First Published on Youth Ki Awaaz on November 16, 2011
The raging discontent across the globe and why it is the most exciting
time to be a University student.
The past few days have heralded the ushering in of a new wave of
discontent and anger among the people across the globe that has been
unprecedented in recent history. Massive protests and demonstrations are taking
place in various countries throughout the world which have been triggered by
the disillusionment with economic policies, cuts in social benefits, increase
in taxes or (as here in our own country) massive and large scale pervasiveness
of corruption and
graft or due to some reason or the other. People are up in arms against what
they perceive to be a dysfunctional political and administrative system and the
failure of the ruling class to deliver. However, the focus of discussion in
this article is not the various issues – whether political, social or economic
– which are being raised by the protesters, but it is the identical
geographical center of these eruptions: the universities across the globe.
The Angry young men and women across the Universities of the globe are
waking up to the political and systemic paralysis that has gripped their
respective states amongst the harshness of the global economic downturn. The
logic of the ruling elite, which seems to be non-existent, anyway, works in a
curious fashion. Faced with harsh realities of economic and monetary doom, the
ruling class has moved swiftly to cut the subsidies, scholarships or fee
concessions and to try and shift the burden of payment onto the students. This
is indeed laughable in an era where most scholars are crying their throats out
and are pleading with the political class to realize the demographic realities
of their respective states and to invest more and more in areas like education
and healthcare. However, if one would map the behavioral trends of the ruling
establishment at the times of crises in any part of the globe, one would realize
that it has always been chequered by a one-step-forward-two-step-backwards
approach or, at best, has been afflicted with administrative and procedural
paralysis. The tendency to think in a reverse direction has repeated itself
again now, when the world is seeing a large-scale turmoil in every domain of
its jurisdiction.
It is in such rudderless and frustrating environment that the youthful
populace of various countries have become disillusioned by the very system that
has been governing them. They have realized that unless or until an enormous
pressure is built up from the bottom, the upper class (which, by the way,
remains oblivious to the happenings at the grassroots), is not going to act.
Before proceeding further, there is a need to dissect the phenomenon of
such protests threadbare and identify where its roots actually lie.
Education
Reality in Chile
In May this year, thousands of high school and university students began
to ‘occupy’ public schools as a form of protest in Santiago, situated in the
heart of Chile. The protesters were massive in number (ranging between a
hundred thousand and two hundred thousand) and could not be rubbished as a gang
of goons who had laid siege to public institutions for fun. The protesters
occupied around 80 schools and literally dead locked the state of affairs in
these institutions for several days. The protests spread rapidly across the
country and received widespread support. These protesters were mainly demanding
increased state support for public universities, more equitable admissions
process to prestigious universities, free public education, use of student bus
pass throughout the year etc. among a host of other perfectly legitimate
demands. These protests which kept on for around 4 months, culminated in a
meeting of around a million protesters on August 21, during the “family
protest in the park”. As a result of these widespread and popular protests,
the country also observed a national strike on August 24 and August 25.
What compelled these students to march on the streets and holler around
demanding radical reforms in the country’s education system? While addressing
the million protesters who gathered before the national strikes of August 24
and 25, Camilla Vallejo, a graduate student of geography, the president of
Student Federation of the University of Chile (FECH) and the leader of the
ongoing protests claimed:
“This neo-liberal model is not working for us. Its ultimate purpose is
the profit and business of a few. We believe it’s necessary to advance toward a
system more egalitarian and inclusive. We want a free country, a just country,
more democratic, more egalitarian. And for that we need a quality education for
all.” (1)
Education in Chile has been in a shabby condition for long. The country
has very few state funded colleges that are not properly maintained and do not
cater to the needs of the job market thus leaving those few, who graduate out
of it every year, unemployed and frustrated. The colleges that do cater to the
needs of students and the job market as well lie in private hands and charge
steep fees that is out of the reach of a common Chilean. Thus the state and the
private players of the country, both conspired to keep the ordinary Chilean
uneducated, or at best, unfit for the job market due to the lack of skills.
