In his hard-hitting book Disciplined Minds, Jeff Schmidt questions our education system which seems to be single mindedly focusing on providing a docile, disciplined workforce to the corporates, without worrying about their goals or ethics.
India is seeing unprecedented growth in the ranks of salaried professionals, and formal education is playing a larger role in Indian society than ever before. And increasingly, job requirements demand that employees be mindful of powerful interests. Competition for professional jobs has intensified, and the opportunities for employment, doing mental rather than manual labor, has made education a high-stakes game in India as people seek the credentials that corporate employers demand. Education is playing a bigger role than ever in assigning people to their positions in hierarchical society, and the all-consuming quest for credentials threatens to twist the identity of anyone who enters it, profoundly changing who that person is. Thus, it is no surprise to hear complaints in India about professionals who give unquestioning service to the powerful corporations that employ them, and show little concern about anyone else. As we will see, these “knowledge workers” are selected precisely for their willingness and ability to serve their bosses’ political interests.
Social reproduction is easy for the very rich and the very poor, but grueling for families – in -between. The rich simply give their children enormous wealth, such as corporate ownership. This ensures that the classes below them, ranging from manual laborers to high-salaried professionals, will end up working for the children of the rich, in positions within their corporate profit machine. Similarly, people heading for manual labor don’t have to worry about things like college admissions and graduate degrees, because they will not need educational credentials. However, those who aspire to professional positions must struggle through much schooling and scrutiny.
The number of professional positions is limited, and so there is intense competition for admission to the elite universities from which multinational corporations and top Indian companies prefer to recruit. Aspiring students from all backgrounds are anxious, because no one is guaranteed victory. However, the competition for elite credentials is rigged in favor of students from families with the most resources and cultural capital, and so the winners and losers are largely known in advance. Why, then, put people through the stress and anxiety of the competition, which ranges from college-entrance “examination hell” to the abusive intellectual boot camp known as graduate or professional school?
The answer is that the competition itself serves powerful interests, and would do so even if it were made fair by eliminating the advantages conferred by family background. Participants compete to conform to standards set by others, and in the process ready themselves to become ideal corporate servants – employees who relentlessly pursue assigned goals without questioning them. So the selection system’s most fundamental rigging is in favor of employers who want obedient, politically subordinate employees, not independent thinkers.
Employers do want critical thinkers, and so it is important to distinguish between playpen critical thinking and independent thinking as to which is the “real critical thinking”. All professional work involves critical thinking, because professionals are assigned to handle new matters and exercise judgment. But such critical thinking is little more than the ability to say, “Hey, the boss isn’t going to like this.” You don’t need to have your own ideology to say that. You just need to understand the boss’s ideology and use it to guide your judgment. That is what I call ideological discipline.
Employers, then, want critical thinkers who are not independent thinkers. They want people who stand for nothing of their own, but stand expertly for the priorities of others, and the education system works to produce such people for them. So the political passiveness of India’s most highly educated employees is not an accident. The politically subordinate status of intellectual workers is, in fact, a world-wide phenomenon arising wherever hierarchical organizations employ people. However, as activist Indian students and workers frequently show, school administrators and corporate employers don’t always get what they want. By working with others, and by understanding how schooling and work are inherently political activities, you can have the fun of surviving education and employment with your values intact, and shaping the world according to your own vision. Many readers of this book have written to me about how it helped them make sense of their experiences in school and at work, giving them the confidence to think independently. (Some of their letters are posted at http://disciplinedminds.com.)
You make a difference in the world only when you do something that would otherwise not be done. That means working on self-assigned projects, not just on things that you have been hired to do.
This article has been adapted from the Indian / Hindi edition of Disciplined Minds brought out by Banyan Tree, Indore.
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