The sham that passes for learning

The daughter of my cowherd, wanted me to have a look at her test results. A bright kid in the tenth standard, she was especially keen to show her English test. The test consisted of a series of short questions that needed a pointed answer. I picked up what I thought was an interesting question: Is there any substance that is hotter than fire? No, there is no substance that is hotter than fire, she had answered, and got full marks.

I asked her if she understood the question. No, she said, with a straight face. And the answer? Not the answer either, she replied. And that was true for all the questions and answers. It was not her fault. Her education consisted of mugging up all possible questions and their answers. It was rote at its worst. She was good at that. Her teachers were happy and her parents were overjoyed that she had done so well.

What would happen to this girl? With such good grades, she was no doubt aspiring to a career, but what kind of career can that be? I got the answer soon, but from Bhagyam, a farm hand. Her son had completed 12 years of school and gone on to obtain a bachelor’s degree in engineering. He got a job, but his pay was not much more than that of his mother. Having spent a fortune on his education, she had now to send him money. What was the point of this education that cost so much and produced so little, she asked.

I soon got a chance to understand the whole business from the other end. I was consulting for a firm in the neighbourhood of Chennai. It was a young plant with a young workforce, and in need of engineers. The managers were vexed because they had to interview an unending stream of aspirants to find anyone who was suitable.

The aspirants were vexed too. They didn’t want to be questioned outside the syllabus. They felt entitled to a high salary because they had spent so much on their education. The managers had no respect for syllabi or entitlements. They wanted to recruit the needle in the haystack, but the haystack had other ideas. The problems for the company did not end there. The ones they chose didn’t stay for long. This was a high-profile firm with a huge reputation. A few months here was enough for a trainee to secure a better paying job and move on. There is clearly a labour market for engineers, but the market is for the needle and not for the stack.

The cowherd’s daughter has, meanwhile, passed the twelfth standard with good grades and joined a diploma course in pharmacology. She gets on to one of the yellow buses ferrying students to the numerous teaching shops six days a week, and after four years of this routine she will get a diploma entitling her to become a pharmacologist. The gap between the generations is mind-boggling. Her grandfather is a cobbler who spends his day mending footwear in the village bazaar. Her mother is a cowherd and her father works in a garment factory for a daily wage. The family is spending a fortune on her education. Is she learning something that is marketable or is it rote all over again?

If she makes the cut in the labour market, the family will experience sharp upward mobility, but what if she fails? The vast majority of graduates churned out by the teaching shops will not make the cut. They are destined for the dustbin, earning a pittance and living under miserable conditions in a city slum. Their children will face a dire predicament. They won’t get even the so-called education their parents got.

The cowherd’s daughter is now eighteen and in no hurry to marry, but suitors are showing up. The first has two degrees, but could not find a job. He is now selling footwear with his father in the bus stand. The second has a master’s degree in commerce and earns ₹300 a day as a collection agent for a money-lender. No man will work in a farm for that wage. Both have been rejected.

Children’s education is almost everything for today’s young parents, but the education they get is piffle. We are willing to block roads, burn buses and break windows for all kinds of causes ranging from bullfights to Hindi on milestones. Why are we not outraged by the sham that passes for education?

The writer is a labour relations and HR consultant

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