Abstract
In the preceding part of the book, we have shown how a decided neglect on the part of Indian political leadership towards the importance of ideational and social revolutions in line with Western Enlightenment ideas and values has contributed to holding the country in a state of perpetual metamorphosis, and also how India’s school educational thinking during the prime formative decades after Independence laid a foundation of a distinct legacy of bypassing a crucial task of imparting—through inter alias suitably designed curriculum and textbooks—the core Enlightenment values including the supremacy of reason, rationality, secularity and universalistic humanism into young impressionable minds, outlook and attitudes.
This chapter draws partly on Arup Maharatna (2014), ‘Invasion of Educational Universe by Neo-Liberal Economic Thinking: A Civilizational Casualty?’ EPW Vol. 49, Issue No. 37, 13 September 2014.
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Notes
- 1.
We would consciously avoid using such currently popular categories as ‘post-modernism’ or ‘post-structuralism’ for the sake of maintaining the steadfastness of our argument and exposition.
- 2.
The growing and pervasive applications of mainstream neo-classical economic premises, approaches and methods of analysis since the late 1950s not only into the field of education but also into other social science branches such as sociology, anthropology and political science have been subsequently christened as ‘economic imperialism’: ‘The most aggressive economic imperialists aim to explain all social behavior by using the tools of economics’ (Lazear 1999: 6).
- 3.
A key role that was played historically by the state in supporting and maintaining standard, quality and rigour in academies and higher educational institutions got reaffirmed in the late nineteenth century when Britain—though one of the pioneers in the Industrial Revolution—experienced relative declines in industrial economy and its international competiveness vis-a-vis other and newer industrial economies marked by far more extensive state involvement in higher education than in England (Hobsbawm 1999).
- 4.
Indeed, even today the oldest and renowned universities of the world such as Harvard still announce, while seeking to attract prospective young minds/students, their zeal for liberal education—‘an education conducted in a spirit of free inquiry undertaken without concern for topical relevance or vocational utility. This kind of learning is not only one of the enrichments of existence; it is one of the achievements of civilization’ (italics added; see www.admissions.college.harvard.edu, accessed in 2012).
- 5.
We are, of course, ignoring some (arguably) nebulous civilizational visions such as the one of launching a ‘new form of civilization’ virtually cut-off from the questions of what and how has our existing civilization been in place or how we have become what we presently are: ‘we may be on the threshold of the emergence of a new form of civilization, as billions of world citizens interact together, unconstrained by today’s monopolies on knowledge or learning opportunities’ (Duderstandt 2012: 594, emphasis added).
- 6.
Taken from New York State Education Department (2009), Federal Education and the States, 1945–2009, Albany: New York State Archives; p. 7.
- 7.
This field has, sometimes, also been called ‘economics of human capital’ seemingly in recognition of the fact that the notion and scope of education is much broader than the one connoted by the term ‘economics of education ’, which is generally circumscribed by economic motives and calculations, economic benefits and costs alone (Tilak 2006). In fact, some authors initially preferred using the term ‘human wealth’ in place of ‘human capital’ (Teixeira 2000: 260).
- 8.
Labaree (1997) calls this ‘social mobility’ goal of education, which does not mesh well with the two other major goals of education, namely ‘democratic equality’ and ‘social efficiency’.
- 9.
A slightly revised version of this paper was subsequently brought out as a NBER Working Paper in 2010 and then published as an article in Review of Economics and Statistics in 2011.
- 10.
For instance, marks are often not deducted for poor and wrong grammar and spelling (Green et al. 2005: 11).
- 11.
Several studies that exist, or are being undertaken of late point to the similar educational trends in other developed and developing countries too (Pritchett 2013).
- 12.
The situation has come to such a pass that the number of teachers, who even commit—in their bid to escape management’s frowning or a threat of job loss—such offences as giving pupils ‘inappropriate assistance’ on coursework and whispering advice during exams, is increasing exponentially even in country such as UK (Osborne 2017).
- 13.
This refers to the following famous sentence written by Lord Chesterfield of the eighteenth century England in one of his innumerable letters to his son who was studying in a public school far away from home: ‘Due attention to the inside of books, and due contempt for the outside, is the proper relation between a man of sense and his books’.
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Maharatna, A. (2019). ‘Invasion’ of Educational Universe by Neo-Liberal Economic Thinking: A Global Casualty?. In: The Indian Metamorphosis. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0797-3_4
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