This lecture was delivered at the History for Peace regional conference on the 'Idea of Justice' in Noida on 13th and 14th of May 2024.

Sundar Sarukkai | Experience of Justice and Injustice

I work primarily in philosophy. Understanding concepts like justice is so fundamental to what philosophers do. After listening to a lot of the questions yesterday and what the other speakers said, I want to make a slight deviation and begin to think about justice by posing a series of questions to all of you, although the purpose is not to test you.

The first is a very simple question that we rarely ask: What does it actually mean to be educated? What is it that you are coming here for? And why are you sitting here in this classroom, in this school? What is the implication of saying that one has finished a degree—10th, 12th, engineering, or whatever.

In the most fundamental sense of the word, what does being ‘educated’ mean? And remember that every policy which affects you, every textbook that you read is based on what others think you should be reading. People have decided what you are going to read because they think that to read is to be educated. So we know what happens when you come to get educated, but what is it for you to be educated from your perspective?

Why are you all sitting here instead of playing? In some of the rural schools that I visit, sometimes we just sit outside—the students don't want to come and sit in a classroom. They say, ‘No, I don't want to sit with you in a classroom where you want to talk. We will go sit somewhere or we will go on a walk.’ The point is, school, for a lot of us, produced a sense of constraint because it was a space of discipline. It was something which held me back. And a lot of children, if given the freedom, may not sit in class. If you have the freedom now to not have to go sit in class, would you come to class? Or would you hang out with your friends? Go check your WhatsApp or other apps on your phones? Or play basketball or some other game?

All adults know that today it is difficult to say anything to growing children like you, right? You are all independent; you do what you like. But yet,  look at the power we have! How is it that the adults are able to, without threatening you, without doing anything to you, make all of you sit in a classroom from 9 a.m. to 3.30 p.m.? Isn't it remarkable? I think this is why parents like school––because they can send their children away for some time! What is it about school that makes this possible? In other words, I am asking you to think about your schooling itself––the idea of the school and what you are here for and what is it that allows you to enjoy this because there are times in school which must have been enjoyable for you. 

Education doesn’t stop with school. Why are you doing all these classes and continuing your studies? Is it because you learn something? And if you learn something, what is it that you are learning? You are going to get jobs which will allow you to buy things that you want to buy. Does this goal matter to the idea of education? Should it? I will keep these as the background questions and I am sure you will have very interesting answers to them. But I want to start with these questions first: Why do we have education at all as an idea? Why is it that societies privilege education to such an extent? Why do we think it is of great value to all of us?

You need a method to ask and answer questions. Here, I will introduce the idea of philosophy. I do not know if they teach philosophy in school. Not to add more subjects to your burden but philosophy is not merely another subject. It is a very basic form of thinking. Philosophy is about teaching. It arises from the role of a teacher. A philosopher is someone who teaches, whether in conversation or in dialogue with another person.

All our ideas of debate, thinking, and dialogue stem from this fundamental act of what we call philosophy. Education, therefore, is not new to societies. It has always been present. There has never been an individual who did not learn something from the community they grew up in. Even in the animal kingdom, no creature exists that does not learn from its family and the group to which it belongs. That is the essence of education.

Imagine a time, maybe 500 years ago. There would not have been schools like this. There would not have been schools where you could have people from very diverse backgrounds come into one classroom. The earliest models of schools were actually community-based, where people who belong together as a caste group or religious set would learn.

But we don’t learn only from schools. You sit in your house, you learn. In fact, as anthropologists would tell us, the most important meaning of the word ‘culture’, which you often use, is that which transmits learning. Today, we tend to think culture means transmission of rituals and food habits and so on but it is actually about transmission of learning.

Why come to school then? If you had stayed at home and got all the facilities—people who could teach you— you would have learnt many of these things. How long is it going to take for you to learn physics and maths? If your parents are as good teachers as your teachers here, you would learn.

So, teachers teach you something––that remains absolute. But what is it that allows this major shift in societies, where we transition from teaching within families or within communities, within particular caste groups, within particular religious groups, to teaching in a place where people of very diverse interests come together and sit in a class and learn together. Many policy makers who design policies for education, take for granted what they think you need. Can students really tell them, ‘No, that is not what we need. Why are you teaching me this?’.

Modern societies have always valued education and so they have introduced the idea of education as an essential part of ‘modern’ societies. Therefore, if you have community-based schools, which means religious-based schools or caste-based schools and so on, we tend to think that they are not the right schools for children to go to and that there should be different kinds of schooling systems. But is it something which the society wants or is it something the government wants? So, who has set up this education system that you have inherited? Who is really running your education system? Is it your school? Is it your principal? Is it your teachers? Not really.

The reason you are here and you study what you study is all dictated by some kind of a government entity. It is the government that dictates most of what happens in the field of education. There are government agencies which have decided what you should study, when you should study, what etc. The idea of education is not a vision of teachers, not a vision of a school but the vision of a government and it is a vision of a society. And for them, there is something of value to this. They want to make sure that children in a particular society grow up getting this kind of information and that they should get it from various other people. That is the fundamental idea.

