Education

While this blog primarily aims to counter hegemonistic capitalist ideologies in the economic arena (a mouthful), it also has non-economic interests. Which is actually the way it should be. We are humans after all, romantic creatures; not machines ruthlessly forced to maximize our economic capital (as the hegemonists would like us to believe).

Anyway, I was looking at this headline and I could barely contain my anger at the brutality of the ostensibly meritocratic culture these capitalists were creating. A brutally competitive culture in which children are being forced to study hard; brainwashed into improving their cognitive capabilities; hegemonistically cornered into being intelligent informed citizens when they grow up.
Is this what our nation has come to?

After getting sufficiently riled up on the headline, I went on to read the article, which turned out to be less about hegemonistic homework loads and more about some educational summit, which was a bit disappointing. But my keen eye spotted another phrase which set my blood boiling again. IITs and IIMs. These elite institutions which in the name of meritocracy fostered an inhumanly inegalitarian ethos; refusing to admit more than a few thousand of the many lakhs every year who wished to partake of the quality higher education that they have paid for with their taxes and that they have a right to.
But alas, they can’t. The only way we can check this imperialism is to prevent the government from building more of such higher-education institutions; and to divert government money from existing ones.
But the capitalists are trying to work their way around this; by wanting to build private higher education institutions. The audacity of their hegemonistic enterprise boggles the mind. Luckily our comrades in the CPI and the Congress have put in place such stifling restrictions and regulations on higher education that, for now, we need not worry about the imperialists exposing more people to their inegalitarian “higher” education. But we need to be alert.
We need to make sure we have a non-competitive dumbed-down primary school system and a non-existent higher education system if we are to combat the capitalist meritocratic hegemony. That we have succeeded till now does not mean we should let our guards down.