What is a center of excellence? What makes an institution excellent? What does a good student in an exploitative system mean? Does it mean that he/she is radical and wishes to use the education to bring about positive change? Even if the wish is there, does this system allow the student to explore such a desire? The answer is obvious. Only as long as a student complies with the rules, written or implied, and plays along with all the inherent injustices of the system, will they be rewarded. Otherwise, they have to face the wrath of the ruling classes.
The fact that a student is not exactly in any particular class, or rather in the transitional phase before either making it to the capitalist or working class is what makes their case very important. They are young, enthusiastic and have loads of potential. Quite understandably, political parties of all colors try to take advantage of this face. From far left to the far right, young people have been and are still exploited through brainwashing.
But does it mean that politics itself is bad, as this Times of India article tries to establish? Or that educational institutes should be made “apolitical”? Hardly so. It is the faulty definition of politics that leads to such absurd and ridiculous claims. Politics is something that encompasses everything of our lives, from micro to macro, from big to small. When a student is exposed to the item songs of Hindi cinema, or that the boy of the family should do the earning while the women should do household chores, or that Pakistan is our enemy nation, or that it is “cool” to buy luxury goods and indulge consumerism, are these not part of “politics”? Of course they are.
It is the nature of whatever goes by the name of politics in the state of West Bengal and indeed perhaps the entire nation, that has contributed to the widespread hatred of politics itself. And yet the only answer to the politics of violence, the politics of muscle power and dada giri is another kind of politics – that of harmony and understanding, while having a no compromise attitude towards anything hostile to fundamental democratic rights.
This is particularly true in case of educational institutions in West Bengal. Since the new party Trinamool Congress has come to power, it has hardly shown any change to bring an end to the era of political intimidation that its predecessor, namely the Left Front, used as a tool to serve political ends. During the Left Front regime, union elections went unchallenged, as students feared going against the hooligans of SFI and the party they were affiliated to.
The same tactics, albeit more crudely, is being employed by the new rulers. The attacks on Presidency college and its famous Baker lab are not isolated – they form part of the terror that got a new lease of life after the public humiliation of senior members of the party in Delhi by CPM and SFI cadres.
So it would be a mistake to assume that the attack on Presidency and its lab had anything to do with it being a so called center of excellency. If anything, it had a lot to do with the fame of the college, which would have given the attackers their publicity. It was nothing but the supremacist, elitism of the author of this article that led her to give such differential privilege to Presidency for this incident. She indeed stresses that it is because the college is getting so much attention, that this has happened. Let us not forget that since the transition in power took place, the college has got unprecedented and arguably unwarranted attention, with goodies being showered on it, while the rest of the colleges have got peanuts.
For an education system to be truly one that harbors excellence, it should not be hierarchical and selective or prejudiced. It should try to bring out the best in everyone, and not find the best among everyone. The aggregate effect is only detrimental in the latter case, as such competition only makes things uneven and unfair and discourages rather than motivates most.
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