But then why does a government and society want you to be educated? This is such an important question today in education. Most educational institutions have completely gone towards an education which can give you a particular job. Look at the advertisement for all the major institutions in our country. Everything— including institutes like IITs, which were about good engineering and science education, have become entry points for jobs. Every year, what do they advertise? What news reports are sent? They publish the placements offered and how much money their students would be making. This was something we never thought of 20 years back. Not that people who went to IITs didn't want jobs. They also wanted jobs and they wanted money but the idea of education was not sold based on what you would earn. I'll guarantee that when you are in the 12th standard and looking for colleges to join, you are going to be reading the same advertisements conveying college placements.

Today, one of the most important roles in every college and university system is providing placement opportunities and securing appreciable sums of money. So is education about that? There's nothing wrong with it but is that the primary goal? I'm not trying to tell you if it's good or bad. I just want you to reflect on it. And when you reflect upon this you will have an idea as to why you're doing this––why are you sacrificing your time and money sitting here and listening to all of this?

There is a very close correlation between education and money. Firstly, we need to spend money to get educated. If education needs money, whose money should I use? Who should be spending that money? Is it the government who should spend the money, or is it the individual students or their family who should spend the money?

All of this is related to the question of justice. I'm just setting the stage for you to see the entry of the character called justice. The first question about justice and education is this: If education needs money and is justified by the money one makes, what will people who don't have the money do?  Money in the context of education has to be understood more broadly. You need teachers, you need books, you need this kind of room and school. Who do you think should be paying for it? If you would say that, well, I want education, I should pay for it, then the first question which you should ask is this: if education is a value to the government and society, what will people who don't have the money do? Do those children not have a right to education? Is it that they can't participate in the kinds of systems that all of us have? Whichever way you look at it, denying them education just because they don’t have money does not seem fair.

This is the first entry of the word justice: Doesn't seem fair. Is it fair that millions of children in India cannot access the idea of education that all of us have just because they don't have money? Does it go against the spirit of education? That's why I'm coming back to the question: What should your idea of education be? Granted that education has a relation with money, I'm not saying all of us should be sitting on the ground and learning. The question is, who should be spending money? Is it the government who should be spending the money? Is it the society who should be spending the money so that everybody has an opportunity to go to a school? Can money alone differentiate children from one another? Can a society actually meaningfully differentiate rich children and poor children, and not give the poor access to things that you have including food and water? You are receiving education. But that education is not coming from you or from your parents or from the school. It is coming from a society and it's coming from a government. Therefore, the question of justice which emerges in this context is: Should education be available to all in the same manner?

There are various ways you can respond to it but in my workshops I often find  children’s responses far wiser than adults. And therefore, I am posing this question to you in order to see how you are going to think about it and learn from you because you are the ones who are at the receiving end of education.

Educationists and the government say that there is something called the aims of education, the goals of education. This is such an important idea which is at the heart of every educational policy that we follow. Unless you know what education is supposed to do, I cannot design what your classroom should be and what you should be studying. Let's say you are studying physics. You will study something called forces and maybe a little bit of mathematics, algebra, then trigonometry, then you will study Newton's laws, etc. Why that particular progression? Or why another particular progression in social science classes? It is because a committee has decided that there is an aim of education and they have a particular idea of the goal of education. I am going to leave you to think about these goals of education that influence your textbooks and your classroom learning.

What is the goal of you sitting in class and learning? You are increasing your cognitive skills. Cognitive skills are thinking skills. You are learning different things, you are learning mathematics, you are learning physics, social sciences, writing and language. So is the primary purpose of being in class to increase your cognitive skills or could it be something else along with that? Could it be being creative? Learning how to be creative in classrooms? You learn to be critical thinkers, you are able to analyse something, make an argument, understand something, right? Is there something more as an aim of education? Could it be that the reason governments and societies want education, want their children to be educated, is because there is, within education, the idea or the possibility that it can produce a harmonious society? Is it possible that the very idea of education is important for us because I learn to be with another person who is different from me when I sit with them in the classroom? Is it possible that our very idea of education is not really about how fast you can do math problems. It's good if you can do math problems very fast. But this cannot be the aim of getting educated. When the early educators set up schools it is because they wanted to provide skills that will help in producing far more meaningful ideas of harmonious living and ethical behaviour.

Some people today call this citizenship. They believe that the primary goal of education is to produce good citizens. But that's a deeper problem and is related to how the government thinks about who a citizen is. Think of a more basic requirement. Can the goal of education be to produce a spirit of fraternity? Fraternity is learning to be with another, to respect another person as a fellow being. It is a term which is very important to the founding father of our Constitution, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar. He referred to the idea of fraternity as maitri. Is the aim of education to teach you how to be in a fraternal relation, with your classmates for example?

