By Saumya Liyanage –

Prof. Saumya Liyanage

Dear academics and students of the Agricultural Sciences, University of Sabaragamuwa, thank you for inviting me to deliver this speech on this very special occasion of your educational journey.

Thank you, the Dean and the academic staff of the faculty of Agricultural Sciences, and also Maweesha, who has been enthusiastically communicating with me to bring me here until today. The high competencies in communication skills, attitudes, mindset, and socio-emotional skills she demonstrated during our conversations surely demonstrate the quality of your undergraduate products and the essence of your graduate profile. I would like to thank the academics who have designed the curriculum and other skill development programmes to produce such valuable citizens. On this special occasion, I am thinking of sharing some thoughts about a current crisis that we all face and struggle with. It’s about our education—education in the primary, secondary, and higher education sectors. But the problem that we all face in education is also related to the democracy that we have all maintained and nurtured as citizens of this country for decades. We have not thought that there is an intrinsic connection between the democracy that we sustain in this country and the nature of our education. But when democracy is in question in the contemporary political arena, our education system will also be questioned or vice versa. In recent years, our higher education system has been reinterpreted to produce profit-oriented degree programmes. A new term came into play in our higher education jargon. ‘Entrepreneurial graduate’ was such jargon which promoted job-oriented graduate. Accordingly, our degree programmes were restructured, and new degree programmes were introduced to produce profit-oriented employers. Of course, our curricula should be revised and updated with new tendencies and turns in the higher education sector to fulfil the new requirements of the new world order. But have we thought about what we have done so far? Have we thought about what kind of graduates we produce from our degree programmes? It’s time for us to think about our higher education and the democracy that we continue to sustain in this country. In this important book, Martha C. Nussbaum has clearly shown us the danger that we are heading towards. She exclaims:

Radical changes are occurring in what democratic societies teach the young, and these changes have not been well thought through. Thirsty for national profit, nations and their systems of education are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive. If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticise tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements (Nussbaum 2010, p. 2).

What does she say? As clearly stated in this passage, she is warning us about what is happening in our education, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, and says how we are removing liberal arts education from our education system. Not only that, she further warns us that by doing this, we put our democracy in danger. But at the same time, she shows us what liberal arts education can do: criticising tradition’ and the value of ‘understanding other people’s sufferings and achievements.’ One may wonder, why is it important to criticise tradition? Of course, we should teach our younger generation to question the traditions that we have sustained through the practices of religions, politics, the sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, and so on. Only in this way can we achieve the progress of society by eradicating prejudices and embracing new traditions and norms. As I see it, our democracy is at stake and is already collapsing. So does the higher education. Over the last few years, we have faced numerous issues pertaining to global pandemics and economic crises, both at the global level and within the country. People started demonstrating on the streets, gathering at Galle Face Green to show their disagreements with the regime. However, after one year of aragalaya by the people of the country, our democracy is again weeping and beginning to collapse amidst all the tax cuts and the unbearable living costs. So, how do we survive as universities when the country and the key pillars of democracy are shaking and beginning to lose their credibility? How do we develop competent citizens if democracy is at stake? How do we cultivate graduates when all the value systems in the country are collapsing? At this moment, I would like to ask a serious question. Is there a connection between democracy and education? Is there a connection between democracy and democratic citizenship? Over the past few decades, we have encouraged the circulation of educational mythologies in our higher education system, which has provided us with new hopes for change. For decades in our secondary education, arts disciplines were marginalised and rejected. As a result of this, even some prominent schools in the cities do not offer arts subjects. When the options are limited and narrowed, then the parents are compelled to select what the school offers. The result would be a disaster in a few decades’ time. Most of the private schools and international schools have only science, math, and commerce disciplines. No options for those who are willing to do performing arts, language, history or philosophy. Our world has been enriched and developed through a vast array of disciplines, from human sciences to history, geography, language studies, social sciences, performing arts, agricultural sciences, and so on. We enjoy this life today because of such scholarship, which has given us a fruitful life. Darvin travelled many years around the world to understand human evolution, collecting specimens from various continents. Stephen Hawkin dedicated his life to understand time, black holes, and the universe. Shakespeare wrote plays extensively to explore the human agonies and atrocities. He explored how power works in society at large and how it is infiltrated into the self and transform our subjectivities at the smallest level. Sigmund Freud dedicated his whole life to understanding the inner world of human beings—our dreams, desires, and drives. Mandela fought against apartheid and spent half of his life-giving new meaning to politics, human rights, and equal opportunity. Yual Noah Harrari, the world-famous historian, extensively writes on the future of the human race. In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, he argues:

Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires, and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? We are more powerful than ever before, but we have very little idea what to do with all that power. Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?’ (Harari 2015, pp. 465–466).

