In almost any situation one can safely say that the eruption of violence marks a setback for education. I am not hinting at the chronic shortage of funds for education and the common justification given for it by referring to the weightier competitive claim to scarce public funds that the crisis of internal security or threat of war has. War represents a setback for education in a more fundamental sense. Education has to do with teaching, which is essentially a relational activity dependent on words. Together, with the help of words, teacher and child make sense of the world and impart a sense of purpose and passion to this endeavour. No matter how inadequate words prove to resolve conflicts, education aims at enhancing our faith in words as a means to create cohesion and to motivate us to hope that better use of words can make a difference when there is a crisis caused by an unhealed discord. Education is a future-oriented activity which makes us concentrate on learning from experience and improving our capacity to engage with the next occasion of the kind in which our words might have proved inadequate the last time.
From this perspective, education all over the Himal region is in a dire state of struggle against violence. Forms of violence differ, but its growing spread and depth are so evident that it must be recognised as a major symptom of the failure of education. I want to register this point in a general sense, cutting across the familiar divide between private and government schools. Current debates on quality in education tend to focus on this divide and ignore the larger failure of education as a social institution in charge of nourishing peace and controlling discord. There can be no satisfactory definition of quality in education which overlooks this role of education. Private schools and their admirers perceive privatisation as a means to resolve the problem of poor quality in state-run schools. Let us also recall that a substantial proportion of private schools in India consciously propagate revivalist and separatist religiosity.
Even if we choose to focus on the finest of secular private schools, we find that some of the best-endowed among them have now given up on the idea that education nourishes peace. Their hope has dwindled to the extent that they do not expect education to ensure the school's own security. One after another, they are all tightening their security regimes and many have taken recourse to CCTV cameras. These cameras ostensibly aim at protecting the school from assailants. But their real aim is to provide a technological solution to the problem of discipline inside the school. Some of the best-known private schools in India have already gone this route; others, including several schools run by the government, are considering the advantages that surveillance technology offers.
The entry of technologically managed scrutiny in education marks a new stage in the erosion of institutional capacity to pursue the humanistic aims of education. It also indicates the rising disengagement of schools from their social ethos. Those who own and run private schools apparently feel that the wider social ethos is a given; so is the larger system of education. 'We can't change the system', they think, 'so, let us run our own school well and ensure our own children's success.' And success means scoring high marks or grades in a national or international 'Board' examination. Private schools which attempt pedagogic innovations to cultivate reflective engagement with the social environment are rare.