamer himself calls ‘legitimate and lasting prejudices’ is prejudicial consensus, emerging from tradition and authority, which is the methodological background of true and untrue. He cites from Derrida’s ‘Préjugés: Devant la loi’ (Derrida 1992):2 ‘Truth as adaequatio … is founded on a non-judicative, prejudicative revelation, on another truth’ (cited in Forget 1989: 141; emphases in original). For Derrida, while historically given prejudgements act as the horizon of our understanding due to our finite location, there is no uninfringeable law of necessity, ordering

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us to fuse traditional prejudgements with new judgements. Every prejudice or horizonal schema is, therefore, refusable. If we were condemned to the coherence-frame of our prejudices, Derrida contends, ‘[j]udgment would not exist at all. At most, there would be knowing, technique, application of a code, appearance of decision’ (cited in ibid.: 144). He argues that a decision cannot be a decision if it is already preconditioned even on a legitimate but incontestable prejudice; if it ‘be the programmable application or the continuous unfolding of a calculable process’ (cited in Gasché 2016: 106–107). The first caveat, therefore, to our characterisation of the refusal of prejudice as an ideal of modern education is that in the thick of everyday existence, the true test of the pejorative nature of prejudgements comes not from ideal speech situations, but from continuous contestations to which prejudices are put by others, strangers, cynics, dissenters, rebels and those suffering under the weight of hegemonic systems of truth and power, even as these systems attempt to stamp prejudices with the sanction of truth. Gasché maintains that Derrida’s attempt to escape traditionalism and calculative decisionism makes the agonising demand that ‘if there is to be something like a judgment in a strict sense, that is, beyond a calculable and predictable operation, it must be the happening of an impossible decision’ (Gasché 2016: 107). Such decisions have to be at least decisions arrived at by opening dominant prejudgements and persuasive positions to the contestations and counter-(pre)judgements of others without claiming to rely on any form of absolute ground. What makes a prejudgement no longer persuasive is the new sense that emanates from critical questioning of it by self and others. Every scheme of prejudice and every ‘impossible decision’ that refuses it, however, is a relation of power that in Foucault’s description is a relation of force, action upon action, which incites, persuades, seduces, makes easy or difficult, and uses coercion and violence should the need arise (1982: 789). Prejudices can be refused because human freedom necessitates that ‘there is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible fight’ (ibid.: 794).

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Because the subject emerges within groundless discursive-material networks of power-knowledge, which in Gadamerian terms means the givenness of prejudice, Foucault writes that the urgency should be ‘not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are’ (ibid.: 785). In other words, the meaning of human freedom demands of us ‘never to accept anything as definitive, untouchable, obvious, or immobile’ (Foucault 1988: 1), and in this exercise of power that refuses we are guided by the ethics of ‘the freedom of others’ (ibid.: 13). The fragile relations of force that sustain human existence also mean in Derridean terms that while a divine cogito thinks itself, is sufficient unto itself and has no need of the other, mortal humans are inherently exposed to the other in a nonprejudicial originary ethic of friendship: ‘I think, therefore I need the other (in order to think); I think, therefore the possibility of friendship is lodged in the movement of my thought in so far as it demands, calls for, desires the other’ (Derrida 1997: 224). Thus, the thesis of the inescapability of prejudice does mean that certain prejudgements are inherent to our understanding and colour our views of others. But there is neither the implication that any of these prejudgements is immutable nor that it could remain closed off to the critical gaze of others. That prejudgements are necessary for meaning-making does not entail any Hegelian necessity for them to survive in some form, at least as a trace, in future judgements. Fighting prejudices, I have argued, is a goal of modern education, and there is no privileged prejudice which is permanently closed off to criticism and overturning. However, I will discuss in what follows the 19th century cultural translation of modern Western education in colonial India, and the tenacious persistence of certain prejudices paradoxically within that very momentous fight against prejudice. In this way, I want to underline the ambivalences and difficulties inherent in any critique of prejudice due to its abyssal structure. That is, every critique has to refer back to its own set of prejudgements rather than to any neutral ground, although the groundless process of critique can give rise to newly persuasive meanings.

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Disciplining the Heathens: Education in Colonial Clothing The Portuguese missionaries set up the first institutions of modern education in India after Vasco da Gama’s arrival in 1498; they also established the first printing press in Goa in 1556 (Venkatanarayanan 2013). Studying the Basel Mission reports of the German Evangelical Missionary Society, active in the Canarese region since 1834, Parinitha Shetty observes that although the colonial government was apprehensive about jeopardising their commercial interests through active proselytism, there was the unmistakable ‘conflation of Christianity with civilizational progress’ (2008: 515). Moreover, the mission itself took the Protestant colonial government in India as entrusted with ‘the great responsibility of civilizing and evangelizing its heathen subjects, since God had entrusted it with the governance of the Indian people’ (ibid.: 514). The ideality concerning modern education, although not without suspicion and hybrid mediations, survived in colonised spaces and postcolonial states. While colonial modernity was not unproblematic and reassuring, David Arnold finds that with western education, modern science quickly attained cultural authority in colonial India and the spirit of modernity ‘extended well beyond institutional and economic reform to inform attitudes and practices relating to education and health, domesticity and gender roles, religious beliefs and social reform’ (2000: 16). Predictably, several of these hybrid forms of wider appeal did not necessarily negate existing social prejudgements about caste and gender but interpretively appropriated them anew. Dipesh Chakrabarty shows how early advocates of education for women in colonial Bengal thought of it as the means to reinforcing their role in the private sphere as the Lakshmi (goddess of prosperity) of the household. Thus, rather than an instance of the battle between tradition and modernity, ‘[t]he “modern” Lakshmi, to be produced through education, was an indispensable part of a

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nationalist, and self-consciously articulated, search for domestic “happiness”’ (Chakrabarty 1993: 8). Despite these differential cultural translations of modern education and its incessant corruptibility, the ideality of it as a form of disciplinary power, which should act as a check on the domestic prejudices of the citizen, whether epistemic or moral, never fully disappeared. Nehru, the quintessential modernist, while taking stock in The Discovery of India of the reluctant beginnings of modern education, forced by the East India Company’s commercial commonsense that it could not import the required number of clerks for the Raj, observes that ‘education grew slowly and, though it was a limited and perverted education, it opened the doors and windows of the mind to new ideas and dynamic thoughts’ (1985: 313). Colonial compulsions forced the establishment of modern education, which produced not only the bhadralok and the docile colonial subject, but also rebels and dissenters, anticolonial protesters and anticaste champions, without perfectly living up to either the colonial commercial goal or the ideal goal of fighting prejudice. The East India Company took interest in Persian and Sanskrit education initially, and together with the pundits, it argued against English education for Indians, whereas the missionaries supported it and also helped develop indigenous languages of India for evangelical purposes. Nehru remarks that although the work of the missionaries in India was not always admirable, their contributions in this regard were praiseworthy. The section of The Discovery of India on modern education expresses the ambivalent sense of a hesitant inauguration of something for purposes other than what it at times actually achieved. Nehru writes that the influential but small Englisheducated class that emerged all over India and first of all in Bengal, a class ‘rather cut off from the masses of the population’, developed both the sense of ‘a revolt against some customs and aspects of Indian life, and a growing demand for political reform’ (ibid.: 319). This ambivalence appears very differently in the writings of Gandhi. In Chapter 18 of Hind Swaraj (M.K. Gandhi 1997), he speaks