This has been a toxic symptom plaguing most of the education systems
across the globe. The picture is especially bleak in India itself. With the
moving in of Private players into the education sector, quality has been
accorded a backseat and profit has become the main motive. The state, instead
of regulating private players and advancing policies that ensure that quality
is given top priority, have instead become a party to the loot by deliberately
letting the public funded educational institutions to languish behind due to
apathy and neglect. The ultimate outcome of such a vicious nexus has been that
quality now comes with a price tag – those who can afford it, get the best
education. Those who cannot suffer in the poorly maintained publicly funded
educational institutions and are ultimately left behind by those belonging to
prestigious private institutions.
In Chile, even this does not seem to be the case. School students have
been forced to join poor private institutions as the state was not able to
provide adequate number of schools due to the increase in the number of school
going children (according to the authorities) or due to the reason that they
did not want to change the state of affairs at all because the authorities were
the ones who ultimately benefited if children went to private institutions
through their ‘cuts’ (according to the protesters), depending upon whom you
believe. So the choice here was not between the publicly funded, poorly
maintained but cheaper educational institutes, but between high fees demanding
private institutions whose quality varied according to the amount you were able
to shell out of your pocket.
In the end, there developed a situation where the taxpayer, through
his/her taxes, was financing the living standards and educational quality of
the rich, while at the same time, it wasn’t the state, but the private
institutions and individuals which were bathing with all the currency.
When the government runs on a wheelchair – The British experience
On December 10, 2010, Jody McIntyre arrived at the Parliament Square in
London in his wheelchair (he suffered from cerebral palsy) along with his
younger brother. They were there on what they called ‘Day X’ or
the ‘Day when Parliament would vote on Tuition Fees’. As the
crowd swelled and the protest started gathering steam, the policemen stationed
at the Parliament Square began attacking the crowd with batons in order to
disperse them. Suddenly, Jody was pulled out of his wheelchair and dragged
across the ground by four policemen, who grabbed his shoulder and carried him
away.(2) A video of the same incident was posted on Youtube, for which the
Metropolitan Police attracted severe criticism from various sections of the
society.
Last month in November, thousands of protesters had smashed their way
into the head quarters of the Conservative Party in central London. Some days
later, the protesters managed to attack a car carrying Prince of Wales and his
wife. A window was smashed and paint bombs were thrown at the car. That same
day, a peaceful march attended by thousand of students turned violent as the
students proceeded to the Parliament Square where they lit fires and threw
stones and snooker balls at the police.
Jody and his friends were part of that student group which was
protesting against the steep increase in the cap of the tuition fee enacted by
the Conservative led Liberal Democrat government which came to power after
promising to vote against any proposed increase in tuition fee if elected to
power. The government also announced huge cuts in the spending on education
which further drew flak from the student community. The argument advanced here
was due to the steep increase in the tuition fee and the cuts in the spending
on education, quality education for the lower sections of the British society
would become costlier as a result of which many may not be in a position to
afford it. This could lead to the division of students based on who could
afford quality education and who could not. Such a division, it was argued,
flew in the face of the role accorded to the government: that of providing
affordable and quality education to all the sections of the society
irrespective of their social status.
The movement went ballistic for the rest of the month, wherein a large
number of students also resorted to violence and vandalism which, although
widely condemned, was popularly seen as the anger of the student community
spilling out onto the streets. As a result of such widespread protests, the
Welsh assembly announced that it would not be going forward with any additional
increase in the tuition fee of welsh students thus placing the mandarins of the
government sitting in the House of Commons in a tight spot.
The focal point of the eruption of the protests was the University of
Oxford, where, on October 28, the students protested against the visit of
Business secretary Vince Cable and eventually forced him to cancel his visit.
The Bill in the Parliament eventually went through, but the protestors
succeeded spectacularly in putting their point across. The reason for the
protests by these students was strikingly familiar to the reasons which sparked
the Chilean student community to protest – only that the British tried to
pre-empt any move by their government to advance divisions within the student
community on the basis of who could afford quality education. Their logic was
simple: it is the states’ responsibility to provide cheap and affordable
education to all its citizens and that double standards in quality based on
monetary evaluations are not at all acceptable.
