“I do not like this life, so I did this.
No one should cry for my death.
I do not like this school, my marks are very low”.

This was the note left by Ramu Abhinav, a 10th standard student in Chennai. He was found hanging in his home on June 12, 2003. The bruises on his face were the reflection of the pressures from his mathematics teacher who wanted him to score better. This is not an isolated case of destruction due to senseless pressures from the system; one that was meant to give enlightenment and livelihood but blunts minds to servitude and snuffs away life at least figuratively, if not literally.

Despite several committees that have suggested a total revamp of the syllabus and curriculum, the cramming game continues to expand the business of more studies, more coaching, more acquisition of marks, more acquisition of diplomas and certificates, whether they mean anything or not. Does this schooling system make any sense at all? Does it develop the skills, knowledge, and competence of the children or is it an intelligently contrived regimen that makes good business for others, bureaucratizes the institution and makes the unknowing public and the employing organisations hapless victims?

The question is not new and was powerfully debated by Ivan Illich in the early 70s. He was a fascinating personality who, inter alia, looked at the faults and counter productivity of mindless institutionalization. His examination of professions, medicine and schools raised a debate of their potential for harming and manipulating. He argued for the creation of convivial than manipulative institutions that support individuals and their interaction with the environment. He argued for creation of learning webs as new formal educational institutions.

He had particularly emphasized the difference between learning and education and implied that learning takes place at home, offices, kitchen, and wherever action knowledge is being deployed to solve problems and add value to people’s life. In fact, he was amongst the earliest to have recognized the relationship between human beings, their environment and the ability of the institutions to become learning. In this sense, the work carried on by Peter Senge on learning organizations was mooted earlier by Ivan Illich, though he did not explore it in much depth.

Ivan Illich was a fascinating personality who was born in Latin America, mastered several languages and went on to work as a priest in Washington. Because of his strong views on the negative features of institutions, including the missionaries, he was discountenanced by the Vatican and had to leave his priesthood in 1969. His writings on Tools for Conviviality (1975); Energy and Equity (1974); The De-schooling Society (1973); Medical Nemesis (1976) amongst many others, had influenced and impacted a generation of students in the 70`s, including me.

In the De-schooling Society, Ivan Illich argued that many students know that the schools confuse process and substance. “Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value.”

A historical analysis by reformers and thinkers record the fact that mass school is a recent phenomenon that has arisen along with the modern industrial bureaucratic States. It is recognized as a Prussian invention that has been copied in England and later by the entire world. Mass schooling taught virtues of obedience, silence, punctuality and acquiescence, which are the same in the hierarchical organization such as the army, civil service, and the factory. A.S. Neill argued that the major aim of the system of mass schooling was factory product and that what was regarded as a good teacher was, in fact, an efficient producer of wage slaves.

The salient features of this system were: age specific groups moving as a age cohort through the institutions; graded and sequential curriculum; classroom supervision by teachers who were a mixture of non-commissioned officers (as Bismarck called them), factory foremen, and a physical training instructor. “The school took the rituals of the factory with the pupils as the ultimate products – graded, labeled, and exported”.

The system creates an “intellectually steroid and esthetically barren environment” and a whole lot of rituals, which support the livelihood of the teachers, the administrators, institutions offering extra courses etc. In fact, some have believed that the entire process of education is getting illegitimately prolonged over the years just to keep many people out of the labour market, as it is getting over-crowded. These children go through every pain of learning ancient history, mugging up formulae and doing experiments on frogs, pigeons, earth worms, cramming dates and names of people, events and species – all of which have no potential for either true learning or value. Looking back, we hardly remember or have much value arising from these activities. And those who don’t cram well enough and question the utility are an embarrassment to the system and have to live with this shame forever.

In actual life, people do not move in age cohorts. They meet a variety of people, confront problems for which the skills acquired in schools have little meaning. The bureaucratized institutions, in some ways, can virtually take away critical period of ones life away to favour the lords of rituals, who have to live on them.

Though controversial, some have held “childhood as a modern phenomenon and (that) the society over a period of time governed the dominant attitudes of adults towards children”. In the 19th century, childhood was treated as a disease by the bourgeoisie who sent their sons to remote public schools to be cured of their childhood through hard experiences that gave them practical experience and knowledge. Perhaps, even the “gurukul” that were dominant in our society till just a few decades back, were meant to be different from the modern system that appears to teach but actually cramp heads with mindless cacophony.

Several attempts at reforms have been effectively aborted as they threatened the entrenched interests. These interests have particularly reinforced the make- believe world that one has to acquire grades, diplomas, degrees, and more. The acquisition is akin to acquiring material and wealth without meaning. Thus, “knowledge becomes a possession to be exploited rather than an aspect of being in the world”. In the end, “learning” became a commodity. As Ivan Illich put “the schooling – the production of knowledge, the marketing of knowledge, which is what the school amounts to, draws society into the trap of thinking that knowledge is hygienic, pure, respectable, deodorized, produced by human heads and amassed in stock………. by making school compulsory, people are schooled to believe that the self-taught individual is to be discriminated against; that learning and growth of cognitive capacity, require a process of consumption of services presented in an industrial, a planned, a professional form”.

The result of decades of self-captivating conditioning is that every one must go through the mill and do the best one can in the rat race to be able to be acceptable fodder for wage slavery, in dream companies and cadres. Unfortunately, the logic does not hold good for many when the job market is depressed. The irony is that the smaller the job market, the higher or longer will be the treatment of acquiring more degrees and aiming for even better institutions that actually fail them in their aspirations. But the show must go on and hence top schools will have to state and advertise mind-boggling ranks and numbers for their “products”. Knowing fully well that eventually most of the students cannot even find placements anywhere. The media has to lap this up, rate, rank and rave about the small trinkets that actually create more market for the unsuspecting and ill informed mass of youth.

The HR profession contributes to this specter by stereotyped manning specifications and recruitment policy that relies on the brand than by its own abilities to determine the real competencies required and measuring them innovatively, from unusual target groups. It needs exercise of a scientific mind and deeper commitment to the profession to be able to do the unusual.

Several in the West have started believing in home education (along with plenty of play and social activity and exposure) than consigning the children to the stereotyped system along with the potential risks of bad habits and poor value systems. These home-taught- club-playing students carry out their education through correspondence and private study till they take up a profession/ vocation that might be personally satisfying and socially meaningful. An Indian American, Sean Rao, 14, won the third prize this year, in the prestigious National Geographic Bee, (NG Bee) a grueling competition in which five million students participated. The interesting point is about the winner in the finals. James Williams, 14, from Vancouver, Washington came first ironically by answering a final question on India. James Williams is home schooled.

However, the size of such courageous parents and children is very small. The formal education system has indeed failed every one apart from contributing to the fiscal strain of failing economies that cannot conjure up a more rational system. Yet there are very few alternatives. If the traditional, self-serving, bureaucratized school system is bad and there is logic for de-schooling, one has to find an alternative model which indeed overcomes the ills of the system and yet promises not to become a neo-bureaucracy. But the danger is of the alternative falling prey to being another “system”.

When I described the de-schooling logic, an entrepreneurial educationist eagerly asked me for an alternative solution, as it will be a good business model!