“What
did your daughters study in senior school?”
“He he,
hmm..humanities’!”
“Oh..I
see..well…”
“Actually
they both scored above 90% in their Xth but chose to study History and
Psychology.”
“But of
course. Why not? Humanities have their place.”
“They
did Economics with Maths as well!”
This would
be my standard exchange while the girls were in senior school, the last sentence
being my trump card! I felt I had to explain that they were not sitting in the
Humanities department because they didn’t have the requisites for admission to
a Science or a Commerce group. It had to be made clear that they were there by
choice and not by coercion.
The “Humaniacs”, as they are known in school, get a raw
deal in our country. The epithets they earn are rich in meaning and character,
ranging from “lallu” to “passovers” to “timepass”. It is quite done in senior
schools for the staff to motivate the laggards with threats of moving them to
the “F” section, the presumably less challenging and laid back, humanities division.
Regrettably unaware of what a disservice they are doing to the cause of knowledge
by running down an entire field of study, the harm done is compounded when
heads of academic institutions also join this uninformed disparagement. I
understand this bias coming from parents and the lay public but educationists?
Surely something is sorely amiss here.
One of the consequences the girls and I talked about during
the process of filing their stream preference after the Xth was that they would
have to be prepared for these derogations. I told them not to be surprised at
being passed over for the odd school appointment as well. The latter did not
happen but being Indian students with good scores, they felt duty bound ever
since to explain the “obvious waste of two good brains”.
They faced obstacles in the form of a generic, cavalier attitude to their choice of subjects. I do believe their environment made
them feel a bit less so for having opted to study anything other than
engineering and medicine or accounts. So omnipresent is this IIT lens of ours
that we disregard the subjects that give a context and meaning to life completely.
It is dangerous for an India on the rise to continue to
reinforce this debilitating dichotomy. If we are to be believed, technology is
important, values need not be studied. The truth of the sciences is superior;
the art of thinking does not deserve our best brains. Given our diversity and pace of economic
progress, we risk making self-destructive choices if we continue to debunk and
devalue the humanities in favour of pure sciences. It is the former that make
and assess that which defines us as humans: meaning!
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