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of modern education as a false, rotten, enslaving fetish because ‘education’ for him is training required to bring ‘our senses under subjection … [and put] our ethics on a firm foundation. … [I]t is not necessary to make … [modern] education compulsory. Our ancient school system is enough. Character-building has the first place in it, and that is primary education’ (ibid.: 102). But because of the entrenched and functional nature of modern civilisation, Gandhi argues, English education is unavoidable and so those who have received it ‘may make good use of it wherever necessary’ (ibid.: 104). Gandhi’s views should be understood in relation to his critique of modern civilisation per se, which, he feared, fed into ‘a system of life-corroding competition’ (ibid.: 68). However, the ideal of modern education does survive in Gandhi’s writings. In Constructive Programme (1941),3 while speaking about gender equality, without going far enough from patriarchal condescension, he writes: ‘Wives should not be dolls and objects of indulgence, but should be treated as honoured comrades in common service. To this end those who have not received a liberal education should receive such instruction as is possible from their husbands’ (ibid.: 176). His educational experiments were insistent on pluralism, though they always included also an attempt at reviving the ancient Indian gurukula system of education, in which the student/disciple (shishya) received education living in or near the family (kula) of the guru. The experiment of Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg between 1911 and 1913 emphasised coeducation and the mixture of children from different castes and religions in the school (ibid.: 100; n199). The ambivalent development of modern education in India can be seen most starkly in the writings of Ambedkar among the founding figures of the emerging Indian nation. Ambedkar was an unflinching modernist who took modern systems to task for betraying their own ideal. In a 1928 report submitted to the Indian Statutory Commission on behalf of the depressed classes or lower castes of the Bombay Presidency on the state of their education, he writes

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that the then untouchable castes were glad to have been relieved of the theocratic rule of the Peshwas, who denied them their right to education. However, they were disappointed because the British, whom they assisted in their battle against the Peshwas, did not stick to their democratic principle of ‘one man one value, be that man high or low’; rather, ‘the British Government deliberately ruled that education was to be a preserve for the higher classes’ (Ambedkar 2014, 2:409; emphasis in original). Ambedkar quotes extensively from the report of the Board of Education of the Bombay Presidency for the year 1850–1851 to demonstrate that while the missionaries who taught in schools found children from lower castes the best pupils, the opinion of Elphinstone, in fact a sensitive administrator, was that since they are ‘the most despised’ and ‘least numerous’, ‘if our system of education first took root among them, it would never spread further, and we might find ourselves at the head of a new class, superior to the rest in useful knowledge, but hated and despised by the castes,’ and so his recommendation was ‘to restrict the benefits of education to the poor higher castes[,] chiefly the Brahmins’ (ibid.: 415; emphasis in original). Ambedkar observes that the more liberal policies in Bengal also did not succeed because children from touchable castes refused to sit with their counterparts from untouchable castes. The Hunter Commission on Education, 1882–1883, he points out, which made several recommendations in favour of the education of the Muslim minority, did not make the same recommendations for the untouchable castes. Ambedkar’s tone is one of betrayal by the champions of modern education. In his book Untouchables or the Children of India’s Ghetto, Ambedkar prescribes two goals for the untouchable castes: education and political power. His reason for prescribing education is: ‘Before any injustice, any abuse or oppression can be resisted, the lie upon which it is founded must be unmasked, must be clearly recognized for what it is. This can happen only with education’ (2014, 5:399). In this sense, one of the important goals of education for Ambedkar

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is the Freirean pedagogy of the oppressed. Revealing prejudices for what they are and resisting them is, thus, a task of modern education. He also indicted Indian Christianity for failing to do so: ‘The Church School may be open to all. Still there is no gainsaying the fact that caste governs the life of the Christians as much as it does the life of the Hindus’ (ibid.: 455). Ambedkar envisaged that the expansive social role of mass education would bring about genuine political democracy, which always meant for him first of all social equality. ‘Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realize that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic’ (ibid., 13:61). The ever-failing ideal of modern education, potentially a way of critical engagement with the accepted prejudgements of society with regard to knowledge in general and about social relations, is a recurrent theme in Ambedkar’s writings, whether regarding formal or mass education. The translational slippage between what modern formal education should be and what it is, needs to be underlined, although such slippage is inherent in any translation because no translation can represent absolutely that of which it is a translation. But when the slippage is stark, wide and unrecognisable, the departure is prejudicial. As Avijit Pathak suggests, modern education in India—perhaps everywhere—is ‘modern’ only in name. Contemporary practices of education bear ‘the legacy of Macaulay, because we see in them the reproduction of a mind-set that is elitist and indifferent to collective emancipation’ (Pathak 2013: 123). To illustrate, the chapter ‘School Education and Exclusion’ in the India Exclusion Report 2013–14 of the Delhi-based Centre for Equality Studies distinguishes girls, Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims and children with disabilities as the five major groups of excluded children in the Indian classroom. Detailing these exclusions, the report observes that Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim children regularly face discriminatory behaviour from teachers and classmates. ‘Teachers often discourage hard work and good grades

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among Dalit and Adivasi students, unfairly presuming that the “privilege” of reservations in education and employment makes them work less hard’ (Bhatty et al. 2014: 61). They reinforce prejudices by taunting children about their caste-based occupations, about the futility of their education and about the burden reservation brings on the national exchequer. ‘Teachers also stereotype Muslim students as children who will gravitate towards violence and terrorism in the future and therefore believe that investment in education for them is worthless’ (ibid.). Such studies reveal that sites of modern education systemically reinforce social prejudices rather than acting as spaces for the opposite socialisation of enabling young people to shed unwholesome prejudices, inherited from their immediate surroundings. Mindful of these stubbornly persistent translational difficulties and ambiguities, the next section attempts to tentatively sketch certain possibilities of teaching, if the teacher is convinced of the social mediatory task of education and accepts her classroom as a democratic space that refuses rather than reinforces inherited social prejudices. Here, we envisage the teacher not as the vehicle of prejudices as in the above India Exclusion Report, but as one concerned about the refusal of prejudice as a social mediatory task of education, and to that extent, she is the ‘ideal’ teacher. The part-real, part-fictitious story of Shraddha is going to be the orienting narrative of the analysis. If it is a clichéd story, it is also a typical one, finding differential iterations everywhere in the Indian subcontinent and its diaspora.