Can you learn how to have a meaningful fraternal relation with others if you do not come to school? Many of you might know that there are experiments in education where people do homeschooling. In my workshops where we have had homeschoolers, I found that they are very good students because they learn a lot. Their parents put in a lot of time teaching them many things. They are probably reading much more than what you might normally read in your classroom. But, in my experience, one of the biggest problems––I am not generalizing all children who are homeschooled––is that these children have forgotten how to be with another person. In the workshops that I conduct, these children are very clever or intelligent. However when we are discussing something, they always jump up to talk, they always have so many ideas, they always want to answer questions. But there was a flaw in them. They did not recognise that they are co-learners, that they have to share the learning with others around them. To recognize that you have to let other people talk, to recognise that others may not have the answers that you have but you have to learn and listen to them, that is something which you learn only in school. It is very difficult to recognise this. For me, schooling was, in that sense, very difficult. To know that you will be sharing space with those who are not like you, with those whom you will not like, that's the lesson of schooling. And that's the lesson of a society. You will not get this lesson anywhere else. If you think society is going to be based on people like us, then it's a dream world that you live in. Society is not made up of people who are alike.

Society is made up of an extremely diverse group of people, especially in India, having hundreds of different differences between them––the way they dress, the way they eat, the way they think, what their belief systems are etc. And if you want to have a harmonious society—it begins in the classroom, where you learn to understand the principles of a harmonious society. The classroom is supposed to be a microcosm of the society. Unfortunately, our classrooms are not microcosms, because we are surrounded by people like us. But your classroom has both students you like and those who do not like. The capacity for you to learn is not merely a cognitive skill; you are not going to learn just because I give you a textbook and say, ‘Oh, learn how to be friendly with others through a textbook.’ There are no textbooks that are going to teach you how to put up with people who are suspicious of you, how to put up with people who disagree with your belief system. And yet, you have to inhabit that space. You have to be with them. You can’t walk out, you can’t throw them out. How do you learn this? You won't learn it in a family, because family comprises of people like yourself. It’s a small group of people who are close to you and even if you don't like them, you will stay there. Not liking family members is very different from not liking people you don't know. But society is like that.

Society is made up of strangers you don't know. And that learning is not going to occur, as I said, from any textbook of any particular kind. So, the reason that society, the reason why governments and societies invest in education––that's one of the most important investments any society and their government does––is because they want to produce a society which will be harmonious, where people can learn to live with each other. But that learning can only be possible in school. Then you will have to ask your school, you’ll have to ask your teachers, you’ll have to ask those who are building the school: What is it that the school does which enables this? Does our school system today still do that? For example: Examinations. What have we done with exams? Exams have pushed people to be very competitive and put individuals in opposition to each other.

There are some liberated schools with very different systems of operating where they believe that there should be no competition. On Sports’ Day, they don't have people who win. So you can't win! You’ll have a running race and no winners. You'll have a race where people will run from one point to the other but they will never declare a winner. And you know that playing is always very competitive, right? You might be a bit puzzled;  why are they all running if there is no winne?. There is no first prize, no second prize. But that's the point about their idea of education. Their idea of education is that education is a group activity. It's something which we do together. It’s not about one individual winning or being better than the other. And if you remove that, then you also move towards the idea that examination systems cannot be about competitiveness. It is about group learning, it’s about learning something together. All these are actually principles of justice.

When you use the word justice, it's a very broad term. All these elements we discussed when talking about education are actually fundamental principles of justice: Fairness, non-competitiveness, social living, harmonious and peaceful existence. These are also the goals of education. And if these are the goals of education, it makes sense why the government is very interested in doing this. Therefore, the question of who should provide education in a society is very clear. It is the public, it is the government whose primary duty is to provide education for us.

Today, there are a lot of schools which are private education institutions. You might think that these schools have nothing to do with the public but remember that every rule which binds your school comes from the government. It is not that you are completely outside the domain. However private your school is, they are not outside the domain of control of the government. If the CBSE board, for example, changes various kinds of rules and changes textbooks, your school will have to do it too. Think about the contents of what you are learning in class, think about the subjects you are studying and the content in your textbooks. What are those things helping you do? Are they helping you to reach this kind of harmonious existence with your friends or with the people in your classroom? Are they teaching you some basic questions of what is it to be a moral human being, other than the moral science class or moral studies class that you have? Do they do that? I am not saying they should. I just want you to think through that particular question.

There is a very paradoxical thing about a lot of education, which if you think sufficiently about it––and educationists have thought about it––is a difficult problem for us to solve. The genesis of this problem goes back many years ago. One of the agency regulating business in India had released a report which said that 80 or 90 percent of our graduates in engineering are not capable of working immediately after their degree. Which means they said the engineering degree is not training them to be absorbed into the workforce. Therefore, many companies in India would hire somebody with a B.E. or B.Tech and then retrain them. They would teach them what they need to be able to work. And this is very odd. You spend four years studying something, thinking you would get a job, you spend a lot of money, a lot of time and at the end of it you are told by the people who hire you, ‘No, you have not been trained enough, you have not learnt anything which is useful to us.’ Look at this paradox!

