By: Amar Yumnam
Manipur right now is preoccupied with the issues of education or rather with what needs to be done as to what is happening in this most important social sector. The happenings in this sector have been a cause of both anguish and anger for the people of Manipur for quite some time. Until recently the person at the helm of affairs in governance of this sector was someone who did not understand what education is about and this was coupled by an incapability to think of what it should be like. It is in this background that Manipur now has a Minister looking after this social sector who, besides his own educational qualification, possesses the capability to apply his mind to the issues of this sector and appreciate the debates raised by the interested public. Since a significant section of the population of the State values education, it is natural that the accumulated anguish and anger would get manifested to draw the attention of the new person in the helm of affairs. It is a positive sign: Time is now that only the Educated can think about Education in a meaningful way – the knowledge economy does not have space for pretensions. As Amartya Sen puts in his Idea of Justice: “What moves us, reasonably enough, is not the realization that the world falls short of being completely just – which few of us expect – but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate.” Today’s world is very different from this one narrated by Paul Trowler in the second edition (2003) of his Education Policy: “Before 1870 the role of the state in education was limited to the provision of grants to some church schools, some teacher training responsibility and the education of pauper children in schools associated with some workhouses. Church, private and voluntary schools were the only important sources of education. Only the middle class and the upper class could afford an education of any quality, and this was usually limited to their male children.”
While the whole spectrum from elementary schooling to higher education are now in a bad shape in Manipur, the school level is in a particularly very bad shape. The need for Education Policy has never been felt in Manipur as strongly as it is today; fortunately, we have a Minister who has right capability to apply his mind on this. Let me quote from Trowler extensively on this: “Education policy is often thought of as a thing: a statement of some sort, usually written down in a policy document. Viewed in this way, education policy could be defined as follows:
“a specification of principles and actions, related to educational issues, which are followed or which should be followed and which are designed to bring about desired goals.
“In this sense policy is a piece of paper, a statement of intentions or of practice as it is perceived by policy-makers or as they would like it to be…This view of policy is a very limited one. It is better to see policy as a process, something which is dynamic rather than static.
“This dynamism comes from a number of sources:
• There is usually conflict among those who make policy, as well as those who put it into practice, about what the important issues or problems for policy are and about the desired goals.
• Interpreting policy is an active process: policy statements areal most always subject to multiple interpretations depending upon the standpoints of the people doing the interpretative ‘work’.
• The practice of policy on the ground is extremely complex, both that being ‘described’ by policy and that intended to put policy into effect. Simple policy descriptions of practice do not capture its multiplicity and complexity, and the implementation of policy in practice almost always means outcomes differ from policy makers’ intentions (which were, anyway, always multiple and often contradictory).”
Stephen Ball also made similar proposition in 1994 on Education Reform: “Policy is both text and action, words and deeds, it is what is enacted as well as what is intended. Policies are always incomplete insofar as they relate to or map on to the ‘wild profusion’ of local practice.”
Despite the existence of NEP 2020, Manipur still needs a policy on how to contextualise education, particularly so in the school stage. As Guttman so emphatically put in his 1987 Democratic Education: “A guiding principle of deliberative democracy is reciprocity among free and equal individuals: citizens and their accountable representatives owe one another justifications for the laws that collectively bind them. A democracy is deliberative to the extent that citizens and their accountable representatives offer one another morally defensible reasons for mutually binding laws in an ongoing process of mutual justification. To the extent that a democracy is not deliberative, it treats people as objects of legislation, as passive subjects to be ruled, rather than as citizens who take part in governance by accepting or rejecting the reasons they and their accountable representatives offer for the laws and policies that mutually bind them.”
The prevailing issues of lack of teachers and uncertainty in the service conditions of teachers are hopefully already getting the attention of the governance. In the light of recent public resentment of so many representatives with educationally doubtful backgrounds returning as Public Representatives and the prevailing education crisis, what Guttman so emphatically puts is of interest: “Deliberative democracy underscores the importance of publicly supported education that develops the capacity to deliberate among all children as future free and equal citizens. The most justifiable way of making mutually binding decisions in a representative democracy—including decisions not to deliberate about some matters—is by deliberative decision making, where the decision makers are accountable to the people who are most affected by their decisions. Deliberative decision making and accountability presuppose a citizenry whose education prepares them to deliberate, and to evaluate the results of the deliberations of their representatives. A primary aim of publicly mandated schooling is therefore to cultivate the skills and virtues of deliberation.”
Besides the widely known issues, we must accept that there are so many injustices characterising Manipur’s education sector. First, the spread and the coverage of education still have a long way to go. Second, the spread and the coverage are in a crisis situation in the mountains of Manipur – the lingering divide in education between the mountains and the valley cannot be allowed to continue. Third, the learning crisis of Science and Mathematics in the mountain areas of Manipur should be corrected sooner than later.
In fine, for a future with justice Manipur needs an Education Policy alive to the contextual realities of Manipur, and implementation of it without compromise.
