The film, Phule, not only visibilised the age-old tensions of caste and gender but also laid open the matrix that these divisive structures share with education. The wounds that Jyotiba and Savitribai Phule had tended to are still fresh. Today, when education is equated with employment, one wonders what response would Jyotiba and Savitribai have to it.
Fashioned by the writings of Thomas Paine, would Jyotiba and Savitribai have reduced the notion of empowerment through employment? But weren’t they also showing what education fundamentally stands for? The Phules knew that the deep-seated perils of society cannot be addressed through the instrumental goals of education, which, in the form of economic solutions, can appear to give some relief but cannot replace the core values that have the potential of social churn.
The contemporary discourse has reduced education to serving the outcome of employability. This has become the central objective of education, foreshadowing its inherent goal of enlightenment and empowerment. The inherent value of education in creating self-awareness and growth has little or no effect on these times. This can be experienced in the conventional educational institutions, which unabashedly focus solely on catering to the job market.
The assumption that the asymmetries and inequalities will be resolved once employment is taken care of is a preposterous assumption. After all, the values associated with education for employability are largely instrumental and can be conveniently attained without engaging with the social contradictions or the times that one is living through. Education for enlightenment, which works towards critique and creation, cannot be carried out within the complacent, narrow world of individuals; it demands inhabiting in and engaging with one’s context, not a departure from it.
By instituting a confusion between education for enlightenment and education for employment, the present discourse has obscured the former in favour of the latter. This conjured-up opposition posits education for enlightenment as an adversary, allowing our sensibilities to renounce the essence of education for being esoteric. The positing of this opposition has welded a strong link between employment and education.
Realising education’s emancipatory potential depends on our translation of what we mean by education for real life — an apt objective put forward by the National Education Policy 2020. What can be more real than addressing the fissures that constitute the social — be they the age-old asymmetries that still afflict us or the fresh wounds that the present xenophobic, conflict-inclined world is throwing at us.
It calls on NEP 2020 to think beyond education as a means of employment and engage with the problems of our times, manifest in the form of discriminations along the lines of caste, gender, class, religion and other social identities. In the spirit of the Phules, it is important to strengthen the link between education and empowerment, which, when affirmed, will pave the way for individual emancipation. The present discourse has diluted education while also depoliticising the times we live in by making employment primary and letting it usurp the goals of enlightenment.
Jyoti Dalal is a Professor at IHE, University of Delhi, and President, CESI