The Obsoleteness of Education as We Know It?

One of the few pursuits that have seen a surge in interest in these otherwise trying times is that of online education. Apart from those that are engaging in it out of necessity, given the restrictions on movement, there are many who are pursuing various courses in order to utilise the time that that has been placed at their disposal. These include courses of all kinds- from the more functional and career-oriented augmentation of skill sets, to a more exploratory embrace of diverse and new kind of interests. Implicit in this desire to add dimensions to oneself, lies a bigger, deeper truth about the idea of education itself and why it needs to be reimagined in today’s times.

Education is the instrument by which we align our tomorrows with our yesterdays and todays. Education is a giant experiment in time- we use the present to distil the wisdom of the past so as to prepare ourselves for the future. This puts an enormous responsibility on this sector of our lives, for it must constantly evaluate what shape is the future taking and how to modify itself so as to better respond to its ever -changing needs. Instead, education is perhaps the most conservative sector across all arenas of life. It moves forward with reluctance, held back by the gravitational pull of its own self-regard. 

A dramatic change that technology has enabled is that today we can learn by ourselves. This is such a radical form of disintermediation, for education was the one place where it has been firmly believed that without a mediator like a teacher, knowledge transmission was impossible. And while the role of teaching continues to be pivotal, today there are many modes of learning that do not depend on a teacher, defined conventionally. A wide spectrum of learning possibilities exist on the Internet, from formal programmes that use new forms of media to impart education that help people find gainful employment, to capsules that add specific dimensions to one’s learning, all the way to the many courses that we can take from medieval art history to learning exotic languages just because we feel like it. We learn highly specific tips about fashion, makeup, cooking, dancing, personality development, and many other aspects of self-improvement rom videos that have been uploaded by people like us. The world is exploding with knowledge of all kinds and it is coming to us from all quarters. The pursuit of knowledge is increasingly located in the individual and is curiosity driven, rather than being institutional and agenda driven. This means that education needs to allow for non-linear modes of learning, and encourage the ability to move from subject to subject, while helping individuals with frameworks that allow them to develop their own worldviews. 

The idea that formal education is a one-time injection limited to a specific stage in life, which must then last us for a full lifetime is a bizarre idea that has been normalised simply because that’s the way it has always been.  In a stable world, one could perhaps defend the practice of spending an entire period of one’s life doing little else but learning, and then employing that knowledge for the rest of one’s lifespan. This notion has been rendered redundant for a while now, and in certain professions like medicine and IT where change has been so rapid, the need for supplementing this one-time pool of knowledge, not merely through our experiences, but by actually going through a more rigorous and focused process of learning, has been felt quite acutely, but otherwise life has tended to go on as usual. 

Earlier, the process of education needed one to remove oneself from everything else and focus only on learning, or more accurately on living a life of the student, for in many cases being a student and learning were casual acquaintances, not fast friends. Today, the external environment demands that education be a lifelong process. Knowledge moves quickly, and obsolescence sets in fast. This is the reason why people over 40 now find it difficult to find jobs that easily. Once there was a premium on experience, now time has become a burden on one’s resume. 

Also, as human beings, our needs have become more horizontal. The idea that we learn one subject and take up one career all our lives is looking quite unattractive. We define ourselves as a compendium of interests, and are far more willing than earlier to embark on new careers in the middle of our productive years, Education is also freeing itself from a purely utilitarian perspective, and is being embraced for its own sake, rather than only as means of landing a job.

In this kind of a world, the older idea of education as being primarily a form of knowledge accretion has little value. Knowledge is available at the click of a button. Simply knowing facts about subjects and being able to reproduce those in an exam cannot possibly a sign of one’s suitability for today’s context. The problem is in fact the opposite. There is too much information going around, too much that needs to be sifted through, made sense of and synthesised. Education should teach us how to learn better, how to think more critically, how to use knowledge more meaningfully rather than focus on feeding us knowledge alone. 

In a world that is going to get more automated by the day, where more tasks will be taken up by other intelligences, the role of the human mind will need to change. A vastly enhanced focus on creativity is needed, for instance, given that a lot of industrial era jobs as well as a lot of knowledge-based work will no longer need to be performed by human beings. 

Education should lead, not follow. It should equip us for the future, not keep us chained to the past. it must be the domain of the greatest creativity and not be the slave of habit. If education has to help usher in tomorrow, it cannot be afraid of change. 

(This is a version of an article that has appeared previously in the Times of India)