My School: A Guide to Adjustment

Democracy as a concept messes our mind up. Why? Because the values cherished by our social institutions runs counter to a liberal, democratic constitution. School is a vital institution that trains us to adjust to some of the basic violations of rights to freedom. To explain this in further detail, I will elucidate some of the practices and incidents of the school that I went to.                                                                                                       

 I went to Delhi Public School Newtown. The moment I entered the school, I was blown away cos unlike my previous school the corridors did not reek of urine, the benches were brightly coloured and for some reason, I liked having bottle – green shit around me. But in this bubble of clean corridors and coloured benches, a tapestry of docility was being very gradually weaved. The institution taught me to adjust. Adjust to a senior council member who has been given the right to check your bag and violate your privacy. Why? Cos as we all know privacy is for Naxalites.

Once I remember bags of 9th-grade students were checked by council members (who were never democratically elected), in the absence of those whose bags were being checked- the students. This practice that we called “ bag checking “ is dangerous. A  school bag is something which travels with a student from their home to the school. This bag like Hanna Montana’s life consists of the best and worst of two worlds - family and school. It consists of your lunchbox-an access to the eating habits of your family, your pencil box- that gives access to the ink with which you like to express, your diary on which you like to express and pages of the books you like to read. Access to one school bag means access to one’s ideas without their consent. This is the dangerous part.

 If one is told in school that's it is okay for a random person to peek into one’s lunchbox or school bag, they end up thinking it is okay for the state or a gaurakshak to peek into your lunch box in search of forbidden meat. Thus, here we learn the first tenet of adjustment, that is right to privacy is negotiable.

Back in DPSN, we were never allowed to express ourselves in any form possible. The editorial rights of our school magazine were given to teachers. To get anything published was as hard as getting published in The New Yorker. If the irony is not visible to you then let me make it a bit clearer. A magazine meant for students, which should ideally consist of student’s writings and some of their questionable photographs, was controlled by the teachers. Beauty in its truest form!  Why would a student who grew up in such an environment, question the daily attack on press freedom. An aspiring journalist, who aspires to have a spine, will have to engage in pathological unlearning after going through a system like this. The second thing we learn here is to adjust to thought control by those in authority.

 Okay, so written words will not be an option of expression. So what else? Art, right?  Cos after all my school was in the cultural capital of India. Contrary to our GK textbooks, my school was quite a maverick in this cultural capital. Once the head of the institute took a friend’s Ukulele because she thought it would distract them from their studies. According to our then school rulebook ( 2018), musical instruments were not banned. But this teaches us the third tenet – adjust to the flexibility of rules according to the convenience of those in power. A student who internalized such behaviour as ideal will probably be fine with the state of UP’s passionate abuse of the National Security Act.

 After, that incident a new rule came into existence. You are allowed to bring a musical instrument, as long as you represent or serve the school in some form by performing on fest or assemblies. Here we see the fourth tenet - namely adjustment to jingoism. Again, a person who grew up in such an environment will probably tweet #India together every time somebody questions the government.

When a friend questioned the school for confiscating the ukulele, the next day the head of the institute called my friend a “Naxal” and threatened him in front of the entire class by saying that she will not sign his character certificate. Such acts almost scream to a student that words like “ Naxal”, “Anti-National” can be casually used to maintain the social order. Why would then a student, accustomed to their school flinging absurd labels at its students for questioning its authority, resist when the state does the same to its citizens? With this last incident, we learn the desirable kind of adjustment- Adjustment to labels.

Here I would clarify two things. Firstly, I come from an extremely privileged school and to access such a school one has to inherit some obvious social and economic capital, which I did. Thus, the incidents that I have articulated might look removed from the reality of our larger education system. But this brings me to one of my core arguments-autocracy can exist in very apparent forms within the walls of a descent infrastructural setup. The infrastructure creates a sufficient amount of illusion to make one forget about it. Secondly, since it was a private school it had the capital to hire a few exceptional teachers who taught us, to be free thinkers. This is one of the many factors which makes my reality different from the larger strata of our society.

We as students or citizens who dream of freedom should be mindful of a discipline that happens at the cost of our freedom.  Governments change, but institutions remain and unless we bring structural changes in the latter, we shall continue to be governed by identical governments with variant degrees of autocracy and we will do what our schools teach us to do- ADJUST!