We the educated elites of India, no not those who can read and write, not even those who have a degree to flaunt and qualifications that can fetch them good salaries in a job market. It is a severe misnomer that most carry about the term education, it being some structured syllabus taught only in schools. In Indian context one may add ‘Government recognized schools’. Thereafter the individual must pass certain examinations and should hold relevant certificates to as a proof of that. If the above mentioned conditions are met, a person is supposedly educated so to say. I beg to disagree though on this account.

I would like to draw a distinction firstly between literacy and education. A person who can read and write is literate. Literacy however by no means can be equated with education, and neither is literacy a precursor or a mandatory requirement for actually judging a person educated. The ability to read and write is nothing but just a tool, it gives us access to plethora of written material. We can use that tool to widen our sphere of knowledge, interact through books and other written media with people of our age and those who are no more amidst us but their thoughts, brilliance of ages that has percolated through books. This tool can be used effectively so to say in our process of educating ourselves. It is however wrong to claim that without it we could not achieve this feat.

Secondly I would like to bring out the difference between qualification and education.
I address the term educated to people who simply have two attributes. Firstly they have a mental faculty so trained and developed to apply it with reason and logic to any situation presented to them. Secondly some life skill they have mastered so as to perform certain useful role in society. One may ask is an illiterate farmer in some village educated, as per me he well may be. If he has trained his mind well enough to judge rationally and react aptly to his environment, which includes people whom he is dealing with. Along with that he is good at his chosen profession he is by all means educated. He may not be aware about Indo-American nuclear deal, but is aware of which crop to sow when, knows how to judge soil and skies, so as to be successful in his endeavors of agriculture, he is definitely educated.

One may ask that such a person however is unequipped and unaware of various new schemes that government is bringing in for farmers. He may also be duped by some conman to take loans that he cannot repay, so and so forth. Will all that not construe as lack of education. My argument on the issue is simple, we the so called educated people, are we aware of all the policies that government brings forth. Are we not equally susceptible to falling in debt traps? We all have a sphere of knowledge around us which we endeavor to expand to a level of reasonable comfort. At this level of knowledge we are able to perform almost every day to day activity without wondering as to how or being lost. This level however varies from person to person, and that makes our individual knowledge about various issues different. If the farmer feels uncomfortable with his level of knowledge he would by all means try and expand it. He will ask people whom he trusts. If nothing satisfies he would learn how to read and write and thereafter through written media increase his knowledge to this level of comfort. Everyone does that when we go to a new office first day of work, a bride when she goes to her new house. Education however comes into play as to how fast we become aware of the changing environment and gear up to tackle it and of course how we actually go about tackling it.
A farmer of Vidharbha and a techie of Bangalore who commits suicide at the same time lack education in same life skill, which make them, take such harsh and self defeating decision at the time of peril. Many may ask farmer may have been lured and duped by some conniving man on the pretext of him being illiterate and uneducated, well then what about the techie who was duped almost in similar manner by some bank or credit card firm or stock market?

A degree simply does not make any one educated. It’s simply a qualification that may be highly lucrative in a job market. Job market simply works on the principle of demand and supply, as long as supply is limited demand is high and there is value for a particular product. Suppose we manage to give everyone a particular degree, whatever it may be, it won’t fetch the money it does on today’s date.

With such an elaborate introduction as to what is education and what is not, I would like to once again raise question on the wisdom of Indian government declaring education as fundamental right and trying to ensure compulsory education (so called) to all children. Frankly it would be foolhardy to believe that a syllabus consisting a bit of maths bit of science, arts and literature is a foolproof way to educate whole of India. Indian education system was borrowed from the English, who had in turn developed this system not as some universal education scheme but more or less for aristocracy and office bearers I won’t include scientist and inventors because most of them during those days were school dropouts. I am not challenging the efficacy of the scheme, a fair blend of all subjects till the pupil is reaches a stage of maturity to understand what is really his liking and thereafter specialization in those specified subject is absolutely an excellent concept. It is however not universal, it caters only for certain specific job requirements and it definitely does not impart any specific lesson in the other vital life skills that I elaborated above. Most people do learn it, but education system cannot take credit for it.

