Tamil Nadu is in the process of sewing up a State Education Policy (SEP) to ensure that every child can learn with freedom and make its own choice. “We need to have a policy that allows a child to be able to take forward the proposals in the policy, and also find a way to progress in life,” said T M Krishna, a member of the high-level committee that is drafting the state policy.
“When we prepare SEP, we have to look at the National Education Policy (NEP) critically. We have to see how to put forward the SEP that challenges certain fundamental things that are problematic in the NEP,” the musician-scholar said, adding that the state cannot ignore the NEP.
Krishna discussed at length the importance of cultural transformation in eradicating caste discrimination. “Irrespective of which part of society you come from, it (caste) is ingrained in you through your habits, rituals, cultural practices, the music you listen to, and the dialect. Caste is all pervasive. You have a political movement that is anti-caste, but there has been a failure in changing our cultural habits,” Krishna said.
Underscoring the need to have conversations with people to understand them without assigning labels like ‘Urban Naxal’, Krishna said children have to be given the freedom to challenge power. Talking about how his experience as a musician led to his activism, Krishna said his best music was when he was not in complete control of himself and the audience.
Speaking about his relationship with the Carnatic music community, against the backdrop of his criticism of its practices, and on the Guru-Shishya Parampara, he said we should create systems that are not dependent on existence of good people in positions of power.