“Cholera became an obsession for him. He did not know much more about it than he had learned in a routine manner in some marginal course, when he had found it difficult to believe that only thirty years before, it had been responsible for more than one hundred forty thousand deaths in France, including Paris. But after the death of his father he learned all there was to know about the different forms of cholera, almost as a penance to appease his memory, and he studied with the most outstanding epidemiologist of his time and the creator of the cordons sanitaires, Professor Adrian Proust, father of the great novelist. So that when he returned to his country and smelled the stench of the market while he was still out at sea and saw the rats in the sewers and the children rolling naked in the puddles on the street, he not only understood how the tragedy had occurred but was certain that it would be repeated at any moment.”
Reading the above lines from Marquez’s “Love in The Time of Cholera”, it might feel like déjà vu. Like the character in the celebrated novel of the Nobel Laureate, creator of the magic of the sadness and funniness of humanity, for all of us going through the present trying times of COVID-19, the pandemic has now become an obsession.
The myriads of bits and bytes of information through various modes of communication have made us believe that we know much of what needs to be known about the pandemic. The news of a friend or a relative falling prey to this menace doubles our effort to know more and more. However, when we see the norms of social distancing getting flouted or when basic health and hygiene fundamentals are ignored, we are also certain about how the virus must have managed to manifest itself as a pandemic, much like the lamentation of the character, Dr. Urbino.
True to a pandemic, no human endeavour has remained untouched by the ravages of this deadly disease. Fear and anxiety is looming large in many industrial sectors. The uncertainty of the future is forcing people to scale down their needs, get back to basics of human existence, cut back on any sort of extravagance that they had got used to.
Modern consumerism had multiplied the production capacity on one hand and had also catapulted the demand for more and more goods and services, which were seen as indicators of the progress and development of the society. Pet salons and parlours for nail art were gradually becoming ubiquitous even in small towns in a pre-COVID era – a bygone era. Yes, that’s how it appears now, given the desolate streets and the shuttered down markets and malls all around us.
However, in spite of the gloom hung all over, we need to be prepared for a new world emerging sooner than later. Pundits are cautioning us that the world that would emerge from the ruins of this deadly disease will be a completely different world, quite unlike the world we were used to. Our personal, professional, and social lives will go through a metamorphosis, and perhaps a new set of personal, professional or social norms will soon be in place to guide us, to help us find the new normal, as some thinkers would like to call the emerging paradigm.
One aspect of human endeavour which is perhaps going to change significantly is education. Since education is such a basic factor for human civilization, the changes in education will surely have far flung influences in almost all walks of life – be it our jobs and careers, our social interactions and discourses, our political and philosophical groundings, our world view and global relations, you name it!
In the times of unprecedented fear, anxiety and uncertainty, it is perhaps best to have a hard look at the perils of our modern rush for mindless specializations in education and refocus on the maxim of ‘man-making’ or ‘life-giving’ education, envisaged by sages and thinkers from time immemorial down to our very own Swami Vivekananda.
The three learning virtues of Aristotle (Episteme, Techne and Phronesis) spoke of the same basic philosophy of education for a well-rounded personality, a complete citizen who would contribute to the well-being of the society, and someone who would aspire to break the shackles of ‘narrow domestic walls’ and lead oneself into ‘ever-widening thought and action’, as Gurudev Tagore would wish. Very recently, Dr. Shrikant Datar and his colleagues, realizing the limits of markets and models, have emphasized on the three aspects of education – knowing, doing and being.
Perhaps it is high time that we recognize the importance of holistic education, and turn the crisis we are going through into an opportunity to recalibrate our education system and aim for a truly multi-disciplinary, cross-functional and comprehensive education. To quote Marquez again, “Love becomes greater and nobler in calamity” – and a calamity of such a proportion as the present one, must surely make us all believe that the need for a well-rounded human being, and not a lopsided critter, is the real need of the hour. Innovations in the industry for human well-being, breakthrough research in combating life-threatening ailments, new world view to bring about everlasting peace and prosperity to the world – all these demand an education that’s truly holistic.
Though developed and made somewhat popular in the pre-COVID era, online education had somehow failed to capture the imagination of the teachers, leave alone the students. Though thousands of petabytes of data and information, in all formats imaginable, was available in our fingertips figuratively and literally too, hardly one would go beyond the immediate need for a piece of data to satisfy just a transient thirst for a handful, while the ocean of data, information, knowledge, and perhaps wisdom, lay undiscovered and unknown to most “seekers of knowledge”.
Teachers and students alike would like to believe that since one cannot drink from a hose, it is prudent to not even venture to drink. Often the constraints of time and space were put forth as too insurmountable to look, even in askance, at any other domain of knowledge than the one someone is specializing in currently. No wonder, we have engineers who would loathe the prospect of managing workmen, doctors who would not like to manage a hospital even for a day, lawyers who refuse to listen to their gut feeling even for once, accountants who would be tone deaf to the stories behind the inane numbers, managers who would not retract from the task of getting efficiency at any cost, so on and so forth…
Perhaps the remedy of the above malaise lies in online education. The constraints of time and space can be beautifully subverted by this technological innovation, and if the mind can be trained to focus on clear goals, and not wander in the Wonderland of the Cyberworld, the treasures that are wide open in the online space can be the most effective tool harnessed to develop the young minds, the future citizens of this world into holistic learners and thus complete human beings.
As in the olden days, why can’t polymaths be developed in our modern education system? What stops a student studying engineering from following his passion of classical music? Though, today with the limitations imposed on the students due to lockdown, social distancing and concomitant restrictions, there appears to be very little choice other than online education, an intelligent and evolved mind should look at this challenge as an opportunity to once again revisit the latent passion for a subject long lost or long forgotten thanks to pressures of formal education, dictated and defined by the constraints of time and space, and develop oneself as a complete man or woman – for, that is the need of the hour and that is going to put one in good stead, when the world will rise again from the morass caused by the pandemic and demand a new set of leaders to take it forward into “That Heaven of Freedom”.
The writer is Dean – Academics, and Dean – School of Business & Economics, Adamas University. An alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and IIM Calcutta, he has a blend of academic and corporate experience in Godrej & Boyce, IBS Business School, Hyderabad, Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, and NSHM School of Business & Management, Kolkata. His research area is - strategic knowledge-skill gap in teaching-learning