You live and learn

With the cut-off marks for admissions rising, it is hard to know what genuine consolation to give to thousands of disappointed students.

With the cut-off marks for admissions rising, it is hard to know what genuine consolation to give to thousands of disappointed students. We can say to them: don8217;t interpret your inability to get into a college of your choice as your personal failure. It is our collective failure. Obdurate politicians, control-freak bureaucracies, insecure academics, ideas of social justice conceived in bad faith, the poverty of our imaginations, and our preference for control over freedom, levelling over distinction, have all conspired to ensure that you get very few choices. Consequently, that half an extra mark seems life-defining. Even good results are interpreted as failures. What should be a time for great exuberance, begins on a note that somewhere life8217;s prospects have already been compromised. We can say to them: there is a paradox even at the heart of the good institutions. The students are exceptional, the faculty relatively poor. If students come out well, it is, few exceptions apart, because they are self-taught. There are some exceptional teachers but, for the most part, even our premier institutions do not have the faculty their students deserve. This is not much of a consolation, but at least it gives you a second chance. You will have to arrange for your own learning in the truest sense of the term anyway, with the help of your peers; institutions will define you less than you think. At least an expanding economy will give you a range of opportunities previous generations never had.

Our metrics of talent and merit at this stage of admissions are perhaps too constricted. It might be liberating not to be trapped by them entirely. One should not minimise the disappointment of not getting into one8217;s top-choice institution; brand names do matter. On the other hand, the course of life and the structure of opportunities will be a lot more variegated than you think at this moment. It is heretical to say this, but there is often a sense in which students at the very top are not necessarily more interesting than the second or third lot. They might have the safety of the brand name behind them, an assurance that doors will open for them more easily, but as Montesquieu famously said, security often breeds timidity as well. Will they have the capacity for risk and invention that you have? They may scamper along a well-laid road, but you might do something more precious: make a road simply by walking on your path.

Or we could simply point them to one of the most poignant speeches in recent times: J.K. Rowling8217;s commencement address at Harvard this year. It deals with a number of themes our young students are grappling with: the balance between their own interests and the expectations placed upon them. It deals with the idea of opting for a vocation, not because of the external comforts it might give, but simply because you enjoy it. Our culture has things backwards: we push for something relevant or paying, without giving students the slightest space to discover what they enjoy. In her case, an education in classics or indulging an overactive imagination was hardly thought to be conducive to anything but poverty. She does not romanticise poverty or failure; she experienced both. Her sense of the deprivations these impose is particularly acute. But she does stress two things. The first is the astonishing opportunities that adversity can produce. As she puts it in two astonishing sentences 8220;Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I built my life.8221; Or more generally, the liberating power of adversity, 8220;The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.8221;

Her second theme is imagination, the ability to think of people, thoughts and worlds other than your own. In one immediate sense it can open up the ability to empathise with others. It is the precondition to creating a minimal civic consciousness. But in an existential sense, imagination can stretch the horizons of possibility, for persons and for societies. The biggest risks in life are what you risk by expanding your imagination, by exposing yourselves to the unfamiliar. Economic security is important for all kinds of reasons. But it would be a shame if our imaginations shrank under the pressure of so many forces that conspire to restrict it: the crass instrumentalism by which we now measure success, the restricted opportunities in education, the false comforts of living out our home truths.

It would be unfair to reinterpret Rowling8217;s words. But her subtext is this. Despite poverty, a well-run and accessible university system gave her an opportunity, to above all study classics. A classics education becomes the conduit for expanding the mind, but also for cultivating a moral sensibility. She uses Seneca and Plutarch to understand our own predicament better. As societies grow complex, as the burden of greater choice is imposed upon us, we will need more self-knowledge, and more social self-knowledge, not less. From which sources will this self-knowledge draw? It is hard to imagine that happening without a proper liberal arts education. And it is hard to imagine a proper education of that sort without some deep connection to a classical tradition that can cultivate a moral and aesthetic sensibility beyond the purely functional. Our unconscionable failure as educators has been to provide these spaces for students.

Rowling quotes Plutarch, 8220;What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.8221; This is an unfashionable trope: the way you shape yourself will shape reality, not the other way round. This also has a corollary. You may not be able to control the external environment to the degree you want, but you can transform your own selves. But for Rowling, imagination is not a flight from reality; it is a way of extending reality and changing it. Perhaps this generation will one day diagnose more imaginatively the ills of Higher Education and construct a different politics. That won8217;t be easy. As Max Weber, another person who knew something about the inner conflict of a student8217;s life said, 8220;Politics is the slow boring of hard boards.8221;

There is always something fake about consoling someone in the face of disappointment; but if students8217; temporary disappointment is converted into a challenge, something will have been achieved.

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The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi pratapbmehtagmail.com