With the new world order and the mythologies circulating in our pedagogy, we have begun to eradicate humanities and social sciences, arts, and performing arts studies from our curriculum. We encourage our children to study science and commerce, assuming that this may be the next era of global education. We assume that we need to develop graduates for the global market where they can showcase their English language competency and IT skills to serve the global liberal economies. We think that the next generation is the iGeneration, so we should revise our curriculum to fit our undergraduates into the global iGeneration. Hence, economic prosperity and the accumulation of wealth are the daily mantras of our politicians and policymakers. These hegemonic narratives have surely infiltrated our education system and are being infiltrated into our nervous system as well. Now these teachings are becoming our daily mantras of education, where we try to produce people for the market. As Noam Chomsky argues, this is indoctrination—indoctrination of higher education. My question is: what kind of world do we want our children to live in in the future? Don’t we need to produce Darwins who will understand the evolution of the human race and how humans are changing their metabolism according to the changes taking place in the environment in the next few centuries? Don’t we need more Jane Goodalls who will take care of our closest primates and protect their rights to live as co-sharers of this planet with human beings? Don’t we need more Mandelas who will fight against all the discriminations against humanity and liberate people from being marginalised and tortured because of their race and religion? Don’t we need Shakespeares who will write about human lives in the next millennia and teach us how they would struggle with power and politics with cyborgs? We need humanities and social sciences, arts and performance for all these things. It is not all about profit and economic prosperity. Therefore, the connection between education and democracy is visible and proven. What we try to do in our higher education is cater for the rapid demand for labour, which serves to sustain the liberal economic models in developed nations. There, we do not see Sigmund Freud, Nelson Mandela, Jane Goodall, Yuval Noah Harari, Shakespeare, or Einstein. We need people who can run the businesses for great nations. We produce people who cannot put ‘other people’s shoes on their feet’. In other words, we do not bother to produce students who can see the world through other people’s eyes. In this moment, once again, I remember what Prof. Martha C. Nussbaum argues:

Education for economic growth needs basic skills in literacy and numeracy. It also needs some people to have more advanced skills in computer science and technology. Equal access, however, is not terribly important; a nation can grow very nicely while the rural poor remain illiterate and without basic resources, as recent events in many Indian states show [….] The results of this growth have not trickled down to improve the health and well-being of the rural poor, and there is no reason to think that economic growth requires educating them adequately (Nussbaum 2010, pp. 19–20).

We vaguely assume that when the country is developing with economic prosperity, our education and life will be enriched accordingly. There is no such intrinsic connection between this so-called economic growth and human development. ‘Achievements in health and education, for example, are very poorly correlated with economic growth’(Ibid). Do you think that our policymakers and leaders do follow this line of economic growth? Do you think that for the last few decades, our regimes have taken decisions to develop our country in this direction? Have we achieved such economic growth that it is equivalent to all the people living in this country? I don’t think so. We have chosen to select government universities not because this is the best option we have but, as common people in this country, both students and academics have chosen our government universities because we have no other options. Our parents are not financially stable enough to send us overseas or to a private university. So again, how do we think about connecting our education to the democracy we experience? The economists and political leaders who are commissioned to develop countries through economic prosperity and surplus value tend to reject and remove the arts and humanities from our curriculum. Arts and humanities help people understand history, humankind, cultures, the environment, demography, and so on. The arts reveal human suffering, the courses of suffering, and injustices in society. The most important and unique factor of arts education is that it teaches us to think from another person’s point of view. If I say this in a simple manner, as an actor, this is what I do on stage and on screen. I try to live another person’s life through impersonation. Therefore, the arts and humanities encourage us to cultivate empathy and humanness. So, this so-called economic agenda does not need such people who would think from other people’s perspectives and empathise with others. What they need is to achieve targets and accumulate wealth. So, what we teach today and what democracy needs are two different things. American Philosopher John Dewey, in his ground-breaking book Democracy and Education, argues:

To say that education is a social function, securing direction and development in the immature through their participation in the life of the group to which they belong, is to say in effect that education will vary with the quality of life that prevails in a group (John Dewey 2001, p. 85).

Again, I request you to think about what is happening around you. What is happening with our education? Our responsibilities as academics, parents of this country, and creators of the democracy we experience today are to take responsibility for the next generation and tailor them to face the challenges of the new world in the future. If we sustain this democracy in such a way that economic prosperity becomes the norm of our educational philosophy, then these graduates will not be able to see the world through other people’s eyes. They won’t see the value of other species who share this world with us. They won’t see the value of our existence in this world. They won’t see the value of our environment, which has sustained our lives throughout the history of mankind. They won’t hear the sound of a crying child, the painful cry of a creature caught in a trap, or the chirping of a bird on a tree. They won’t hear the dripping of water in the rain. They won’t hear the inhalation and exhalation of the person sitting next to you.

References 

Dewey J. (2001). Democracy and Education. Pennsylvania State University. 

Harari, Y. N. (2018). Sapiens: a brief history of humankind. New York: Harper Perennial.

Nussbaum, M. C. (2010). Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

*Saumya Liyanage is Professor in Drama and Theatre and is currently working at the Dept. of Theatre, Ballet, and Modern Dance, Faculty of Dance and Drama, University of the Visual and Performing Arts, Colombo, Sri Lanka. saumya.l@vpa.ac.lk