Shraddha’s World: The Classroom as Democratic Space The role that teachers and the education system play in the formation of the modern subject could be seen as central to what Foucault calls disciplining.4 He describes the technique of examination in the widest sense, which developed in the modern period, as the disciplinary

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means of correct training, combining ‘the ceremony of power and the form of the experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment of truth’ (Foucault 1977: 184). Discrete, hierarchically different individualities are produced through the disciplinary technique of examination. Keeping to Foucault’s overall frame of analysis, rather than describing teacher-power on purely negative terms as repressive, it must be described positively and productively: ‘it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth’ (ibid.: 194). It is undeniable that the particular disciplinary tactic of the modern classroom was experienced in 19th century western societies as a way of organising space, time and persons, leading to the double bind between constituting discrete individual citizens and totalising the power of the state, which sometimes triggered positive changes like ‘the historic shift in gender relations in the nineteenth century’ (Ball 1990: 5). As an asymmetrical power relation, Foucault argues, the pedagogical relation need not necessarily be evil according to its game of truth, but there must be vigilance about avoiding ‘the effects of domination which will make a child subject to the arbitrary and useless authority of a teacher’ (Foucault 1987: 129). In fact, Foucault’s analysis of how disciplinary power produces the subject has opened the doors for reading him sometimes as a crypto-educationalist. ‘Discipline derives from an educational beginning, as disciplina, and appears intimately implicated in what Foucault would ultimately name as power-knowledge from its beginning’ (Hoskin 1990: 30). The suggestion here is that education is the principle of coherence between power and knowledge or the missing third term, the hyphen in ‘power-knowledge’ that makes power irreproachably verifiable by knowledgeable experts and knowledge irreplaceably central to modernity due to its powerful penetration into every aspect of life. However, at this point it is important to add a second caveat to my characterisation of the refusal of prejudice as an ideal of modern education—to the extent that educational subjection is produced out of a specific negotiation of the existing power-knowledge ensemble,

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both pleasingly and forcibly, the ideal of refusing prejudice is not merely groundless, as we have seen, but is itself caught up in that very ensemble, amplifying the translational slippages of modern education. So, for example, powerful classes of western society began to have faith in modern schools only when they could be successfully used as disciplinary tactics to govern and manage people because several other strategies had failed. Consequently, the function of the school became ‘progressive and positive rather than restrictive and negative’, and thus it ‘came to occupy the central place it does in modern societies’ (Deacon 2006: 123). Hence, given the ubiquity of the power-knowledge ensemble, if all human relations are mediations of it, productive and destructive, repressive and emancipative relations also will have to emerge within and in terms of that ubiquitous ensemble. And so, any possibility of transforming teaching as a relation of power-knowledge is located in the humble techniques of that disciplinary power such as examination and behavioural correction (Hoskin 1979: 146). In other words, modern education is about entrenched as well as new relations of power-knowledge, disciplinary subjection as well as the critical refusal to submit, and as such it also holds the possibility of ‘the potential for a new politics of refusal, paradox and immanent critique which by promoting new forms of subjectivity may give the failing modern epoch further cause to stumble and hesitate’ (Deacon and Parker 1995: 120). At the same time, educational disciplining for subject-formation in the informal settings of the family and immediate community is so powerful that the school or university sometimes has no real effect on the student when it comes to the question of fighting prejudice. There are indeed ingenious ways of readjusting, rearranging, disguising and concealing prejudices within what is accepted as nonprejudicial and modern. Let us take the case of Shraddha, a fifteen-year-old girl in class ten in a prominent Mumbai school. She is the only child of a south Indian Brahmin couple, a banker mother and a scientist father. The rigid purity rules in their household still do not allow her

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menstruating mother to enter the kitchen. Caste habits come to her effortlessly because she is part of a powerful network of religioussocial-material forces that have gently, persuasively, pleasingly and sometimes punitively enforced them since the time she was a baby, receiving the world around her in curious gay abandon, more passively than not. The sway, regularity and solemnity of rule enforcement and the embodied, material aspects of the cultivation of habits in a prayerful and moralising ambience were irresistible for her. Shraddha’s mother was a star badminton player in school and her father is a health freak; they have always encouraged her to play since the time she could remember. But she had to carry her own water bottle and safeguard it from being used or touched by other kids. Shraddha was scrupulously honest, frugal, thrifty and simple in her habits, respectful of elders, courteous and helpful to friends, and she courageously fought peer pressure whenever others questioned her habits and mannerisms. But despite her conspicuousness in the class as the pretty dancer, topper, the best handball player and the ‘good girl’ par excellence, Shraddha was perceived as annoying by some of her classmates and teachers. Her self-righteous demeanour could put people off. Sharing food during the lunch hour was popular among her friends. She preferred to part with her homemade food rather than touch or have anything from any of her friends; she firmly refused to accept anything from others/outside. Classmates remember Shraddha sharing only once a pinch of upma from a classmate after sustained classroom banter, but they did not fail to notice that what she accepted was also from a caste-mate. She looked down upon Hindi film songs popular among her friends. Shraddha exudes power and confidence. The authority of Mitali, the class teacher, often pales in her presence. But Mitali does not give up, for she genuinely believes that her students should mingle among themselves, breaking the divisive, stifling barriers of caste and class. Mitali teaches mathematics and puts her social ideal in this way: ‘1 is never 1 without 2, 3 and 4.’ Mitali’s formulation nears that

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of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy in Being Singular Plural: ‘the One is more than one; it is not that “it divides itself,” rather it is that one equals more than one, because “one” cannot be counted without counting more than one’ (2000: 39). It is in relation that we become what we are; therefore, it is in genuine, open relation with others that our unique singularity emerges. We may say that Mitali believes that the classroom is a genuinely democratic space. But, what is involved in taking the classroom as a democratic space? The paradoxical perpetuation of its own prejudice, abundant in modern thought, such as the advocation of a single universal reason—a danger hidden in the salutary Kantian depiction of formal education as the sentry who guards against domestic education reproducing its own prejudices— and the ambiguities in our dealings with prejudice in general must caution us in responding to this question. As a form of political life, involving fluid social interactions and voluntary dispositions, Dewey argues that education must be integral to democracy. But democracy for him is also a form of social life, and as such it is ‘a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience’, which implies interlocked human interests and actions and ‘the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity’ (Dewey 2004: 93). Referring to Dewey’s conception of democracy as a form of life, Ambedkar laments the aping of western political democracy in postcolonial states without there being social democracy.5 ‘Democracy is incompatible and inconsistent with isolation and exclusiveness, resulting in the distinction between the privileged and the unprivileged’ (Ambedkar 2014, 1:222–223). In other words, the democratic form of life amounts to full recognition of the ontology of self-formation in terms of relationality without artificial exclusions and segregations. From this point of view, it is needless to specify the ‘other’ of relation, who could be living, nonliving, human or divine being. Derrida broaches a radical version of such a view, when his deconstructive critique refers to all available

