Once education is ‘dumbed down’ thus, reduced to a process of acquiring a qualification and a set of competencies as evidence of such, there is an easy case for the dismantling of the public university system: “if what you do can just as well be done using less space, less time, less trained teachers, and even online, what is the justification for allocating all these physical resources and the money that goes into sustaining them?”
by Hasini Lecamwasam
Any meaningful exercise in knowledge production centrally involves investigating the systems of thought that undergird our social, political, and economic arrangements, with a view to changing them to be better for more people. The university’s mandate as a site of critical dialogue, social justice, and struggle for human liberation are closely connected to this function. It is for this reason that all subjects taught in a university, whether in the arts and humanities or STEM disciplines, are supposed to provide a grounding in conceptual investigation that enables one to see through the paradigm that frames knowledge, and projects it as ‘objective truth’, ‘science’ as an expression of it, and so on. In other words, all kinds of training imparted by a university should be based on a critical approach to the politics and relativity of truth and knowledge. However, the gradual incursion of market interests into the university space has contributed towards pushing through changes that undermine this mandate of a university, now increasingly conditioning how those within universities view it as well.
In research, this translates into conducting studies that have the capacity to attract industry actors who can bring in greater funding. However, industry actors in turn are attracted to work that tells them how their profits can increase, rather than research in pursuance of societal wellbeing. This constrains what is possible and, over time, the very parameters of thought in research. In consequence, the focus of research has shifted from investigating conceptual paradoxes (what are called ‘research problems’) to collecting empirical data (‘research questions’), especially in HSS disciplines. Accordingly, criteria for research excellence are evolving to reward information-intensive research that serves simply to reinforce existing social structures and systems by seeking answers to such banal questions as: ‘why do people prefer private universities?’; ‘what is the demand for STEM subjects like?’; ‘what are the perceptions towards the relevance of arts and humanities?’; ‘how to achieve better standards in higher education through quality assurance?’, and the like. Answers to such questions are more and more explored using quantitative methods (KAP surveys, etc.), supplemented by anecdotal qualitative ‘evidence’, which, together, tend to focus on the downstream effects of much larger phenomena, rather than the political and economic dimensions of social problems that fundamentally shape them, as well as any study of them.
These transformations are also reflected in teaching-learning exercises, not least because our research necessarily informs our teaching. ‘Critical’ discussions in classrooms are becoming a regrettably rare occurrence. Instead, most lectures are simple that: lectures, i.e. one-way communications where teachers parrot away information for students to repeat at examinations and scrape off good grades.
The stamp of this sort of uncritical, ‘information-based’ education baked on to several of us manifests in the conservatism with which certain everyday issues are approached, and the highly individualistic not-in-my-backyard syndrome because of which many decide not to engage with them. A few months ago, undergraduates of Peradeniya were told they cannot protest in front of the Senate building, given its historical and administrative significance. This was recently topped off with an even more egregious directive barring them entry into the adjacent pillar area, lest they affront the administration or the visiting public with loud music and, god forbid, public displays of affection. These incidents, and the lack of due outrage on the part of teachers and certain sections of the student body itself, made me reflect seriously on how questions of education, including academic and student life, are understood, and the increasingly restrictive interpretation of the university it signifies.
The boiling down of education, particularly higher education, to a mere qualification necessary for employment, and the consequent chipping away at the conditions that make for a ‘profound’ education – political consciousness, activism, and even love and affection between peers – is happening in a certain context: Sri Lanka’s drive towards education marketisation which has several global precedents, and the consequent policy, funding, and training landscape surrounding higher education globally. In Sri Lanka, successive governments, prompted in no small measure by external funding institutions such as the World Bank, have firstly sought to align education with market demands, and subsequently turn the service itself into a commodity. As a result, education is coming to be understood more and more in cost-benefit terms (whose costs and benefits are both individually accrued, in line with the individualism of the neoliberal market), rather than the overall development of students and society, an attitude that is increasingly internalised by students, educators, and administrators alike.
Once education is ‘dumbed down’ thus, reduced to a process of acquiring a qualification and a set of competencies as evidence of such, there is an easy case for the dismantling of the public university system: “if what you do can just as well be done using less space, less time, less trained teachers, and even online, what is the justification for allocating all these physical resources and the money that goes into sustaining them?” If student activity was to be limited to the classroom, and teachers were to simply cover a given syllabus, if our vision of education is also limited to one of students attending lectures and teachers simply facilitating the process, then we have to agree that we must take up less space and consequently less money.
The plea to return to a culture of critical education is not simply about greater consciousness and activism so students (and perhaps teachers) could inhabit the university space more freely; it is about what such a shift would signify. A ‘university’ is not needed simply to churn out employable graduates. Any training institute squeezed into a five storied building (or less) can do that, without the thought or trouble that goes into creating and maintaining an actual university. Of course, our students need to find employment, and we need to prepare them for that; but what distinctively makes us a university is the critical edge they are supposed to walk away with, that helps them be more than cogs in the wheel. That is the kind of education that would have equipped them – and us as teachers – to rise up with more passion against arbitrary directives seeped in Victorian moralism and red tapism; that is also the kind of education that alone would help us climb out of the current economic pit prioritising human wellbeing over that of macroeconomic indicators.
So, let us dare to do the counter-intuitive, and continue to push agendas of critical research (likely without funding) and critical discussion in classrooms and outside (at the risk of penalisation) within universities because, ironically, the case for the survival of the university itself hinges on that.