This must puzzle you a little bit. If I ask myself what I did in school, I remember I studied a lot. We had really wonderful teachers and wonderful textbooks. If I ask, what is it that people who have gone to schools remember of the knowledge that they learnt in school, then that paints a very different picture. For example, a friend of mine, who is now a mother and spends a lot of time with her kids, was telling me that she remembers that school was tough because she had to learn trigonometry, calculus, geometry etc. She said, ‘I spent a lot of time learning all that but after I was out of school, I have never once used it or thought about it.’ Which means you are spending 15 years of your life learning things of which a fraction, a very small fraction, is useful later. How much of the material you actually learn are you going to use in your future life? Does it mean you are not supposed to learn all this? I want you to think about what the purpose of learning is. Why are you learning this? For what? If you are not going to study science subjects further than school and you have already learnt calculus you are never going to use it when you study business studies, social sciences etc. Then you can ask the question: Why should I learn calculus? I am saying this particularly because one of my areas of interest in education is math education.

Math education is one of the most interesting things to understand about education. It is a highly valued privilege. It is pushed on children who don't like mathematics. A lot of children don't do well in math. They want to drop out of school because of this subject. Forget about those of you coming from schools like this. In rural schools, one of the biggest causes of dropping out of school is science and math education. The reason they don't go to school is because they don't understand what they are learning. Why is it that you are giving them all these difficult questions?

If they find these questions difficult, does it mean that our whole idea of education should have to change in a particular manner to accommodate them? If earlier we concurred that the idea of education is a value for a society which has to be inclusive and bring freedom to even the poor and produce a more harmonious society and more empathetic human beings, then the question is, what should education look like in order to accomplish this? And by asking that question, I am asking a fundamental question about justice, which I want you to think about––is the education system which we are all part of, is it a just system? Is it a fair system?

I want to give you some numbers, so you have a better idea of your own peers in this country. Thankfully, because of some push towards universal education, we have had a lot of children who are forced to go to school. So imagine you are living in a world with people of your age and you ask yourself how many of those children go to school.

In India today, the percentage of children who go to school between the first to the sixth standard i.e. the primary education sector, is close to 100% (theoretically but not always in real numbers). Almost all children are at least entering some kind of a school system and therefore, they have some degree of access to school. But when you come to the secondary education, like the ninth and the tenth standard, the percentage of children who attend school drops to about 75 per cent for boys and 73 per cent for girls. In other words, out of every 100 children like you who begin their schooling from the first to the sixth standard, some slowly start dropping out. By the time they are in the ninth and tenth standard it becomes three-fourth i.e. 25 per cent have dropped out. And then by the time you come to senior secondary education, which is the eleventh and the twelfth standards there is a huge drop. The percentage goes like this: 58 per cent boys and 49 per cent girls remain in school. This means 50 per cent of the students who started studying drop out by tenth standard.

So, in other words, all the aspirations which drive all of you to be in a school and learn every year to progress further cannot continue for hundreds of millions of children in India of your age beyond tenth standard, because they do not continue the school. And people are trying to understand why. One of the biggest reasons is lack of money, which is always a problem. It is a large percentage but it might not surprise you that this is because those who drop out, drop out because they become labourers i.e. they begin to work.

India has a dubious distinction of having one of the highest number of child labourers in every sector. You go anywhere in Delhi to get your tea and samosa, do you know who is producing that? In many cases, it is children who should be sitting in the classroom with you. If you now look at higher education post the twelfth standard the numbers drop further. The gross enrolment ratio drops to about 28 per cent, say between 25 to 30 percent in India. You know what it means? It means that for every 100 students of that age when they should be studying, only 25 to 30 percent get a chance to. This means 70 to 75 out of every 100 children are not able what we take for granted–– get a degree. By the end of the twelfth standard, we are already thinking of what to do, where to go, what to study but what of those 75 out of 100 students? Where are they? What are they doing? They become the labour which runs the society. They produce everything for you, they enable the society to run because they do jobs that we as educators do not do.

Is this just? How do you evaluate the notion whether this is fair or just? So, when I am asking you about justice, not just as something you would be able to write an answer or essay on but something that everyone experiences, where you yourselves are part of a system that deprives so many others of education, how do you feel? How do I then understand education so that it makes it more just? That is the larger question which I am pushing you to think about.

Justice is a concept and as I said, in philosophy or many of the social sciences, we analyse that concept and try to understand it deeply. It is a concept which is a special kind of concept, a moral concept. As human beings, we have different kinds of concepts, like numbers, an important concept we operate with. We have to teach you numbers and you can, once I teach them to you add them, multiply them, etc. But are numbers a moral concept? It does not seem so. There is nothing good or bad about numbers. A moral concept is one which you can use to say, ‘That is a wrong act. They should not have done that.’ If a teacher abuses a student or shouts at a student, some people might call it a wrong act because shouting at another may be seen as morally wrong. However, 2 plus 2 equals 4 does not appear to be morally right or wrong. 2 is not a moral concept unlike justice and terms that stand for it.