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forms of democracy as modelled on the Aristotelian trope of the philos/friend. Whether it is a friendship of blood, birth, nature, nation, language, race, caste, sex or religion, the friend is a resembling, familial, fraternal and androcentric figure, inhospitable to the stranger. For Derrida, democracy is ‘a matter of thinking an alterity without hierarchical difference’ (1997: 232; emphasis in original). He replaces Aristotelian love of the friend-brother, Leela Gandhi argues, with Epicurean love of stranger or philoxenia (2006: 29). Democracy in this sense is a correction of the paradox inherent in the conventional conception of it, because the principle of equality of all enjoins ‘respect for irreducible singularity or alterity’, but this principle has to be betrayed in the actual ‘community of friends’, counted as the representable national subject out of the majority (Derrida 1997: 22). Such a democracy, for Derrida, is a utopian perfection, never to be fully realised, except in imperfect, minor translations in the margins of modern nations and imperial powers, as in the friendship between M.K. Gandhi and C.F. Andrews (L. Gandhi 2006: 16)—perhaps also in the disciplining spaces of modern classrooms. Such a view of democracy, Alex Thomson argues, is neither empty nor passive, but involves the unavoidable calculation of decisions without the comfort of the ultimate law in the face of human finitude and undecidability, thus bearing witness to ‘an economy of the violent suspension of the law in the taking of a decision’ (2005: 201). In short, democracy in this sense is the choice of action favouring the subversion of prejudice or the given ensemble of power-knowledge that perpetuates and justifies suffering and stigma. And, as a possible means to the cultivation of refusing prejudice, formal education is an unavoidable imperative of such a democracy. Coming back to the classroom story, it must be said that Mitali, the class teacher, had a tough time dealing with Shraddha whenever the school included her for group dance because she refused to wear the costume loaned by the school. Mitali also often gently corrected Shraddha’s caste-implicative comportments, prodding

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her into changing some of her habits. One day Shraddha’s parents took leave from work, came to the school and talked to the principal, who reprimanded the class teacher. The parents politely and firmly insisted that teachers should not meddle in the “moral” convictions of students. Shraddha is sure that she is criticised because what she does is right, for only trees that bear fruit are stoned. From the standpoint of democracy as the refusal of prejudice against those who do not resemble the self in some way, classrooms are democratic spaces because they are utopian spaces where the teacher can experiment, improvise, encourage, cultivate and foster non-hierarchical relationships, disregarding codes of social prejudice. Mitali did so and continued to do so despite the reprimand because the principal did not have an answer to her question immediately after the parents left, on whether discouraging prejudices in the classroom was against the school’s code of ethics for teachers. Conventional classrooms are spaces of competition between learners in order to calculate their merit without any leeway for expressing, encountering and reconfiguring contestations regarding prejudicially imposed identities and stigmas, and so the failed attempts of teachers like Mitali must be considered pedagogical interventions for constructive disciplining. The classroom is an important nod in the power-knowledge ensemble, which makes it a difficult space to address problematic identitarian relations of power in transparent Habermasian communication. Rather, the plausible option is perhaps to teach oneself the techniques to manage ‘with a minimum of domination’ (Foucault 1987: 129). In this sense, resisting the dominating behaviour of Shraddha, her parents and the principal, Mitali continued her unsuccessful attempts at refusing caste-implicative behaviour for the sake of their pedagogical influence on the class, if not on Shraddha herself eventually. The most vicious prejudice to be fought in a classroom is perhaps the presuppositions and curiosities about what a student is rather than who she is. The question of the substantive subject is a residue of traditional thought and the problem with all questions of identity and

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the identitarian view of the person. However, it is possible to teach without a substantive view of the learner’s identity and rejecting the murky lineage of humanism by focusing on the learner’s singularity (Biesta 1998: 13). Disavowing any preconceived notion of human nature or what it means to be human, it is possible for a teacher to be alert to identitarian stigmatisations that label students as Muslim, girl, Northeast Indian, Dalit, gay or disabled. Furthermore, it might be possible for a teacher, who disavows substantive essence to nature and reality, to undertake the teaching of science from a freer, nonhumanist vantage point, making it possible for her to place the Anthropocene epoch in its historical perspective (Lloro-Bidart 2015). In that way, knowledge does not become a substantive truth about reality or a creative construction of the subject, but meaningful articulations emanating out of discursive formations of powerknowledge, which are open and responsive to the multiple meanings inherent in reality itself. According to the four pillars of learning in the Delors report (1996), learning to know (information) and learning to do (skills) take undue precedence over learning to be and learning to live together or with others. However, it is not the case that the classroom ceases to be a democratic space to absorb information and to learn skills if the teacher considers it to be the space for refusing prejudice. Since the classroom continues to be a space to teach mathematics, science and history, to do experiments and make artefacts, what helps most in the fight against prejudice are not moral lectures and propositions, but various everyday ways of questioning prejudice in unobtrusive material arrangements in the classroom, in the adoption of disapprovals and incentives for various student actions and comportments, in rule imposition in the interest of learning, impartial treatment of students and fostering of more democratic relations among them—especially in subtly expressive, embodied and ethical ways of administering curricular instructions and skills— and in the manner of conducting other classroom-related activities

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such as examinations, experiments, sports and the arts. All these little things may be oriented towards a less pejorative and less dominating relation of power, rather than pandering to substantive prejudices circulating in society, of which the classroom is the microcosm. Refusal of prejudice is a critical rearrangement of the scheme of power in the interest of a more democratic, non-hierarchical, nonpejorative relation of power. In fact, the ambiguities, vulnerabilities and fragilities hidden in the teacher’s refusal of prejudice are inherent to all finite encounters with otherness. Shraddha demonstrates several unproblematic morals in conformity with her world. But her bodily demeanours in accordance with caste injunctions of touch and purity, concealed in her unwillingness to eat food cooked outside her home, her caste-enveloped moral vigilantism, her contempt for the popular art, and her parents’ rebuff of teacher interventions, supported by the formidable persuasive force of the world that she represents, go against the democratic space that Mitali wants her classroom to be. Shraddha certainly is a difficult case for Mitali, for she exudes power and deploys a dominant ethic, to resist which there isn’t even a legible language at the teacher’s disposal, and hence there follows teacherfailure and reinforcement of the closed ethic of purity and pollution. The teacher perhaps can only repeat her failure many times over and thus reinforce the power of that failure upon more receptive students and in time possibly even upon Shraddha, because there is little chance of support from the school administration, which in all likelihood is eager to bow to the dominant ethic in the name of the liberal value of individual freedom. Giorgio Agamben argues that the State or a dominant scheme of power can only recognise ‘identity’ and cannot tolerate singularities forming ‘a community without affirming an identity’, human co-belonging ‘without any representable condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition)’ (1993: 86). When Shraddha clings fiercely to her dominant ethic, Mitali courts failure and must repeat her failure if she wants to foster the classroom as a democratic space. In this instance, Mitali cannot really

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inaugurate a less dominating form of power in the classroom, but can only evoke it and deploy its denial as an instance of teaching. The absolute refusal of prejudice is not there in this instance because the teacher is unable to reject student conduct that she does not want to condone. But, the refusal of the prejudicial ethic in the interest of the democratic space of the classroom is often composed of little acts of disapproval and approval, dissent and assent, which gradually gather form, intelligibility and social power, strong enough to challenge and neutralise an erstwhile powerful game of truth. Such is the nature of ‘everyday revolution’ in general. To conclude, I have argued that if a teacher considers the classroom a democratic space, where equality means a non-identitarian approach to the singularity of free persons, firm and friendly forms of questioning identitarian notions of substantive prejudice among students can become a significant part of teaching, whether such questionings meet with immediate success or not. I began with the consideration that any understanding any time is based on certain nebulous, inarticulate, taken-for-granted horizon of prejudgements or prejudices, but the structure of horizon is constantly open to substantial modification, though not without tough resistance. Referring to the classroom story of Shraddha, I claimed that the substantive and problematic prejudices of her world are refusable, but it is difficult for her to do so because her world is a powerful, resilient network of entrapments that eases her existence and pleases her cultivated sensibilities; it seduces as well as enforces a more-orless solid, privileged structure of prejudgements, within which caste, purity, vigilant moralism and a sense of privileged separation from the common world are central parts. In the typical Indian classroom, Shraddha is impressive because she excels in the type of skills, knowledge and ethics demanded by the dominant scheme of power. The persistence of such an ethic in a site of modern education is a deviant translational slippage that refused to disappear, as we have

