Sanjay Srivastava writes: Byju’s fall and the failure of fast-food education

There is a sad seriousness to the novel’s comedy that is a commentary on the futile attempts at social mobility that — rather than providing an avenue for it — bind many to the sterile hopes of rote learning. What Kashinath Singh means to point to is that in milieus of desperation, imagined techniques of salvation only condemn supplicants to never-ending cycles of hopelessness. The younger brother comprehends the pointlessness of the exercise the befuddled elder one carries out with mechanistic reverence. An uneven and poorly designed education system, he realises, cannot simply be overcome by occultic conversations with a tree, notwithstanding its sacred status.

This pithy episode from Kashi Ka Assi could serve as a cautionary tale regarding the ongoing controversy over the edtech firm, Byju’s. The company, as we know, has gone from being (as one media report put it) “India’s hottest tech startup” to its most troubled. Over the past six to eight months, it has been raided by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) over suspicions of foreign exchange violations; accused of financial mismanagement; faced attempts by major investors to oust its founder and allegations of breaching corporate ethics; and had its market worth slashed to a fraction of its earlier value. The Byju’s case is, however, mainly discussed as an instance of poor corporate strategy rather than — as Kashinath Singh’s warning-offered-as-bemusement might suggest — an instance where education has been converted to a five-minute noodle dish. In this process, education — that process of making us genuinely human — has been converted to a machine for profit-making without much proof that it produces any public good.

The pervasiveness of rote learning as an educational strategy is, not, of course, new and has a relatively long and, by now, well-established modern history. It is serviced by urban dystopias — consisting of coaching institutes, accommodation and allied industries — that have taken deep root. Here, failure and success are measured primarily through success in examinations that privilege rote learning. These are, as might be expected, also landscapes of bereavement. The calculus of success and failure pioneered by this system produces grim statistics of youth suicides at its epicentre. Through narrowing the capacity for human thought as well as the possibility of adjusting to changes in economy and society — when, for example, the nature of jobs changes because of dramatic technological interventions — this model severely handicaps those who have been entangled in its net.

And yet, public commentary on the Byju’s phenomenon continues to be in the languages of good and bad corporate management, imagining education as a packet of chips that has proved unpopular because the promoters forgot to add the right kind of masala mix. The salve for anxieties regarding uncertain futures cannot, however, be found in decrepit, quick-fix and technocratic attitudes towards education.

First, there is a vast arena of livelihood choices that can also produce happiness, which has not only been marginalised by the fast-food model of education but also effectively stigmatised. This means that young people with an interest in, say, urban design, filmmaking or journalism, face familial and social pressure to pursue careers for which they might not be suited. Failures at examinations that require capacity for rote learning are, subsequently, experienced as failing one’s family as well as marks of personal inadequacy. Second, there is a difference between acquiring a technical qualification and being subject to a technocratic one. An engineer with broad learning not only builds good bridges but is also equipped with skills of switching tracks should bridge-building go out of fashion. Technocratic education, with its incredibly narrow methods and processes, leads to an incapacity for thinking on one’s feet.

Finally, the capacity for thinking broadly derives from learning to engage with human complexity. One of the hallmarks of fast-food education is the withdrawal of students from normal schooling — an indispensable period of learning the skills of social interaction — and their insertion into the abnormal milieu of the coaching institute. This produces both under-socialised young people and dysfunctional adults.

And, yet, we hear almost nothing about what the “edtech” model means for human capacities and creativity. We hear little about the fact of the great human wastage that multiple years of perspiration and formulaic learning lead to for so many of its hapless subjects.

The writer is British Academy Global Professor, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS University of London