We learn moral concepts like we learn other kinds of concepts but these moral concepts are very special. The kind of learning that we need for them is very different from the kind of concepts we learn in science and mathematics. Moral concepts are about how you behave as an individual and how you behave with others as an individual. So, it has two dimensions. One, moral concepts have to do with the individual and also with our capacity to do social acts. This is where the fundamental question of moral concepts comes from.

Therefore, a moral concept arises from an experience of knowing how you think, how you act, how you treat others and how you behave with others. If you give this brief introduction to ‘ideas and concepts’ and if you ask the question, ‘What is education?’ then the first thing you can say is that education is fundamentally not a transaction. It is not an economic transaction. It is fundamental; it is built as a pillar of justice. Education is actually a moral idea. It arises as a moral idea for societies. The idea of education itself can only be built on some particular idea of justice. And that is why the question of justice becomes very important.

Education is not only an economic transaction. You could say, ‘Only rich people can buy cars and buy nice clothes. The poor cannot.’ What does it mean? Does it mean that we should give the money to them? What I want to point out here is that the kind of economic transaction in the above is different from education. Education is not an economic transaction. In other words, you cannot buy education. When you talk about education, you would always say you receive education. You will never buy education, you can receive it. You don't receive a car in the same sense.  Reception of education already suggests to you that there is something very different between an economic transaction of buying something and receiving something. The ideas of justice, which includes ideas of fairness, equality, your experience of justice and injustice, have a special meaning in the context of education and why you are getting educated.

The final question which I am sure some of you may have is that at the end of it all you might still say well, ‘Eventually I am the one who has to get educated. It is my skills which are tested in the exam. I am the one who has to go get a job. Isn't education about improving the individual, the capacity of the individual to work, or to earn money?’ Obviously all the efforts of your teachers, your parents and others are to improve your skills. That is not to be questioned at all. But I want to point out just this one aspect and leave you to think about these questions everytime you are in the classroom and in the school. But what is the resource to think about it?

This is what philosophy does––question what it is to be an individual. Are you very different from another person? Is there something special about me? Am I the one writing this exam? Am I the one who is very clever, who can see very well, who can do all these things well? It is always about I––the focus of a lot of our modern day understanding. Unfortunately, education today pushes you to promote this particular kind of an attitude. But the question which I want to leave with you, which a lot of social scientists think about and something very close to my own heart, is the recognition that much of what you say you are doing (I am doing) is actually produced by, and dependent on, others.

This goes back to a very important idea about education. Education is a debt, something which you owe others. I will tell you what I mean by that. Let's assume you are all very good writers. And when you write, you say, ‘Oh, I wrote this poem. It is wonderful!’ It is true––you wrote it and it is wonderful. But who gave you that language in which you wrote your poetry? Whose is the language which you used to write your poetry? Who produced it? The poem that you write which you feel justifiably proud about is also based on the contributions of millions of people who have produced the language and given it to you for free. Language is the first example of a social commodity which is given to you for free, which you can use in the way you want. The same applies to mathematics: Say you are very good at math, you solve all these problems and you know that you are indeed good at mathematics. But the whole point of the math that you are doing is that it has been produced by thousands of people over hundreds of years and given to you as a gift.

You can't even buy a samosa on the road without paying money for it. It is a transaction. Look at the kind of value in the name of education which you have received as a gift from millions of anonymous, unknown people. That's the crucial point about education. It's this anonymous, unknown social world which produces our skills. It is the labourer in your homes who do the cleaning and cooking, the drivers of buses and cars that bring you to school, the thousands of hard working people who run the city without you being aware of them - it is all this labour that makes your education possible. To recognise this and to acknowledge others’ contributions to your learning - that is part of the basic skills that you should get from becoming educated.

The GER, Gross Enrolment Ratio, of the US and now increasingly China along with most advanced western societies can range anywhere between 70 to 80 and sometimes more. This means many more students are going into the system and they study even after their twelfth standard. But you know, most of the societies have one particular problem––they don't have labour to run their basic day-to-day jobs. That's why immigration is such an important issue. You need people who are the poor, who will have to come to your country to do the work which you don't want to do. Forget about other countries, I have seen this in every city in South India. I come from Bangalore and it's comparatively more prosperous perhaps than some other cities in the north. What is the problem that we have today? There is no labour. There are no local people who will do the labour for housing. So, if you want domestic labour in Bangalore, they come from Tamil Nadu, or they come from North Karnataka where there's a lot of poverty. So, if all of you become engineers and doctors and all of us study all this higher order stuff, who's going to be making your samosa and chai? Who's going to be driving your buses and your autos? Societies are maintaining a balance and not allowing everybody to get educated because without labour you can't run the society of the elite but having education is still a very important factor. So, these are very deep contradictions. I'm just pointing out why society is struggling with this concept of education.