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seen, since the colonial beginnings of that education in India, but Shraddha uses this uncorrected structure to her advantage, reinforces her impregnable ethic and defends herself against pedagogical challenges posed by Mitali, who is eager to shape the classroom into a genuinely democratic space, where all students belong without having to refer to the baggage of their socially imposed identities. The upshot of this analysis, however, is that Mitali’s pedagogical failure is nonetheless a significant act of teaching, which she must continue in the interest of her search for new games of power and truth that will delegitimise the problematic aspects of Shraddha’s world. After all, teaching in a democratic classroom is what the democratic teacher does and enables.

Notes 1 In this disputation with Gadamer in the late 1960s, Habermas was himself trying to find a middle way between the hermeneutical thesis of the inescapability of prejudice and the abstract universalism of Kant’s critical philosophy. And so, in 1970, Habermas was already claiming that the hermeneutical thesis about the unavailability of ultimate grounds to truth should make us see that what we agree to call ‘true’ has to be based on the ‘consensus which might be reached under the idealized conditions to be found in unrestrained and dominance-free communication’ (1985: 314). Such consensus for him is the basis of the critique of prejudice. But Habermas’s solution of the ideal speech situation or formal structures of communication to resolve practical, social and political matters is unreal and, as Fred Dallmayr argues, begs the question of ‘the need to reintegrate expert knowledge into the ordinary language of practical political life’ (2000: 850). Again, in Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, Jacques Rancière argues that Habermas’s ideal speech situation ‘locks the rational argument of political debate into the same speech situation as the one it seeks to overcome: the simple rationality of a dialogue of interests’ (1999: 47). The eagerness for consensus is for Rancière the basis of all authoritarian forms of politics in history.

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2

Although a partial English translation of ‘Préjugés: Devant la loi’ is available, my references are to the untranslated portions of this piece. Hence, citations from ‘Préjugés’ are either from Forget (1989) or Gasché (2016). 3 Reproduced in M.K. Gandhi (1997). 4 We must, however, keep in mind that informal education in the familial and social settings is an equally powerful aspect of disciplining. Zygmunt Bauman observes that the modern work ethic, the Protestant ethic, which functioned as a type of mass education, ‘served to train and discipline people, instilling in them the obedience necessary to make the new factory regime work’ (2005: 2). 5 Ambedkar, therefore, argued that social democracy had to be attained in India by a Constitution suitably designed ‘to dislodge the governing class [touchable castes] from its position and to prevent it from remaining as a governing class for ever’ (2014, 9:448).

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German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present, edited by K. Mueller-Vollmer, 274–292. New York: Continuum. Gadamer, H.-G. 1989 [1960]. Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Mar. London: Continuum, rev. trans. Gandhi, L. 2006. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gandhi, M.K. 1997. Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, edited by A.J. Parel. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Gasché, R. 2016. ‘Have We Done with the Empire of Judgment?’ In Deconstruction, Its Force, Its Violence, Together with ‘Have We Done with the Empire of Judgment?’, 89–107. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Habermas, J. 1985 [1970]. ‘On Hermeneutics’ Claim to Universality’, trans. J. Dibble. In The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present, edited by K. Mueller-Vollmer, 294–319. New York: Continuum. Habermas, J. 1988 [1967]. On the Logic of the Social Sciences, trans. S.W. Nicholsen and JA. Stark. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Heidegger, M. 1962 [1927]. Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper and Row. Hoskin, K. 1979. ‘The Examination, Disciplinary Power and Rational Schooling’. History of Education, 8(2): 21–135. Hoskin, K. 1990. ‘Foucault under Examination: The Crypto-educationalist Unmasked’. In Foucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge, edited by S.J. Ball, 29–56. London: Routledge. Kant, I. 2007 [1803]. ‘Lectures on Pedagogy’, trans. R.B. Louden. In Anthropology, History, and Education, eds G. Zöller and R.B. Louden, 434–485. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lloro-Bidart, T. 2015. ‘A Political Ecology of Education in/for the Anthropocene’. Environment and Society: Advances in Research, 6(1): 128–148. Nancy, J.-L. 2000. Being Singular Plural, trans. R.D. Richardson and A.E. O’Byrne. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nehru, J. 1985 [1946]. The Discovery of India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pathak, A. 2013. Social Implications of Schooling: Knowledge, Pedagogy and Consciousness. Delhi: Aakar Books.

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Rancière, J. 1999. Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rousseau, J.-J. 1979 [1762]. Emile, or On Education, trans. A. Bloom. New York: Basic Books. Shetty, P. 2008. ‘Missionary Pedagogy and Christianisation of the Heathens: The Educational Institutions Introduced by the Basel Mission in Mangalore’. Indian Economic and Social History Review, 45(4): 509–551. Thomson, A.J.P. 2005. Deconstruction and Democracy: Derrida’s Politics of Friendship. London: Continuum. Venkatanarayanan, S. 2013. ‘Tracing the Genealogy of Elementary Education Policy in India till Independence’. SAGE Open, 3(4): 1–10.

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Index A

Bildung (culture), 24, 175-76, 192n16

absenteeism, 198, 208-10, 216

Bruner, Jerome, ix Buddha, xvii, 278

Agamben, Giorgio, 317

Buddhism, xxii, 188, 247n8, 292

Ambedkar, Bhimrao R., xxix, xxxvi, 36, 45n34, 276-79, 287, 292,

C

293n2, 297-98, 306-08, 313, 320n5

Canada, xxvii, xxxii-xxxiii, xxxvii,

Arendt, Hannah, xxxiv, 197, 199-

4, 109, 111, 114, 119n2, 120n3,

205, 211, 214, 219-20

127, 153

Aristotle, 17, 113

capitalism/market, xxviii-xxix, xxxi,

Arnold, David, 190-91nn5-6, n15,

xxxviin2, 15, 16, 20n21, 23, 34-

304

36, 45n37, 148n11, 160-62, 164,

art/aesthetic, xxxi, xxxiv, 12-15,

167n12, 173, 175, 190n3

17n4, 19n18, 131-32, 146, 174,

care ethics, xxxii, xxxiv-xxxv, 79-

188, 199, 203, 213-14, 217-20,

80, 88, 100, 105n7, 184-85, 187,

231, 241, 254

193n31, 223-25, 227-28, 230-

Audi, Robert, 219

31, 234-46, 247n4-5, 248n15-17

authority of teacher/pedagogical

Carson, Rachel, 254, 260

domination, 26, 28-30, 38n13,

caste/Dalit, xxiii-xxiv, xxvii, xxix,

n15, 40n17, 142, 171-72, 173-

xxx, xxxii, xxxiv-xxxvi, 10, 35,

74, 176-77, 180, 189, 199, 204,

45n34, 53, 58-59, 62-63, 79,

206-07, 212-13, 217, 219, 223,

186-89, 191n15, 193n33, 204,

228-30, 234-35, 241, 274, 285,

273-74, 276-79, 281-86, 289,

299-301, 310, 312, 315, 317-18

291-92, 293n2, 294n5, 304-09,

autonomy (of teacher/learner), xxv, xxviii, xxx, xxxiv, 25, 37n6, 42n26, 79-80, 90-91, 94, 153, 155, 163-65, 174, 176, 186, 206, 218, 231

