There is something deeply unsettling about the state of education in India today. What we are witnessing on the streets and within educational institutions across the country are not isolated disturbances; they are symptoms of an anxiety that can no longer be ignored.
Never before have so many young people entered universities, competed in examinations, accumulated degrees and been asked to dream of a better future. Yet beneath this unprecedented expansion lies a growing unease. Students worry that a flawed or manipulated exam can alter their lives overnight; that recruitment processes may remain uncertain for years; that the cost of education and living will keep rising; and that, even after doing everything society has asked of them, there may be no place waiting for them.
This is why Paulo Freire feels remarkably contemporary. Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed alongside Pedagogy of Hope offers us more than a critique of education. It gives us a language to understand the unease of India’s students and, perhaps, to recognise that what appears as student unrest may also be a deeper crisis of an educational system that has expanded access without necessarily expanding agency, dignity and hope.
Freire begins with a deceptively simple proposition that education is never only about knowledge, it also shapes how we understand ourselves and the world around us. It tells us whose knowledge counts, which questions are legitimate and what kinds of authority should go unquestioned. His famous critique of the “banking model of education” is more profound than a criticism of dull classrooms. In this model, the teacher deposits knowledge and the student receives it. The student learns to reproduce rather than interrogate, to remember rather than investigate, to answer rather than ask.
The danger is not simply that such an education produces unimaginative students but it can also make the existing social order appear natural. If knowledge always comes from above, perhaps authority does too. If the student’s role is to receive, perhaps the citizen’s role is also to obey and this has particular resonance in India, where education is simultaneously an instrument of emancipation and a mechanism through which inequalities can be reproduced.
For crores of young Indians, education remains the most credible route out of inherited disadvantage. But the quality of schooling, access to technology, command over English, coaching opportunities, university networks and even the ability to remain in education for longer are distributed unequally. The promise of merit therefore often hides very unequal starting points and the dominant section of the society prefers to ignore it.
The exam system makes this contradiction especially visible as a student may spend years preparing for a competitive exam only to confront a leaked paper, a postponed test, a cancelled result or a recruitment process that seems to have no predictable end. When this happens, the student is not merely facing an administrative inconvenience. Something more fundamental is shaken within them and that is the belief that effort will be met with fairness.
This helps explain the intensity of student anxiety across the country. We often describe it as an individual psychological problem, as pressure, stress or fear of failure. But some of that anxiety is institutional, as it is produced by uncertainty in the systems on which young people have been asked to build their lives.
Consider the message conveyed by repeated disruptions in exams and recruitment. Students are told to work harder and compete better, as though success depends entirely on individual effort. Yet no amount of preparation can compensate for a cancelled exam, an unavailable vacancy or an arbitrary institutional decision. The individual is made responsible for outcomes that are, in significant measure, systemic.
Freire helps us see why this matters. Domination does not always arrive in dramatic form because it can be embedded in procedures that appear neutral and in arrangements that are described as simply “the way things are”. The most powerful hierarchy may be the one nobody is encouraged to question. That is why student protest deserves to be understood differently.
When students protest exam irregularities, recruitment delays, unaffordable accommodation or discrimination, their anger is often dismissed as impatience or political provocation. But what if the protest is itself a demand for education to honour its promise?
A university cannot ask young people to trust institutions while giving them repeated reasons not to. Nor can it tell students that merit is the great equaliser while ignoring the unequal conditions under which merit is produced and judged.
Seen this way, the apparently separate grievances of students begin to acquire a common thread. The demand for a fair examination, a timely recruitment process, affordable education or a dignified campus experience is also a demand for institutional credibility.
And this is where Pedagogy of Hope becomes essential because, for Freire, hope is not passive optimism but the conviction that history remains unfinished, that the present is not destiny. Hope begins when people understand that institutions and social arrangements made by human beings can also be changed by human beings.
This is precisely what education should cultivate, yet much of our educational culture teaches the opposite lesson. Students are encouraged to secure a degree, clear the exam, obtain employment and move ahead. The emphasis is overwhelmingly on adaptation: learn the rules, perform well, compete successfully. There is nothing wrong with preparing young people for employment. However, the problem begins when employability becomes the sole purpose of education.
A democratic university must also teach students to ask why the rules exist, whom they serve and whether they can be improved. It must make room for disagreement without treating disagreement as disorder and it must allow students to discover that questioning an institution can sometimes be a way of strengthening it.
This also changes how we should think about the anxiety of India’s students. Their restlessness may not simply be a failure of resilience. It may reflect an acute awareness of the distance between the promises made to them and the opportunities actually available.
We tell young people that education will transform their lives. They are therefore entitled to ask whether the institutions entrusted with that education are worthy of their trust. A student who questions a recruitment delay is not necessarily being disruptive. One who challenges discrimination is not necessarily being divisive. And one who demands accountability from a university is not necessarily hostile to the institution or to the rule of law. More often than not, dissent is simply the first language of citizenship.
Freire’s lasting contribution is to remind us that learning can serve two very different purposes. It can teach people to adjust themselves to an existing reality, or it can give them the intellectual and moral resources to question and transform it. At this juncture, can we really deny that India needs the latter?
Our students do not need institutions that merely prepare them to survive the world as it is. They need the intellectual freedom to imagine a fairer and more just world, and the confidence and capacity to participate in creating it. That is learning against the status quo and that is what makes a democracy worthy of its citizens.
Manoj Kumar Jha | Rajya Sabha MP from Rashtriya Janata Dal
(Views are personal)