Written by Jug Suraiya Has India’s education system become a contradiction in terms, in that it does not educate and is no longer a system, an orderly arrangement of ideas and functions formulated to achieve a desired objective? A spate of scams, of mass-copying, leaked question papers, and faked certificates, poses a threat to the groves of academe which are being turned into a blackboard jungle, producing hordes of purportedly educated unemployed young people, making a cruel mockery of our vaunted ‘demographic dividend’. But more than the economic and social repercussions of mass unemployment, our derelict educational edifice is haunted by the spectre of a deeper existential crisis. In an interview on social media, a student has identified a fundamental flaw in what and how we teach by dividing courses into the science stream and the arts stream.
Students who opt for ‘hard’ science subjects like physics and chemistry, can’t also choose ‘soft’ subjects like history and literature, and vice versa. This creates an asymmetry not only in terms of job skills and employment opportunities but, at a deeper level, it can lead to an ethical, moral, and spiritual vacuum, a void in the heart of our body politic. Science teaches the ‘how’ of life: how to do brain surgery, how to cure disease, how to build rocket ships.
The arts guide us to the ‘why’ of life: why peace is better than war, why love should overcome hate, why there’s a difference between good and evil. Both the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ are essential to life. Without the ‘hows’ – how to make fire, how to invent the wheel, how to discover gravity – we’d still be living in caves.
Without the ‘whys’ – why we choose a profession, why we adhere to a particular creed or ideology – we’d have no compass with which to chart the journey of life. The ‘how’ is the superfast train in which we travel; the ‘why’ is the direction we travel in and the destination we hope to arrive at. When Neil Armstrong took his historic “One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind”, a commentator observed that the American tragedy was that it had put a man on the Moon without knowing why.
The ‘why’, of course, was America’s rivalry with USSR, the space race being an adjunct to the arms race. And the tragic irony was that the images relayed from Apollo 11 of the blue Planet Earth, in all its breath-taking and fragile beauty, should be shadowed by the monstrous mushroom cloud of nuclear Armageddon. The ‘how’ that split the atom raised the ‘why’ of prioritising between building an energy plant which could light a million homes and making nuclear warheads which could take a million lives.
The advent of Artificial Intelligence, with the boundless horizons it has opened, has made even more crucial the tightrope walk between the ‘how’ and the ‘why’, between what we can do, and what we ought to do. Will AI create a virtual reality ‘realer’ than the real reality? Help to overcome cancer? Both? AI could be the final challenge in balancing the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ if what we call humanity is to retain its humanness..