312, 314-18, 320n5 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 304 Chomsky, Noam, xxx, 40n17 Christian missionaries, 51, 53, 287,

B

290, 304-05, 307-08

banking concept of education,

civilising mission, xxxi, 22, 28-31, 33-34, 41n20, 42n23-24, n26, 56,

17n3, 148n11, 165, 190n4, 229-

175, 304

30, 232-33, 242 325

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Index

326

colonial education and ideology, x,

Dewey, John, xxviii-xxix, xxxi, 3,

xix-xxi, xxiv-xxv, xxvii-xxviii,

5-7, 9, 18n7, 19nn11, n14, n16,

xxxi-xxxii, 25, 28, 30, 32, 38n13,

38n9, 40n17, 45n34, 201-03,

45n34, 49-74, 152, 171-76, 187,

214, 220, 276, 298, 313

190n6-7, 191n9, n15, 192n15,

dialogue/dialectical, xxxiv, 36n2,

206-07, 211, 216, 273, 279-80,

96, 122-23, 128-34, 142, 144-45,

298, 303-05, 319

149n17, 171-72, 176, 178-80, 182-85, 187, 189, 223-24, 231,

community (of learners), xv, xxix,

286, 293, 301, 319n1

xxxiii, 8-9, 92, 94, 122-23, 127-29, 134-36, 141-42, 144-45, 147n5,

Dillon, Robin, xxxii, 79ff.

n7, 155-56, 189, 224-27, 230, 232-

disciplining, xxviii, xxxi, 25-28, 37n6, 38n13, 40n17, 243, 304-

39, 242-46, 280-81, 298, 311 contextualization, xiii, xix, xx, xxxi-

11, 314-15, 320n4

xxxii, xxxiv, 4-9, 92, 98, 188,

discrimination/prejudice/ marginalisation/oppression/

288-89, 291, 301

exploitation, xxx, xxxiv, xxxvi, 4,

critical pedagogy, xxxv, 24, 223-24,

9, 10, 24, 45, 52, 79, 88, 99, 101,

227, 230-31, 236-37, 242, 274-79

144, 148n11, 150, 152, 155, 157,

curriculum, xviii, xxv, xxviii, xxxiii, xxxv-xxxvi, 3, 8, 14, 16, 30, 36n1,

160-65, 167n10, 182-83, 188,

109, 148n11, 155, 165, 173-74,

204, 211, 223, 228, 273-77, 281-

199, 204-10, 251-53, 255-59, 261,

88, 291-92, 297-303, 305, 307-11,

264, 266, 268, 270, 280, 282-86,

313-19

289-93, 293n1, 298, 316

D

Drèze, Jean, 198, 210-11, 216

E

democracy, xxviii-xxxi, xxxiii,

Eagleton, Terry, xxx

xxxvi, 15, 19n11, 38n9, 102-

English education (in India), xx-xxi,

03, 108, 112-13, 117, 120n5,

xxiv, 34-36, 45n34, n36, n38,

121n10, 150, 163-64, 172, 175,

46n40, 56-64, 67, 72n6, 115,

177, 200, 209, 212, 219, 236,

173, 215, 305-06

241-42, 273-293, 297, 309-319 democratisation of education,

ethics of teaching, ix, xiii, xvi, xviiixix, xxx-xxxvii, 79, 108, 171-84,

xxxvi, 172, 175, 177, 273-77,

186, 189, 212-13, 217, 223-28,

279-82, 288, 291-93

230-31, 235-36, 239, 241, 246,

Derrida, Jacques, xxix, 301-03,

258, 273-74, 315-16

313-14

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Index

327

humanist (tradition of education),

F Foucault, Michel, xxviii, 157, 30203, 309-10, 315

xxxii, 23, 49-51, 70, 176, 217, 316 humanities, 16-17, 34, 109-10, 118, 119n1, 120n3, 254, 263, 281

Freire, Paulo, xxxv, 4, 17n3, 24, 40n17, 121n10, 138, 148n11, 149n17, 150, 165, 223, 229-34, 275-76

I India, x, xiii, xviii, xx, xxii-xxiii, xxv,

G

xxvii-xxxii, xxxiv-xxxvii, 8, 10, 14,

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 298-301,

22-23, 25, 27-32, 34-37, 39n16, 40n18, 41n19, 42n25, 43n27-28,

303, 319n1

44n32-33, 45n34, n36, n38, 49-51,

Gandhi, Leela, 214

53-54, 56-59, 61-62, 65-66, 69,

Gandhi, Mohandas K., 45n34, 192-

71n1, n4, 110, 152-53, 172-76,

93n15, 293n2, 298, 305-306

178-79, 185, 187, 189, 190n3-7,

gender/women (feminism), xxix,

191n15, 193n35, 198, 205, 208,

xxx, xxxiv, 4, 8-9, 18n5, 59, 79,

210, 211, 216, 221n2, 224-25, 251,

87, 104n1, n3, n11, 105n4, n11,

255, 270n1, 273-74, 277-84, 287-

108, 110, 112, 116, 118, 126, 179-

94, 298, 303-09, 311, 316, 318-20

81, 183-84, 186-89, 193n25, n28, 204, 224, 227, 230-32, 237-38, 240, 244-46, 248n12, 273, 278, 280, 291, 294n2, 304, 306, 310 Gordon, Mordechai, 201-02, 219 Gramsci, Antonio, 275

J Jackson, Philip, 202 Jamir, Satiba, 242 Jamir, Tako, 238, 244

Grande, Sandy, 231

K

gyan and vidya, xxii-xxiii

Kant, Immanuel, 24-27, 31, 3739nn5-7, nn11-13, n15, 40n17,

H

80, 89, 156, 166n5, 288, 297, 299,

Habermas, Jürgen, xxxiv, 171ff, 300-301, 315, 319n1 Hegel, G. W. F., 19n15, 162, 166n4,

313, 319n1 Kumar, Krishna, xxviii, xxx, xxxiv, 56, 199, 205-06, 208, 210, 216

288 Heidegger, Martin, 215, 247n10

L

Herman, Barbara, xxxii, 80-81, 88ff.

liberal education, xxviii, xxxii, 22,

Hindu/Hinduism, 8, 43n27, 44n33, 54-56, 58, 273, 281, 284, 287, 308 hooks, bell, xxxv, 18, 223, 227

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25, 34, 43n28, 53-54, 56, 58-59, 148, 160-64, 175, 190n3, 273-74, 306-07, 316

