The most natural and perfect work is to generate its like. – An Alchemist’s Wisdom
Always responsive to the challenge that modernity implies for education and pedagogy – as indeed the converse, the encounter of education/pedagogy with modernity – the contribution of Krishna Kumar (hereinafter KK) entitled “Rurality, Modernity and Education” (EPW, 31 May 2014: 38-43) alerts us to the double bind of possibility and impossibility that lies at the very core of modern education and pedagogy.
Indeed, if KK’s thesis is plausible (which it is), then the effectiveness of all short-term measures and compromises with reference to curriculum and pedagogy come into question. This constraint may be further addressed by the following question: how can KK’s understanding of the reciprocal challenge posed by modernity and education give any concrete account of the singularity of educational practices when they seem to be irreducibly structured by the double bind of modern education and pedagogy? My effort, in this response, is to make clear and re-thematise this double bind.
My point precisely is this: if (modern) education and pedagogy are about both possibility and impossibility, then a reflection adequate to this state of affairs needs to be effected; and, what is more, that if the current stalemate about educational reform and pedagogy which KK’s essay documents so well is to be surpassed, then we need to be augmenting our thinking about modern educational practices at whatever level.
Engaging the Double Bind
I have discussed aspects of the question in two recent pieces in the EPW, one analysing the issue of “critical pedagogy” as contextualised to the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbook cartoon controversy revolving around B R Ambedkar (EPW, 5 October 2013: 66-72) and the other devoted to the forwarding of the claims of (what I had characterised) “method-centred” research pedagogy (EPW, 1 February 2014: 63-68). It may not be necessary to recapitulate the ground of these two forays, except to admit and affirm with them that the current edginess over educational practices has also to do with an “undecidability” about the tools and resources of a modern critical pedagogy. Importantly yet, we can see KK’s attempt as adding another dimension to the deadlock, one having to do with the force of the declarative act underlying modern education and pedagogy, namely, the programmatical thesis, taken to be central to modernity, that far from education creating modernity, “it (education) embodies modernity inasmuch as its own encounter with modernity has transformed it so vitally” (p 38).
Allow me to foreground the problem in the context of KK, before venturing ahead. Having set up a broad contrast between modernity (whose “leading edge” is urban life) and rurality (or rural living), KK goes on to pose sharply the following “paradox for education”: “The association of modernity with urban life poses a paradox for education because modernity in education is rooted in a pedagogic culture which is essentially rural” (p 38). While this in itself need not produce the double bind of modern education and pedagogy that we are here interested to engage, it is what KK goes on to say that foregrounds the double bind of possibility and impossibility taken to constitute the core of modern education. Let us thematise from within KK. Working through fragments of an expansive history of education in India (incorporating both colonial and post-Independence history), KK finds in the context of these changes a “new grammar of rural-urban relations” taking shape, with the “town or the city connot(ing) aim or intended direction, whereas the village connoted a sacrificed belonging” (p 39). Aside from this “existential grammar” however, as KK astutely reminds, “the town and the village are related to each other as epistemic entities in a parallel grammar of modernity”, according to which the “town is where knowledge about the village is created and stored” and in terms of which “the village, as an object of consciously and assiduously organised knowledge, is born in the city” (p 40).
Quite clearly, some aspects of the double bind that structures modern education and pedagogy are apparent here, even if KK does not himself formulate it as such. It is when he goes on to explore the “rural response to modernity” that what we are calling the double bind becomes even more evident and challenging. KK is concerned to sound the limits of a “modernity” in education that is “rooted in a pedagogic culture which is essentially rural” (p 38), and which “involved the transmission of modern ideas to the villager” (p 40). Having stated so, KK shifts gear, turning to the “new realities” of rural India and striving to “examine what these changes might mean in terms of rural modernity” (p 41).
Foregrounding the point that “the state’s attempt to universalise elementary education” (as combined with “the general social trend towards literacy”) has meant that sizeable sections of the rural population “now possess the rudimentary skills associated with literacy than was the case at any earlier point in modern history” (p 42), he pointedly asks about “how these new elements might shape our perception of rural modernity” (p 42). KK here quickly dismisses the validity of “general answers”, but asserts, all the same, that there is a persistence of “gender and caste-based disparities in literacy, employment and children’s education” (p 42). He highlights the limits of government reports, all too fixed as they are on “enrolment data”, discounting (in the context of gender) the “length of girls’ education and the quality of their experience at school” and (in the context of caste) the “handling of mixed-caste classrooms by teachers” (p 42), while going on to maintain, starkly, that the “same programmes that pushed enrolment high have also diluted the village teacher’s economic status and professional identity” (p 42).
A Movement Across
Having formulated, on our terms, aspects of the double bind that encapsulates modern education and pedagogy, we must probe this condition further. A question that will concern us here is: what kind of normative and theoretical weight can we lend to this double bind/paradox? For KK, as we have seen, education has been “one of the prime means through which the grammar of rural-urban relations ...has been internalised by successive generations of the rural population” (p 42), a point which, we must stress, is in keeping with his emphasis that education “is not merely a measure of modernity, but also the designer of its inner nature and meaning” (emphasis added). The latter lines which I have italicised are particularly noteworthy, and we will return to it later.
For the moment, let us look at what KK infers from this prognosis. As he writes, “(i)n the history of modern Indian education ...the curriculum has primarily served as a means of dissemination and control”, and in this light wryly observes that “(a)s a vehicle of modernity, education [has] remained largely empty of modern pedagogic values” (p 43). He is clear that “the village we construct with our modern, urban imagination is at least partly a myth of our making” and that “(o)ne contribution of modern education and its curriculum has been to reinforce a polarity between rural and urban living” (p 43). Accordingly, even as he avers that the “reality of both villagers and city-dwellers may offer far greater evidence of an overlap than a polarity”, KK underscores the point that the “insistence that the remaining agenda of modernity is mainly in villages often leads to distorted priorities” (p 43).