Hey Ram! The
case of missing Ramayana essay from Delhi University syllabus.
Late last month, the Delhi University administration scrapped an essay
titled “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three thoughts on
translation” by noted scholar A K Ramanujan from its History Syllabus.
The move came after some students belonging to the student wing of a
politically influential Hindu fundamentalist party entered the University’s
department of History and bashed the head of department in 2008, raising
objection over the contents of the essay and claiming that it hurt the
sentiments of the Hindu community. The administration was thus seen as bending
to the protests by these tactics of arm twisting by a particular communal group.
Immediately there were widespread protests both by the student as well
as the teacher community. While the Delhi University Teachers Association said
that it would oppose the removal of the essay when the matter came up for
discussion in the Academic Council, the students on the other hand decried the
attempts by particular sections of the political community to give the syllabus
a ‘communal hue’.
Leading political Commentator Swapan Dasgupta, while commenting on the
controvery, wrote:
“A Delhi University history graduate who won a scholarship to Oxford
recently recounted the absurdities of the process. The medieval history
readings, he told me, were replete with denunciations of the so-called
‘revivalist’ historians of an earlier era. What struck him as surprising was
that none of these apparently flawed histories featured in the prescribed
reading lists—not Sir Jadunath Sarkar, not R.C. Majumdar, and not A.L.
Shrivastava. In other words, rather than encouraging students to savour
divergent ways of looking at the past, history became a set of acceptable
truths and unacceptable untruths—hardly an approach befitting an open and
argumentative society.” (3)
The problem here was not that of the state sponsoring education of the
economically weaker sections of the society or advancing the interests of the
rich, but the matter at hand questioned the whole process through which the
University decided what was fit and what was not to be taught in its colleges
and thus determined the quality of the course. It also raised concerns over
divergent views being increasingly suppressed and dissent increasingly
discouraged within the walls of the University. Clearly, as shown by this
particular example, the contents of the course and thus the overall shade of
the education being accorded by the University was open to interference and
political arm twisting by influential sections of the society.
Conclusion
What the incidents of Santiago, London and Delhi in effect show is that
the sphere of education in the 21st century is increasingly turning into a
politically volatile one. For it is through the kind of knowledge and education
imparted to the generation of young men and women that will determine the
future course of the country. It also shows, in effect, that the students across
the globe are breaking the stereotype accorded to them, as being insensitive to
the happenings of their country at large.
What has contributed to the annihilation of this stereotype? Firstly,
the means of communication and mass mobilization have become amazingly fast
which allow the word to be spread in almost no time. Social Media as a means of
communication has emerged as the new tool which the student political activists
use ruthlessly and with impunity to criticize, recommend or condemn the
government. Social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter are being used
as an alternative source of media where the word is quick and the response,
even fast. Guy Atchison and Aaron Peters in the book “Fightback: a
Reader on the Winter of Protest” (which was brought out by the
students who participated in the London protests), note that:
“In the new ‘crowdsourced’ model, the distinction between producers and
consumers of dissent is dissolved – there is no hierarchy or membership
structure in place, instead all individuals are potential participants
within a movement. It is within this context that anyone can contribute, hence
we have the rise of networked activists, with such individuals simultaneously
performing the old roles of both producers and consumers of dissent – indeed
they are much like those who participate in citizen journalism or use content
on Flickr, what Alvin Toffler called ‘Prosumers’ – at once producing dissent,
mobilising and facilitating it, while also participating in actions facilitated
by others.” (4)
Secondly, with education becoming a focus of most of the administrations
around the world, more and more youth are getting educated. Although a billion
people around the world still remain illiterate, general literacy rates around
the world have soared 5. With the ability to read, write and have access to
different mediums of information, the awareness levels have greatly increased
and have automatically pushed up reaction levels. This, coupled with the fact
that inequality levels across the globe have shot up amazingly has added to the
dismay of the general milieu whose tolerance level was already bursting at its
seams.(5) As noted earlier, the political leadership of the world has
fabulously failed in delivering the promises on the basis of which they were
voted to power and this has hugely disappointed the masses, pushing them on the
streets.
