The key necessity of the time is for higher education institutions to implement behavioural change programs and provide students with opportunities to practice sustainability, creativity, innovation, and social connection in their daily lives
The biggest fallacy of society today is that, despite being self-proclaimed progressives, we live in a burnout society, in the words of philosopher Byung Chul Han. This is one that thrives on excess positivity borne out of a culture of overproduction and relentless achievement, and marked by a deficit in understanding psychological and emotional health.
This discrepancy is felt most in the education ecosystem. The dilemma is that we are a part of the educational process, and the further we return to the classroom and the curriculum, the higher the burnout .
The current pressures of maintaining the metrics of education — through constant exams every week, grades, and the pressure to perform in assignments, classes, case studies, and every class project relative to the other in the classroom – have transformed the classroom into a combatant space. Here, the curriculum and educational institutions themselves have only led to the production of combatants. The process naturally takes out the learner from the students and often from an educator or administrator, making them silent combatants chasing the next check or tick box. The check box is ticked regularly to either scale a class ladder or an academic ladder to be better positioned in the metrics of the educational accreditation system. Along with students, the system often makes the educators record keepers of marks, certificates, and API scores without understanding their purpose and learning value. In the record-keeping process, silent lobbying and vested — interest group lobbying of human beings from different sections of society also persist. This leads to the infusion of a mediocre, record keeping metric of promotion which is not based on true learning, value proposition and knowledge.
Education has been replaced by a metaphor of a burning and burnt out society where every participant of the system is either a pathologist or a pathological patient. Classrooms, lecture halls and faculty rooms often turn out to be not community spaces for discussion and deliberation but spaces of subversive, combatant aggression. In such a space, faculty rooms, classrooms are not a community of free joyful happy learners but a bunch of combatants who are in a self perpetuating, imploding, insecure creatures looped in the game of a metric based career. It is because they are primarily driven by the instinct of survival at any cost as a combatant in a war does. If the combatant doesnot implode or attack in evasive, pervasive way, he or she would be killed. In a war, even if a combatant learns, the combatant learns to kill and survive for security and not to progress. Hence such a pathological situation of insecurity has pervaded the majority of educational system being driven by a systemic structure created unknowingly post commodification of an essential public good — “Education”.
The aggression is hidden within the garb of academic theorisation, procedures, guidelines, reporting, and all other processes of a system, which, in essence, is violent from within with a peaceful, polished projection. This is happening more owing to the creation of a combatant which is actually working in a space which is supposed to be education, but not less than the norms of a battlefield where you either kill to survive or you get killed. On a war front, two combatant individuals kill each other not because they are good or bad, but they kill to protect their national security, identity security, and essentially from a primal instinct of survival with training to do so. The metaphor holds equally for the educational process right now, which is supposed to be a public good but has turned out to be a war front. The projection also has a sense of discipline of a curriculum for everyone — from the administrators to the academics to the students with a hidden string of a string puller. The puller is pulling the string by means of a changing narrative of private capital changing the meaning and purpose of something which was supposed to be a social good with an abstract perpetuity called — “Education”. Education, which by its essence is a public good, has undergone a change in definition as a “Private Capital”. To get education is not a right now but to achieve education is an outcome of a capitalist process of private capital accumulation by means and a platform of exchange which is a market — “New Education Market”. In this new education market, a student is similar to a labourer in a capitalist process who puts in a sum of labour that generates a product that is exchanged in multiple forms of the market. Thus, private capital gets invested in this new labour called a student, who has to then create a product (which is, say, the student who has got a packaged placement outcome). The transformation of this private capital to a new labour to its transformation to a new product is driven by rules and norms of capital, surplus and wealth accumulation by the owner who is creating this transformation. The wealth is transferred from the parent who invests in the labour to the one who owns the process of transformation from labour to a product, accumulating the labour. In the entire process, what is lost is the duty to serve selflessly for the labour to learn, learn for the society , learn for values, contexts so that finally the labour is transformed to a learner for societal change and multiplier, value creation, proposition and not for just a product transformation.
The nature of this puller is often like a “Panoptical” regulator who also occasionally becoming like a “Mephistopheles.” The dual identity of the string-pullers of the education system works like the “Invisible Hand” of the market and turns the entire education ecosystem as a society of combatants. With a bit of dark humor it can also be called as a “Community of Combatants”. Often these combatants are only looking at metrics and like a Mephistopheles can go to any transaction game to make and perpetually create more combatants so that the established education system of combatants, pathologists, pathogens and patients can only survive. To come out of this combatant framework towards a learning framework of education, the need of the hour is to change the nature of the puppet strings. This will need a complete rehashing of the way of seeing education, the fundamental parameter of which should not be seen as wealth accumulation but with an ethical wealth accumulation complemented by the purpose of reinvesting back in society. One of the ways of doing it is through creating a framework of learning without competing. This approach equips young people with social and scientific knowledge and skills and changes their daily behaviors toward education for progress and development (Nguyen, 2023) through a larger citizenship-based education.
Learning pedagogy must come out of curricula, academic grade-based grouping, and align with a constructivist learning approach — where learners actively participate in their knowledge and skill-building through exploration, collaboration and experimentation — by investigating how innovation, both technological and social, affects and is affected by education as they create local, national, regional and global citizenship through education. Innovative learning methods play a critical role in revealing the learner’s creative potential. STEM-based education can enhance the capabilities of students in innovation, creativity, scientific thinking and problem-solving skills as well as develop mindsets oriented towards sustainability. Globally, lecture-based, exam-based, and teacher-centered pedagogy is undergoing a shift toward more active learning, in which students build their own understanding of a subject through learning activities. This is an imperative to take education out of the combatant system and prevent the perpetuation of a burnout society. The key necessity of the time is for higher education institutions to implement behavioral change programs and provide students with opportunities to practice sustainability, creativity, innovation, and social connection.
To solve sustainable grand challenges, educational institutions must embrace their role as living laboratories for providing creative solutions that can be tested, refined, and scaled up to come out of a combatant education system. A key aspect of such an emancipated education system will be that the participant of the system is a learner first. The learner can be seen as a long-term investible resource which gives back values, principles, norms, empathy, kindness, learning and re-learnings to a society and a system which is becoming more of a combatant system.
Against the backdrop of an emerging society with humanoids, robotics, AI interference, and its control over our consciousness, it is imperative that we immediately change the nature of the education system. If not, we will only thrive with combatant puppets and zombies in the near future, controlled by a string pulled by AI consciousness. Such a situation will only have burnout on one side of society as human beings and string controllers with AI consciousness on the other side. Today’s education has to urgently break out of self-created Frankenstein’s style of combatant to imagine a more ethical, compassionate and equitable future for society.
The writer is Professor, MRIIRS, Research Fellow, ACPET, visiting Professor, IMPRI