The second requirement of education that I mentioned that is ‘qualification’ is a market based requirement. Society is a fabric, a well oiled machine; for it to run well free market principles need to be adhered to. Simply put, where ever there is demand you need to supply it with replacement. Now if we look at our society we would notice that it essentially does not consists of people with graduation certificates and various university degrees in hand. There are various kinds of jobs equally important that needs to be addressed so that we have this machinery up and running. Individual may choose for himself what task he likes to perform, but cannot relieve himself of the responsibility of performing one. If he does not then he is a dead weight on the rest. Now the jobs with degree and qualification appear lucrative and better, that is simply because there is high demand for these and we still don’t have enough of them. It does not however imply that this demand has no limits or saturation. They on reaching saturation will become less lucrative and excess products’ (graduates) will be rejected by the market (society) and we will have unemployment.

In democracy however government tends to get motivated by policies of mass appeasement. In our society such white collared jobs are held at very high esteem everyone wants that for their kids. In such scenario it seems like exceptionally people friendly policy to go about declaring education a fundamental right and spending billions on it. All short term goals work in incumbent governments favor, building schools, creating employment (as in teachers and staff), providing meals and economic incentive, all seems such a philanthropic act that the government can boast about. Results are visible in five years makes it even more attractive, what people fail to see and governments simply do not want to see is that they are simply destroying the social fabric of a period 20 years from now. Luckily our government is so inefficient they would never be able to achieve any task they set forth ;we may not fact this problem in such acute a way.

Unemployment in white collared job sector will however be tremendously high in the times to come because of this non adherence to market principles. Other philanthropic argument which I need to counter is that governments actions ensure equality in society, even poor kids get an opportunity to study, well according to me had we had a non interfering government we would have had simply enough private schools coming up to meet the market demands. For sure no private school would give reverse incentive to teach children or force it down anybodies neck but definitely a competitive low price schooling market would have flourished in India. One which for sure would have been better than the present government schools for sure.
Lot of statistics are available on net freely for anyone to go through on net which depicts how government is mindlessly wasting billions of tax payers money on such self defeating philanthropic missions. Government however cannot be blamed for these in a democracy but we the people who somehow are led to believe that these actions would help in building a better nation. We overtly get philanthropic and emotional without understanding the true implication of such government steps. We are led to believe that only those who have entered the portals of schools are educated and more so with all these process we will build more prosperous and stable nation. It’s time we do a reality check on these stupid claims and refute it, not everyone perhaps but at least we the so called educated elites of India.

Update: I am adding this excerpt that happen to come across today….in brief words it echoes what I was trying to point out throughout my article. How a policy that seems excellent in short run especially in regards to a particular community is failing us in long run. Read it and try and evaluate the present education policy on Indian government in this perspective

In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.
Yet when we enter the field of public economics, these elementary truths are ignored. There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: “In the long run we are all dead.” And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.- Henry Hazlitt ~ Economic in One Lesson

The distinction may seem obvious. The precaution of looking for all the consequences of a given policy to everyone may seem elementary. Doesn’t everybody know, in his personal life, that there are all sorts of indulgences delightful at the moment but disastrous in the end? Doesn’t every little boy know that if he eats enough candy he will get sick? Doesn’t the fellow who gets drunk know that he will wake up next morning with a ghastly stomach and a horrible head? Doesn’t the dipsomaniac know that he is ruining his liver and shortening his life? Doesn’t the Don Juan know that he is letting himself in for every sort of risk, from blackmail to disease? Finally, to bring it to the economic though still personal realm, do not the idler and the spendthrift know, even in the midst of their glorious fling, that they are heading for a future of debt and poverty?

In this lies the whole difference between good economics and bad. The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.