The questions I've posed to you are not easy. I'm sure your teachers and administrators and people who make policies in government also struggle with these kinds of questions. I was sharing these ideas with you as a way to think through the concept of justice and not just education but after the questions yesterday I thought, well, I should come back and talk about justice through the context of education. What is special to a moral concept like justice is the fact that moral concepts cannot be seen and cannot be evaluated from your perspective of it. So, when we talk about justice and say, ‘Oh, it's very unfair. I have not been treated fairly. It's been so unfair. I have felt it's so wrong. So, how can you expect me to be just to others?’, we are only evaluating our own perspective. The word justice is not about individuals. It's not about what is just to me or just to you. The word justice is a common term for the people, for a larger society.

Today, everybody, all our politicians in elections, are saying we have to save the spirit of the Constitution. The Constitution is readily available. If all of you have read the Constitution, you know it's a long, sometimes difficult, document to read. And therefore, we have the Preamble which captures the spirit of the Constitution. The Preamble is very important and it has the word justice. But how is justice mentioned in the Preamble of the Constitution? How can we understand it?

The word ‘justice’ in the Preamble does not refer to each of us as individuals. There was some discussion of reservations in Indian education yesterday. Some remark, ‘I have got so many marks but it is not fair that somebody who has scored less than me has got the seat.’ It's a justified comment from the individual’s perspective. But it's a wrong way of reading the word justice because the word ‘justice’ in the Constitution finds its place in a book of the people. It's not my use of the word justice. It's not justice for me or justice for you. It is justice for us.

If all of us in the room produce the word justice, what is its meaning? Imagine, if all of us say, ‘We, the people in this room, agree that we will adhere to principles of justice. It sounds very good and you can frame it and put it up. But look at the word ‘justice.’ The word ‘justice’ is common to all of us. The meaning of the word justice has to be produced as that meaning which is common to all of us. It's includes my sense of justice and your sense of justice.

So, in the Constitution, the word justice is in the Preamble. It makes sense because it is justice as viewed from the lens of those who are the worst of the worse-off people in the society, or people who just are worse off than you. When we look at the concept and the meaning of the word ‘justice’ in the Preamble, don't look at it as the raw meaning of the word justice but look at it from the concept of those who have been denied the basic justice that all of us have. It is only from that perspective, the perspective of empathy and fraternity i.e. maitri that we can look at the world through the eyes of people who are less fortunate than us. That is the only way in which we can recover the meaning of the word justice in the Constitution. And that is the only way we can even think of the idea of justice as a means to produce more harmony in society and provide equal upliftment and freedom for all, which fundamentally is the primary meaning of education.

Question and Answer Session

Audience Member 1: Sir, you mentioned that the primary goal of education is to build a harmonious society where there is a feeling of fraternity. But, sir, as you mentioned, it is the government or the state that dictates education and schooling. So in this process does the state become the end and the students, the mean?

Sundar Sarukkai: So how we can handle that situation? If it were only a state dictated process, then I think the goal of education may shift from building a harmonious society to something that will benefit only the nation as the primary goal. I agree with you and your question is very important. I'm just saying that when you look at the question of education historically it moves away from the elite or richer classes, or out of caste-bound institutions or community-based organizations towards more inclusive, universal environments. That is a pressure which comes in the form of newer modern nation states and even changing forms of society, right? That hope is there. That's also where the first idea of democratizing education comes from––you believe that everybody should get educated in principle.

Earlier the selective education of a few and the exclusion of others from education was challenged. This challenge meant that a larger authority had to intervene. This is the idea of the state––a broader, larger authority which makes education a larger concern. However, historically, the state also becomes very closely associated with commercial interests like trade, for example. So the economy begins to dictate a lot of state's actions and therefore, that influences the aim of education in the state. For example, for the last 20–30 years, there has been a constant push of education in a system such that one would immediately get jobs, establishing a direct correlation between getting a degree and earning a livelihood.

So that's why today there's a huge support from the state on skill building. So we recognize that the relationship in the state and the corporate sector also influences the way in which education is changing. But the problem with the larger corporate understanding of the world is also the fact that these social values like harmony, fraternity are not their fundamental principles. Their fundamental principle is profit. Therefore, the state in association with the corporate has also changed its particular value of understanding what education is all about.

There are politicians also involved. And ironically, you are asking a politician, who is running education as though it were a business, to also frame policies for egalitarian democratic education. That's not going to happen. In fact this business relies on the evasion of government schemes. The state has many things to keep in mind, including whether it wants harmony or not and that's a very, very big question. Among these things is also the larger question about its relationship with the finance sector and how that has also influenced the way in which we understand education today. This is a puzzle.

