The Irony of the Grand

Elite educational centres are more prone to foolish ideas than commoners in their own living environments, as imperial and colonial regimes designed educational institutions from the outset to be alienated from common life. Their models are invariably based on walled campuses, grand architecture housing students and staff, and a sense of superiority among those entitled to live there. Consequently, they lose their cognitive anchorage in common life.

The feeling of being special and superior cuts them off from their own people, making them see themselves as emancipating angels rather than as one among those who are actually their kith, kin and compatriots. They thus often genuinely believe in grand ideas of the kind that Karl Popper analysed in The Open Society and Its Enemies.

Exceptions are too numerous for this proposition to be universally, or even widely, valid. Nonetheless, ideologies, theologies, and ethnic identities, refined and augmented within campuses, often override composite and organic life, and this has been a major problem. The reality is that commoners face life in its raw form and cannot afford not to know what is safe and what is perilous. Those who think that they can guide common folks to rise above their supposedly foolish ways are often fools themselves.

The tragedy is that grandiosed, fortified, and moatified idiocy often beats real wisdom in guiding human affairs, as it is psychologically overwhelming and has the backing of the collective and the centralised against the localised. A true educator would enable pupils and people at large to distinguish between the two.

Niraj Kumar Jha