Atanu Dey writes a perspective on the importance of education and its state in India: “Everything else, all institutions required for development — from markets to democratic goverment to legal systems to law enforcement — require an educated populace for their functioning. In the absense of widespread literacy, a nation has little hope of achieving anything at all. Education is not just an instrumental good (for achieving development) but it is also a final good, an end in itself for it allows humans to be more fully human…It is India’s misfortune that its leaders have neglected that fundamental truth. So we have the largest number of illiterate people of any nation in the world. Literacy, though distinct from education, is closely related to it. Without a literate citizenry, the so-called freedom of the press is an absurd notion. Without an educated population, our so-called democracy is a mockery of the ideal…I would like to present the bare outline of my argument about the Indian education system, why it is elitist, and what that implies for the development of the economy.”
As Atanu says often, before we start to do the right things, we have to stop doing thr wrong and stupid things. And in education, we seem to be doing many things wrong – still.