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Index

328

M

N

Macaulay, Thomas B., 28-36, 41-

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 313

45nn19, nn21-23, n25, n27, n31,

Nehru, Jawaharlal, 36, 298, 305

n33, n37, 57, 173, 308

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 24, 31-36,

Marx, Karl, 156, 162, 274 Miri, Mrinal, 290 moral education/formation, xxxvii, 3, 24-25, 27, 31, 33, 36, 79, 8182, 88-94, 96, 99-101, 103-04, 180, 190n7, 212, 225, 226, 234, 242, 309, 311, 313 motivation (of teachers/learners), 15, 90, 114, 117, 132-33, 139, 183, 198, 202, 205, 208, 210, 238, 243, 258-59, 267-71 MST (Movement of Landless Rural Workers, Brazil), xxxiii, 4, 15055, 159-67 Mukerji, Rose, 214, 217, 219 multiculturalism/pluralism/ diversity/difference/otherness, xi, xiii-xiv, xxvii-xxix, xxxiixxxiii, 3, 5, 7-8, 10-11, 13-16, 18n6, 19n11, n16, 23, 31, 35-36, 58-59, 70, 71n4, 86, 88-89, 100, 105n11, 106n114, 114-20, 122-24, 126-29, 132-45, 147n6, 148n12-14, 150-51, 156, 160, 165, 172-73, 176, 179-80, 18384, 186-87, 190n7, 198, 200, 202, 204-05, 211, 213, 215-17, 219, 224-25, 233-35, 239-43, 262, 265-66, 268, 273-74, 276, 278, 280-82, 285-86, 293, 298, 30103, 305-06, 309, 312-14, 316-17

Teaching in Unequal Societies John Russon et al.indd 328

43nn29-30, 157 Noddings, Nel, 172, 185-89

P Patricia, Hill Collins, 238 pedagogy, xxv, xxxiii-xxxvi, 4, 6, 8, 11-15, 20n19, 23-26, 31, 36n12, 37n5-6, 38n10, 40n17, 81, 101, 103, 106n14, 122-23, 126, 129, 138, 142, 150-51, 154-55, 164-65, 171-76, 178, 180-81, 185, 187-88, 191n15, 192n20, 197-200, 202, 206, 209-10, 213, 217-19, 223-25, 227, 230-37, 241-42, 247n9, 255, 274-76, 27881, 283-86, 291, 293, 297, 308, 310, 315, 319 philosophy (teaching of philosophy/ philosophy of teaching), xxxi, xxxvi, 3-5, 8, 12-16, 19n18, 20n19-20, 23, 31, 42n25, 43n30, 51, 70, 79, 110, 114, 122, 133, 140, 150-51, 155, 162-63, 171, 178, 186, 193n30, 214, 223-30, 235-37, 246, 257, 264, 270, 274, 279, 286-94 Plato, xxxiii, 23, 131-33, 138 play/joy and learning, xi, xv, xxxv, 127, 203, 207-08, 216, 220, 251 power/hegemony, xv, xx, xxx, xxxvi-xxxvii, 31, 37n7, 38n13, 53-55, 58-60, 63-64, 69, 71, 92,

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Index

329

113, 120n5, 130-31, 133, 140,

Schiller, Friedrich, 217-20

151, 157, 159, 163, 165, 172, 174,

self/social-change/transformation/

177, 180, 182, 204-05, 209, 213,

emancipation/liberation, xxvii,

223, 230, 233, 273-75, 277-82,

xxxi, xxxiii-xxxv, xxxvii, 9-10,

285-86, 289-91, 301-05, 307,

13, 23-24, 26, 33-35, 79, 90, 93-

310-12, 314-19

94, 100, 108, 116, 122-23, 129,

profession of teaching, ix-xi, xiv,

131-34, 136, 141, 144-46, 147n7,

xx, xxiv-xxv, xxxii, xxxv, xxxvii,

148n11, 149n17, 150, 155, 159,

199, 204-05, 210-15, 220, 227-

162, 164-65, 175-76, 178, 199,

28, 286

201, 217, 219, 220, 223, 225,

public/private education, xxviii,

231, 233-34, 243, 264, 269, 270,

xxxiii, 3, 19n16, 30, 42n25,

274-77, 278, 280, 282, 285-87,

43n28, 44n33, 50, 57, 69, 71n5, 72n8, 155, 160, 164-66, 186,

292-93, 308, 311 self-respect/dignity, xxxii, 38n13,

192n19, 236, 273-74, 276, 278,

79-88, 93-106, 217, 237, 243,

280-81, 286, 297, 304

286-87 Sen, Amartya, 198, 210-11, 216

R Rawls, John, 79, 104n2, 160-61,

skill, xxiii, xxxiii, 11, 13-14, 22, 36, 90-91, 93, 97, 117, 154, 173, 175,

167n12

178, 182, 199, 208, 210, 252-54,

responsibility of teacher/learner, xii, xiv, xvi, xviii-xxi, xxiii, xxxiii, 3, 12, 14, 41n22, 50, 111-12, 116, 118, 128, 138, 143-45, 176, 183,

269-70, 276, 280, 286, 316, 318 Socrates, 130-33, 138, 146, 147n9 storytelling, xxxiv, 132-34, 142-43, 172, 184, 187-88, 193n31, 207,

188, 200, 204, 209, 231, 237-40, 242-43, 245, 251, 253-54, 286, 304

209, 268, 298, 309-319 student-centric teaching, 199, 215

Rich, Martin, J., 202, 212-13

T

Robottom, Ian, 251-52

Tagore, Rabindranath, 219,

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 24, 37n3, 297 Russell, Bertrand, 200

293n2,191-92n15 teacher in oral societies, xvi-xviii, 209, 237, 242 teaching as relational activity, xiii-

S Sartre, Jean-Paul, xxxiii, 123, 13437, 140, 147nn5-6, 148nn12-13

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xvi, xix-xx, xxiv-xxv, 185, 227, 231-33, 239, 241, 246, 265, 313

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Index

330

281, 283, 285, 289, 293n2, 310,

teaching as transfer of knowledge,

314-15, 317

xiii, xvi-xix, xxi-xxii, xxiv-xxv, 81, 173-76, 178-80, 202, 214,

university teaching/education, xxx, 3-4, 25, 31, 38n10, 39n14, 61,

226, 240-41, 274-75 textbook, xxv, xxx, xxxii, xxxv, 41,

108-12, 117-18, 122, 125-26,

61, 65-68, 73n9, 174, 190n7,

136, 143, 146n2, 172, 175-78,

191n11, 198-200, 205-08, 210,

190n3, 192n19, 238, 278-85, 288, 293n1, 311

213, 214, 216-17, 219, 258-66, 270, 283

utilitarian/utility, 28-35, 40n18, 41n19, 42n24, 43n31, 173, 176-

tribal/Adivasi, xxx, xxxiv-xxxv, 63,

77, 251, 257

223-27, 235-49, 284, 308

U

V

unequal societies (inequality/

vernacular, xxxii, 44n33, 56, 58-59,

hierarchy), xix, xxi, xxiii-xxiv, xxvi-xxix, xxx-xxxvi, 3, 7-8, 14, 23, 35, 43n31, 59, 67, 79, 101, 124, 150-52, 154, 172, 174, 17677, 179-82, 184, 188, 192n25,