While the exodus of students spilled out on the streets due to the
specific changes that took place under the realm of Education and directly
affected them; the subsequent protests also raised issues of national
importance and garnered support from the public at large.
However, all has not been rosy for this youthful and fuming generation
as they have been increasingly ridiculed for being ideologically bankrupt,
logically challenged and indulging in ‘Facebook Activism of the like button’.
This prompted an emotionally charged response from Jillian Steinhauer, who,
writing in the Guernica Magazine, commented:
“For years, my generation—Generation Y, the Millennial Generation—has
been charged with detachment. Because of us, adult writers coined the term
“Facebook activism, ” and they lectured us that clicking “Like” buttons and
signing electronic petitions could never effect real change. Now some of my
cohort has leapt from the virtual to the real world: they’ve taken to the
streets, their numbers are swelling, and they refuse to leave. They deserve a
little more faith.” (6)
Many critics have also tried to lambast the ‘hippie culture’ that is
being demonstrated in these movements. The youngsters, obviously, have used
improvised and new methods of protest such as kiss-ins, embrace chains etc. to
highlight their cause. Providing a response to these pundits was Danny
Goldberg, the author of How the Left Lost its Teen Spirit and Bumping into
Geniuses, who, in article in Dissent Magazine, countered:
“The hippie idea, as used here, does not refer to colloquialisms like
“far out” or products sold by dope dealers. At their core, the counterculture
types who briefly called themselves hippies were a spiritual movement. In part
they offered an alternative to organized religions that too often seemed
preoccupied with rules and conformity, especially on sexual matters. (One
reason Eastern religious traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism resonated
with hippies was because they carried no American or family baggage.) But most
powerfully, the hippie idea was an uprising against the secular religion of
America in the 1950s, morbid “Mad Men” materialism, and Ayn Rand’s social Darwinism.”
(7)
One would then conclude that it is really an exciting time to be a
college student. Especially if you belong to the economically weaker section of
the society, as the people at large are becoming increasingly frustrated with
the promises which their leaders failed to deliver and the dysfunctional
bureaucracy which instead of serving them, serves the interests of the
political class. The next time you feel agitated or frustrated with the state
of affairs, design a placard and gather your friends. March out onto the
streets. Holler around and protest. You don’t know whether many would be
nursing the same grouse. You never know when your cause can turn into a
national cause.
References:
- Storify: Catching Up with Chile’s Student
Protests, October 2011 (http://storify.com/gure/chile-student-protests)
- For Jody’s own account of the incident, read:
Life on Wheels: Week 76 – Student Protests, Part Three, December 10, 2010
(http://jodymcintyre.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/week-76-student-protests-part-three/)
- Usual Suspects: Much ado about Three Hundred
Ramayanas, October 23, 2011
(http://www.swapan55.com/2011/10/much-ado-about-three-hundred-ramayanas.html)
- Guy Atchison and Aaron Peters: “The
Open-Sourcing of Political Activism: How the internet and networks help
build resistance” In Fight Back! A Reader on the winter of Protest Edited
by Dan Hancox, pp.49 (http://felixcohen.co.uk/fightback.pdf)
- Anup Shah: Poverty around the world, Global
Issues, January 02, 2011 (http://www.globalissues.org/article/4/poverty-around-the-world#TheWealthyandthePoor)
- P.A.P Blog/ Human Rights etc: Statistics on
literacy, August 26, 2008
(http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/stats-on-human-rights/statistics-on-education/statistics-on-literacy/)
- Jillian Steinhauer: In Defense of Youth
Activism and the “Like” Button, Guernica, October 23, 2011
(http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/3196/jillian_steinhauer_in_defense/)
- Danny Goldberg: In Defense of Hippies,
Dissent, October 23, 2011 (http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=552)