Without doubt, it is not the historical and/or logical plausibility of these ideas that I am interested to query here (and there is much that one could say on this score). My concern, as already indicated, is with the kind of normative and theoretical weight we can be lending to the framework of these ideas. In rendering, as we have, his “paradox for education” as a double bind of possibility and impossibility that structures modern education and pedagogy, KK may yet object to the interpretation that we are placing on his text/rendition.
He has every right to do so. But it may be worthwhile, for one and all (including KK), to consider the following (and I am afraid I am going to be synoptic here): (i) interpretation must often involve working with the grain of a text (without, of course, twisting its contents); (ii) we must avoid over-simplifying (or trivialising) the space of modernity; and (iii) at the heart of all learning and pedagogy is an impossibility of ever attaining it in all its possibility. Lest I be misunderstood, I must hasten to add that I am certainly not implying that KK’s understanding of modernity is trivial and/or that his erudite and thoughtful probings of modern education and pedagogy (both here in the short text that we are here complicating and elsewhere in his wider corpus) are flawed.
My point precisely (one, incidentally, in the spirit of KK) is that if we need to be augmenting our thinking about modern education and pedagogy, then the various aspects of the current stalemate over educational practices and the reform of those practices need to be addressed. Obviously, KK is concerned to push the normative weight of his prognosis in the direction of a “fresh vision of rural modernity and education” and which takes “the rural teacher’s agency seriously” (p 43); I am interested to thematise something different though. Allow me to reformulate.
Grounds for a Re-thematisation
All too often, disquisitions about change (within an institutional realm or across them) take the form of an evasion of the changes. I am not saying that this has happened with KK, but to insist – as I do – that change cannot be applied to any referent does not mean that it cannot be used for an act of reference. In this oscillation between a possible referent of change and the use of changes in an act of reference, there lurks an ambiguity about whether a set of changes can be interpreted and seen as consistent or inconsistent without bringing in something external to change.
It is the normative strength of KK’s argument that he bases it on, as we just saw, a “fresh vision of rural modernity and education”. On a rough understanding of that interpretation, it is an attempt above all to comprehend modernity and education/pedagogy through change (rather than comprehending change through modernity/education). The difference is difficult, yet crucial, and it has to do with what happens when, subjected to the pressure of a dynamical object, namely, change – the fact and the value of change – one (as analyst or interpreter of changes) decides to consider it as (if you will) a terminus ad quo rather than as a terminus ad quem. That is to say, an analysis devoted less to the end-point of a process of change (terminus ad quem) than an analysis of the ways in which changes are produced (terminus ad quo). Those given over to questions of educational reform and pedagogy at whatever level cannot avoid the ground that KK traverses therefore; and yet, we need to be thinking further about educational practices and measures of/for critical pedagogy.
It is very hard to give a critical justification for any clear contrast between modernity and education/pedagogy, although it has been constantly resorted to in the historical study of cultural forms. I do not doubt a causal connection between them, of course. But what seems very much a question is whether this causal relation is effected and mediated by what? Also, how is their necessity being framed – in relation to what and in what terms?
Summarily, inquiries into the causality of modern education and pedagogy take such forms as, say, “how did modern education secure itself and with what consequences?” or “what makes modernity capitalise on education and pedagogy as instruments of change?” and, again, “what is it in modern education and pedagogy that gives rise to modernity?” – investigations structured, clearly, by the expectation that some causal activity procured certain effect by means of some kind of force or immanent logic. Not that such a line of questioning is in principle unjustified or in practice useless; they even could correspond to the way things (have) come to be and thus elicit something internal to a process of institutional becoming. But I think it is vain to keep pressing the inquiry in such terms when the answers do not always justify them; and it leads only to confusion and miscomprehension then to posit classes of phenomena which correspond not to the answers received but to the questions put.
Note that my problem is not quite the logical ease with which we confuse “preconditions” (plainly, the histories of what led up to something) and “effects” (the aggregate of the changes which that something causes or that unfold in respect to it). Rather – and to limit ourselves to the double bind of modern education and pedagogy – I am trying to draw attention to the “undecidability” of modernity wherein (or whereby) the significance and status of educational practices and decisions continually change or differentiate themselves and are consequently inaccessible (or, even, ultimately meaningless). On this register, whose full contours I am afraid I cannot unravel, the singularity or unicity of (any) modernity – connected or unconnected with formal education and pedagogy – would be undecidable.
KK, I am inclined to think, has some measure of the problem, but does not push it through, remaining content with the claim that education (as we highlighted in the previous section of our commentary) “is not merely a measure of modernity, but also the designer of its inner nature and meaning” (p 42). Indeed, this diffidence only heightens the problem, so that even as KK is appropriately keen to record the encounter of modernity and education, the surface on which this encounter is staged (namely, rurality) ends up reinforcing the very antinomies that structured the encounter in the first place. There is also, I think, a short circuiting of the discourse – and meta-discourse – of learning processes organised in the institutional form (whether school, college, or university), which is further accentuated when KK alludes to the “rural” character of pedagogic modernism. But that would take a longer process of unravelling than what the EPW would allow. Hopefully, in the event of a dialogue developing in these pages, I can delve into this axis of inquiry.
This response to Krishna Kumar's "Rurality, Modernity and Education" (EPW, 31 May 2014) attempts to make clear and re-thematise the double bind of modern education and pedagogy.
{ Sasheej Hegde (sasheej@gmail.com) teaches sociology at the University of Hyderabad. }
From : EPW,
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