61-62, 66, 71n5

W walls to bridges, xxxiii, 122-29, 136, 141-45

204, 211, 228, 273, 275-76, 279,

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About the Editors and Contributors Editors John Russon is Professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph, Canada, and Director of the Toronto Summer Seminar in Philosophy. He is the author of eight books, including Human Experience (2003), Bearing Witness to Epiphany (2009), Sites of Exposure (2017) and the forthcoming Adult Life (2020). He has also written extensively on contemporary European philosophy, German Idealism and ancient Greek philosophy. Siby K. George is Professor of philosophy at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay. He writes on development, technology, pain and dying, political ethics, education and subjectivity, employing the resources of contemporary continental philosophy and specifically emphasising non-western and Indian contexts. He is the author of Heidegger and Development in the Global South (Springer, 2015) and is an editor of Cultural Ontology of the Self in Pain (Springer, 2016). P.G. Jung is Associate Professor of philosophy at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay. During 2014–2016, he was a fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. His publications are largely in the fields of philosophy of language, history of ideas and the philosophy of everydayness. He is the coeditor of Cultural Ontology of the Self in Pain (Springer, 2016).

Contributors Roshni Babu is Assistant Professor of philosophy at Manipal University, Jaipur. She obtained her PhD in 2017 from IIT Bombay for the thesis ‘Introspective Metaphysics in Colonial India: Transcendental 331

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About the Editors and Contributors

Philosophy of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya’. She then worked briefly as a research assistant at IIT Bombay. Her current work undertakes a critical survey of the neo-Advaita philosophy. She co-authored the article ‘The “Incongruous Move”: From Actuality to Possibility of Metaphysics in Kant’ in the Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research in 2018. Amrita Banerjee is Assistant Professor of philosophy at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay. She received her PhD in philosophy and a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Oregon. Banerjee was Assistant Professor of philosophy at Allegheny College, Pennsylvania, prior to joining IIT Bombay. She specialises in ethics and social and political philosophy, which she approaches from the perspectives of feminist philosophy, classical pragmatism and 20th century continental philosophy. Banerjee focuses on work by women philosophers and philosophers of colour within these traditions. Her papers have appeared in prestigious journals such as Hypatia, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The Pluralist and Philosophy in the Contemporary World. She is co-editor of the special issue ‘Mothering from the Margins’ in Philosophy in the Contemporary World (Spring 2016). dhārā k. chotāi is Assistant Professor of English at the Centre for English Studies, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar. Her doctoral research focused on literary historiography in Gujarati in the 19th century. Her current teaching and research interests revolve around the ontology and epistemology of the ‘literary’, 19th century discourses on colonialism and visual/cultural studies. Patricia Fagan is Associate Professor of Greek and Roman studies at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Canada. She is an awardwinning teacher, the author of Plato and Tradition: The Poetic and

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Cultural Context of Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 2013), and a contributor to the recent A Companion to Ancient Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 2018). Bruce Gilbert is Professor of philosophy and liberal arts at Bishop’s University near Sherbrooke, Quebec. He received his PhD from the Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialisation include ethics, politics, metaphysics and the philosophy of religion. He also does research with social movements in Brazil. His book The Vitality of Contradiction: Hegel, Politics, and the Dialectic of Liberal-Capitalism (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013) won the Biennial Book Prize of the Canadian Philosophical Association in 2015. Karilemla is Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Savitribai Phule Pune University. She received her PhD from IIT Bombay, and her thesis won the Award for Excellence in Thesis Work at IIT Bombay in 2017. She researches and publishes in the areas of continental philosophy, philosophy of technology and philosophy of culture. She also works in the interdisciplinary fields of care ethics and cultural studies. Karilemla was a Fulbright Scholar at Emory University, Atlanta, in 2013–2014. She has also held a visiting faculty position at the University of Porto, Portugal, under the Erasmus Mundus Fellowship in 2017. Apaar Kumar is Assistant Professor of philosophy at the School of Arts and Sciences, Ahmedabad University. His areas of research include the history of modern philosophy (especially Kant), hermeneutics and phenomenology, and ethics. He has published articles in these areas in journals such as Kantian Review, Journal of Value Inquiry and Trópos: Journal of Hermeneutics and Philosophical Criticism. His current research focuses on Kant’s theory of selfconsciousness, as well as questions emerging at the interface of philosophical hermeneutics and social ontology.

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About the Editors and Contributors

P. Kesava Kumar is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Delhi. He received his PhD from the University of Hyderabad. He is author of Political Philosophy of Ambedkar: An Inquiry into the Theoretical Foundations of the Dalit Movement (2014), Jiddu Krishnamurti: A Critical Study of Tradition and Revolution (2015) and Dalita Vudhyamam: Velugu Needalu (a compilation of essays on the Dalit movement in Telugu, published in 2010). Krishna Kumar was Professor of education at the University of Delhi. Between 2004 and 2010, he served as the director of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), New Delhi. He is currently Honorary Professor at the Department of Education, Punjab University. In 2011, the Institute of Education, University of London, awarded him an honorary DLitt, and the same year, he was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India. He has delivered many prestigious lectures, including the Gladwyn Lecture (2007) in the House of Lords of the British Parliament. Some of his major works are Social Character of Learning (1989), Politics of Education in Colonial India (1991 and 2014), What is Worth Teaching (1992 and 2004), Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan (2001), Battle for Peace (2007) and Routledge Handbook of Education in India: Debates, Practices, Policies (2017). Besides several works in Hindi, he writes for the Hindu and the Indian Express, and also writes for children. Rinzi Lama is Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of North Bengal, Darjeeling. Her research largely centres around the anthropology of medicine, healing practices and identity politics. She was previously associated as a researcher with the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, and has worked on sustainable livelihood and environment, and environmental education, as a part of the Eastern Himalayan programme.

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335

Kym Maclaren is Associate Professor of philosophy at Ryerson University, Toronto. Her research addresses questions of education in a wide, existential sense, focusing upon the nature of human development and flourishing, and investigating the social and affective conditions that support or undermine these. She has been trained in the pedagogies of Inside-Out Prison Exchange and Walls to Bridges Canada and, since 2012, has been leading university courses in prison and the community based upon these models. Kanchana Mahadevan is Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Mumbai. She teaches and researches in the areas of feminist philosophy, decolonisation, critical theory, political thought, aesthetics and film. Her book Between Femininity and Feminism: Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives on Care (published by the Indian Council of Philosophical Research in collaboration with DK Printworld, New Delhi, 2014) examines the relevance of Western feminist philosophy in the Indian context. She is currently working on the relationship between the secular and the postsecular with reference to gender. She has also held several visiting professorships and fellowships abroad. Ranjan Kumar Panda is Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay. His areas of interest include philosophy of mind and language, philosophical moral psychology, and education. He has published Mind, Language and Intentionality (2008) and edited Language, Mind and the Reality: Philosophical Thoughts of R.C. Pradhan (2015). Currently, he is working on an edited volume titled Self-Knowledge and Moral Identity.

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