I think in India, the fact that we have such a low GER of 25–30 per cent is shocking. So many students are discontinuing their education and dropping out is not because they are not interested in it. People have asked the question before: Are these people dropping out because they are not interested in education or are finding it very difficult? No, the majority drop out because they choose to become domestic labourers simply because it yields more money. Huge amount of money.  That will obviously lead to disharmonious social existence. What this model has done is increased the disparity between the educated and the uneducated.

And that is a problem. That's all I am saying.

Audience Member 2: Good morning, sir. I am Shivani. You mentioned that studying in the classroom teaches us to respect diverse perspectives. I firmly agree with you. However, being in the classroom, students also learn things like stereotyping or marginalization. What is your take on this?

SS: One of the most difficult questions in education is how to form a classroom. You know, I think, for me, the people who have the most important jobs in society are the teachers. I don't think anybody does the kind of work, or manages the difficulty of work the teachers have to deal with. Compared to any job profile in the society, teachers are not only imparting education, giving something, much more than what you expect of simply text to do but also producing future citizens. They are actually making a microcosm of society replicate in the classroom. They are trying to show you what it is to live in a society. It is very difficult to produce such a classroom and consequently, such a society. And I think if somebody succeeds, it's a very remarkable success. There are very few who can really succeed in an ideal manner.

We do learn stereotyping and marginalization. I shouldn't be saying it in a school but I will say it: You know, children are not necessarily nice. Children can be quite difficult. They can be quite nasty to each other. There is no innate sense of harmony. Children won’t simply say, ‘Oh, wonderful, wonderful, I understand all this stuff.’ You have to cultivate it. You have to cultivate a sense of learning even when there is stereotyping.  How do I understand somebody with whom I'm totally disagreeing, someone who is so different from me due to gender, caste, religion, etc.? That is what I think a classroom has to be. And just the emphasis on particular kinds of cognitive skills or text cannot do that. So how will it happen in a class? I'm sure something like this happens in your classrooms––a classroom in which there is open debate, open questioning, open discussion of particular positions. A classroom where students learn to try and convince the other of one’s own points of view, learn to recognize that there are some moral boundaries one will not cross like abuse or making fun of people. It’s a simple thing and much of this is taught because children are hurtful to each other without realizing it, they do it unintentionally. This is why a teacher’s job is so difficult.

In Karnataka schools many of the teachers are trained in gender studies. So, they have understanding of how to introduce it in the classroom. In a study, you know what they discovered? Gender bias in the classroom. Some of the girls in the class were saying that when they raise their hands, they are never called upon to answer. It is always the boys. The teachers didn't even recognize they were doing that. These are subtle ways that impact girls.

I think a teacher is one who is constantly learning to recognize that when she enters the classroom, she does so with her bias and prejudices but is also willing to learn and change them. And that's the nature of this whole idea of teaching and education. That's why I want to just re-emphasize this point. Learning is not about so-called notions of intelligence and cognitive skills but it is a fundamentally moral process of producing the kind of individuals that we are.

Audience Member 3: Hi, my name is Kritika and I'm from Prakriti School. You mentioned that for education to be fair and just, instead of an individual paying for their own schooling, the government should pay and provide for the individual. So for the government to provide everyone with schooling, what actions do you think the public should take to provide the government with the resources for the payment of everyone's schooling?

SS: Okay, wonderful. I think you met Professor Nivedita Menon yesterday. She spoke about public schooling in Scandinavian countries like Sweden, Norway and so on, where the school system is funded from taxation. And there's always been this question––From where should one raise funds for schools? If you just want a room, you need to buy it. You want chairs, you have to buy them, right? You have to pay the teachers too. Who is going to account for these costs? This has been a very genuine problem.

In fact, there's a very interesting debate with Gandhi, which might interest you, when they were talking about how to get money for education. There was a proposal that they would tax alcohol because people drink a lot of alcohol, presumably and if you tax it, you earn a lot of money. In fact, today, many state budgets depend on alcohol consumption. Karnataka is a very classic example. Two days back, in one of the newspapers I read that one of the highest sources of revenue for the Karnataka government comes from alcohol sales. But the question posed to Gandhi was this: Could we use the money from alcohol sales to run schools? Gandhi, being the austere man he was, he said, ‘No, you cannot use it.’ This is because he was against alcohol consumption at the social level and said, ‘Money produced in that manner cannot be used to run the schools.’ So, this has always been a very important question.

What I'm trying to say is that, if you decentralize schools, you open up many different models of schooling which people have tried to implement, where you run schools in many different ways, you bring community support of different forms etc. Why should every child in India, study the same textbooks that all of you are studying? Why should they all study Newton's law of gravitation, calculus, civics, or Russian history? We need to understand the reason for this and the question at the heart of  it is: What is the idea of education?

