The Tyranny Of The “Online”
Ananyo Chakraborty
One year of staying at home and (un) attending online classes has amounted to a paradigmatic shift in the lives of students in India. It is reminiscent of no age prior to the present, and exposes us to unique challenges in the future of higher education. The physicality of the university experience stands vital in the life of a student, since it acts as a pedagogical instrument in experiential learning through democratization of knowledge. However, the introduction of centralizing policy recommendations like National Education Policy (NEP) and the Blended Mode of Education is believed to dismantle the public-funded university system.
Rabindranath Tagore had envisioned a system ensuring whole education of a human being. However, the present Indian education system reduces the student to an unquestioning consumer of capsules of market-oriented knowledge and skills, the university to a service provider, and the teacher to an obedient employee. Students are ought to be potential slaves of a neoliberal market, completely devoid of the faculties of critical thinking. Thinking and questioning individuals are looked upon as potential threats by the state. Thus, there has been a proactive attempt by the present ruling dispensation, guided by the monolithic ideology of the RSS, to depoliticize the student body, and discourage diversity and free thinking in academic spaces. Dissenting students and teachers have been incarcerated under dubious sedition charges. The NEP paves the way for a back-door entry of privatization in higher education, at the cost of millions of students from the marginalized sections. To deny oppressed people higher education is a concerted attempt to render them helpless in the face of systemic exploitation due to ignorance of the same. The allocation for higher education has gone down by Rs. 1,116.52 crore, from Rs 39,466 crore in 2020-21 to Rs 38,350 crore for the 2021-22 financial year. Amidst systematic defunding of public education, students find themselves in an acute dearth of scholarships and research grants. Widely critiqued proposals like Four Year Undergraduate Programme (FYUP), and de-affiliation of colleges from universities threaten the prospects of a broad pool of Indian students aspiring to access affordable higher education.
Online education would complicate the perplexity of the teaching-learning process by the “increasingly pervasive diffusion of digital technologies” as predicted by the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agumben in his evocative 2020 tract, Requiem for the Students. He went on to state that online education would mark an “end of being a student as a form of life”. Mukul Mangalik, in his 2020 article for The Wire titled DU Should Cancel Open Book Exams, Spare Students of ‘Final Cuts’ of Trauma, invoked the concept of collegiality (growing together) as vital in the life of a student pursuing higher education. Much of the learning happened in conversations outside classrooms, in dhabas, libraries, and other non-conventional spaces. Not only did online education dismantle collegiality but also robbed the students off their rights to learn, think, act, and speak fearlessly in these physical spaces. The spaces of solidarities between students, teachers and Karamcharis have been constricted, the multifarious voices stifled and denied their opportunity to represent themselves. As mentioned by Apoorvanand in his recent article, Why UGC’s proposal for ‘blended teaching’ is a bad idea’, ‘the campuses give the youth relative freedom from the shackles of communities they come from’, ‘help democratise society’ and shape ‘political citizenship’. Online education demolishes free political agency of students to educate, agitate and organize against systemic oppressions.
The uncritical mimicry of the physical classroom in a plethora of online video conferencing platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, Webex, Microsoft Teams and so on, have greatly undermined academic rigour. Students and teachers often find themselves ill-disposed to engage in a lively exchange of ideas due to technical impediments and spatial segregation. At the risk of sounding a little outrageous, it may be said that the online classes have restored the authoritarian pedagogy of the school system, with the teacher assuming the authoritative role of delivering instructions unidirectionally, without free-flowing counter-active engagement from students. These platforms leave the state with a higher ability to organize surveillance in classes, which is threat to their democratic functioning. We need to remind ourselves that these platforms were originally devised to assist big corporates to hold group video meetings, often to cater to their foreign clients. The proposal for a Blended mode of education, with about 40% of the courses being taught remotely on these platforms (SWAYAM MOOCs), would amount to a detrimental reduction of the public universities as mere enablers of ‘the transaction of a pre-cooked syllabi’, much along the lines of transactional corporate models. Concerns about ‘online education degrees’ being rendered valueless in ensuring employability have been surfacing in the recent months. Also, recent data shows that only 37% of Indian students can access proper internet connections. The Blended mode would thus serve as an effective method to deny the majority of students their right to higher education, most of who belong to historically oppressed communities.
Pandemic-mediated higher education has blatantly exposed the apathy of the university administrations towards the students, teachers and karamcharis. Universities have overburdened students with numerous assignments, hectic class routines and online examinations, despite repeated appeals from students and teachers to reduce academic pressure. Teachers have found their human abilities being stretched to continue with online classes and evaluating answer scripts, in the time of a nationwide pandemic claiming thousands of lives daily. More than 35 teachers of Delhi University have passed away in the second wave of contagion. Karamcharis have been denied their salaries for months, forcing them to fend for themselves. The university system has showcased itself to be devoid of compassion, a virtue central to human freedom and development. It seems to expect human beings to behave like machines, stuck inside their homes and operate through mechanized platforms. Online education is a deeply non-humanist system, decentering the focus of education from students to mediated online platforms and Kafkaesque university administrations. Behind the ‘student-centric’ posturing of the Blended Mode lies a grotesque attempt to exclude students as the major stakeholders in the higher education system.
The Prime Minister has announced free vaccination to all citizens above the age of 18, after persistent efforts from student organizations like SFI and several state governments. It can only be hoped that all stakeholders of the higher education system are vaccinated at the earliest and physical classes can resume on campuses, to prevent further decay to the already-fractured edifice of higher education in India.
Ananyo Chakraborty is a second year student of History Honours at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.
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