Don’t make learning a test of worth

Why in the News

A student at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay has taken his life, and the circumstances of the death are under investigation. Accounts of what happened are sharply polarised, so establishing the immediate cause will not answer the larger questions the death raises. Over the last decade the IITs have recorded more than 170 deaths by suicide, a large number of them by students from Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities. A Supreme Court appointed task force on student suicides already has an interim report on the table. The contested point is whether such deaths are individual mental health events or the outcome of how these institutions treat the students they admit.

Why does admission not deliver equality on campus?

1. Society reproduced on campus: Prestigious institutions are not immune to the strains, power structures, hierarchies and discriminatory practices of society at large. Selectivity does not filter any of those out.
2. The pressure to excel becomes outsized: Students arrive from very different social backgrounds into a system where the pressure to excel acquires outsized importance. Admission does not by itself guarantee equality for a student from a marginalised community.
3. The additional burden: The burden is greater where a student must also negotiate subtle prejudice. A persistent sense of not quite belonging sits on top of the ordinary academic load.

What did the Supreme Court appointed task force find?

1. The panel and the report: A task force on student suicides appointed by the Supreme Court and chaired by a retired Supreme Court judge issued an interim report in June. Its findings are about the institutions rather than about the students.
2. Complaint mechanisms do not work: Students often see institutional complaint mechanisms as difficult to access, ineffective, or operating in tokenistic ways. A mechanism that goes unused produces no record of the problem it exists to capture.
3. Under reporting by the students most affected: For students from marginalised communities the fear of not being believed, or of retaliation, makes them hesitant to report discrimination at all. An absence of complaints is therefore not evidence that discrimination is absent.

Why is the mental health framing insufficient?

1. Counselling and wellness provision: More counsellors, helplines, wellness centres and greater awareness of distress are all necessary. None of them examines the conditions that produced the distress.
2. The institution’s absence from the account: Individualising suicidal tendencies as personal difficulty, or as a student’s failure to cope, removes the institution from the account. It is then never required to ask difficult questions of itself.

Why does faculty composition matter beyond representation?

1. The social mismatch: The panel described a social mismatch between the backgrounds of a large number of students and those of their teachers. Access to higher education has grown more diverse and faculty composition has not followed.
2. The measured gap: More than 65 per cent of faculty in IITs, National Institutes of Technology (NIT) and private institutions are from communities other than the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the Other Backward Classes (OBC).
3. Understanding from within: A more diverse faculty helps a campus understand social difference from within. Support then rests on institutional culture rather than on the good intentions of individual teachers.

What does making academic performance the measure of worth cost?

1. The promise of social mobility: In a country with a large aspirational class, the promise of social mobility is an important part of pursuing a degree. Education cannot be separated from career ambition.
2. The purpose of an institution of learning: At the heart of academic life sits the process of gaining knowledge rather than grades, degrees and the job market alone. The purpose of an institution is to intertwine the two.
3. The cost of an unrelenting measure: A student thinking constantly about grades, rankings, deadlines, evaluations and the consequences of falling behind has little room to follow an idea. The pleasure of learning is displaced by the accounting of it.
4. Artificial intelligence as a shortcut: The ease with which artificial intelligence (AI) becomes a shortcut to learning makes the question unavoidable. An institution has to state whether it rewards the acquisition of knowledge or the ability to produce the right answer under pressure.

What would an institution that examined itself have to change?

1. The question the system has not answered: Institutions have not examined whether all students have the same space to enjoy friendships, freedom and intellectual discovery. Those are part of what higher education promises and they are not evenly distributed.
2. The variable an institution actually controls: Elite institutions cannot insulate students from the vagaries of the economy. They can decide whether those uncertainties are amplified on campus, or whether education supplies the intellectual confidence to confront them.

Conclusion

The difficulty is not that the cause of each death is unknown. It is that both routes by which a student could raise a grievance, the complaint mechanism and the teacher, have been found wanting by an inquiry the institutions did not themselves commission. The unresolved question is whether an institution will accept an external finding against itself, since nothing in the present response obliges it to. The marker to watch is whether the task force’s final report attaches a named accountability route to the grievance mechanism, or repeats the recommendation to strengthen counselling.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2024, GS1, 15 marks] Despite comprehensive policies for equity and social justice, underprivileged sections are not yet getting the full benefits of affirmative action envisaged by the Constitution. Comment.”