Let me share something. Two days back there was a meeting with the Karnataka government for reformulating the education policy and in this meeting, there were two or three people who were Dalit activists. One of them said, ‘95 per cent of your book is totally irrelevant to us. There is not a single page where our lives, our language, our experiences or our children are discussed. Our children are reading it; they are reading some foreign textbook. Why should we make all these children read that?’

So, if you think of education, it should not be centralized but grow such that there is no singular CBSE sitting in Delhi dictating terms to such an extent across the country. But then you also do not want to let the state completely out of it because you do not trust individuals and communities. I do not want there to be caste-based schooling. Similarly, you cannot have completely religion-based schooling in the sense that it again excludes the other. You want the inclusiveness, you want the democratic part, right? And yet, it has to be sensitive to local situations. That is why the question of education is always a challenge in a place like India with different languages, different dialects, different experiences.

Audience Member 4: Good morning, sir. I am Radhika. My question is about the deletion of some chapters in history, especially from medieval era. According to you, is it an educational agenda or a political conspiracy?

SS: All textbooks are political. There is no textbook which is not politically constructed including, your maths and science books. There is nothing which has been decided outside politics. We can interpret politics in different ways. Sometimes it is a devious agenda to do something, right? Sometimes it is also an ideological agenda. It is also some belief that children can only learn so much. Or they should be taught only one particular thing.

All education works from a principle of adult and child––the adult gives and the child receives. Therefore, children are now seen as more passive and what should be taught is decided by the adults. If you look at the colonial histories where Europeans were writing about Asians, it always followed the model of adult and child. The Europeans came as the adults to educate the child. Therefore, they would tell us what books are important for us to read. They would decide. I am sure you all know about this discussion.

In this case, it is a very explicit agenda. I think what they have done with Indian history is terrible. I mean, they cannot erase this kind of thing. If I walk in Delhi, I can experience the presence of Aurangzeb, or the Mughals on the streets. Just because you remove it, it does not disappear.

I wanted to add a quick point. All these people are still caught in an idea of education of 30 years old where the text was the holy book. You know, as a teacher, let me share an example from thirty years ago. Say I was teaching about a philosopher, I am the only one who had access to that book. The book was very expensive, so the students could do not buy it. So, I was the one who had everything. I was coming to the class as an authority. Today, when I go to my class, my students have downloaded that book and 100 other books which I have not sent. Today, our information is not coming from the school books at all. Your school books actually touch upon a surface level. You are getting much more information about history, Aurangzeb etc. from WhatsApp University and other places. Our education system has to take that account. I am not too bothered about it at one level but it is still a very, very important problem.

Audience Member 5: I want to know if there is a connection between education and emotion. Do you think receiving too much education makes me more emotional or less so? I would like you to ponder about this. The second thing I would like you to address as you were yourself mentioning, is the social media exposure students of today have. Just because they are exposed to more social media, does that mean they are getting more education out of it?.

SS: Without generalizing, to answer your first question on the correlation between education and emotion, we know that emotional intelligence i.e. a kind of learning has a very deep affective element, which is both in terms of learning as well as in terms of the impact on students. We also know that one of the greatest impediments to effective learning is this lack of understanding of the emotional content of learning.

For example, I still think that one of the most important elements of teaching for me is really the content; it is about confidence. This is particularly in the context of gender and in the context of rural students. It's not about whether can solve this problem or not but a kind of emotional understanding towards each other. What I mean by emotional understanding here is larger ideas or notions of confidence, dignity and respect. Those kind of larger affective worlds are extremely important in the learning process. It changes the way we learn. But I don’t think more education implies one is more emotional.

I don't use social media, so I don't know much about it but I learn from others. When I look at the kind of posting done by ‘people who have degrees but who are uneducated’, all I can say is, getting a degree has nothing to do with the qualification of education. People who are in the IT sector for example, or in other areas, who obviously have advanced degrees, write such hateful stuff on social media. I what their idea of education is? And that's why we go back to asking this question and I think it's important for children to keep asking themselves that.

What is this thing which I'm learning from? What is it that you mean when you say ‘I have got an education’? Is it a degree or is it something else? To me that something else is the large notion of harmonious empathy and learning to struggle. It's not easy putting up with someone we don't agree with, don't like, who is different from us. But if we have not learned to do it, we are not educated. So I think that's the view which I hold.

A lot of information on social media is not the same as education. To me, education is to give the capacity to students to do something and I see this work for my PhD students. When I teach them a book, I don't teach them the text at all. I want to teach them how to read rather than simply read that book. That book is quite secondary.

The idea of learning to think through and understand the basics of thinking, reading and writing are far more important elements of learning as compared to just information. So in this social media world, it is true that you have so much information but it is only enough as a language. We are reading so many things but if one is not able to synthesize it, not able to analyse it, is it really an education or are we just reading texts as words? But this is going to be contentious because today, a lot of ideas in education shifting away from textual reading into visual literacy and to smaller forms of social media learning. I think all of us teachers have to come together along with our students to tell us what is it we need to do. We have to produce a discourse amongst ourselves.