The classroom is important, not the uniform

I write as a teacher who for many years has taught students in Mangalore, a sharply polarised region in Karnataka that is seeing bitter clashes over a dress code in educational institutions. My students have come from different religions, castes and nations. They spoke different mother tongues, ate different kinds of food and wore different kinds of clothes and ornaments. Some wore the markers of their married status, some wore the habit of their religious order, some wore the clothes that denoted their geo-cultural location, some wore the symbols of their religion and caste, and all conformed to the protocols of gender. These differences in appearance and beliefs and practices of thinking and speaking and eating and appearance, never ever disturbed our sense of belonging to a classroom community.

In many ways, the classroom of a government educational institution is truly representative of the society within which it is instituted, since it provides democratic access to students from all sections of society. Moreover, it acknowledges that our society is hierarchically organised and that children from marginalised communities need to be given additional support and provided privileged access to the classroom and the social capital of education. The coming together of many social worlds within these classrooms makes it a location of perpetual epistemological disruption. Here, learning takes place not only through the protocols of institutionalised pedagogy but also through the many ways in which we go astray of ourselves, as we dialogue with that stranger who is a classmate, a student, a teacher and who slowly becomes a member of a classroom community that we build together. And how we structure and inhabit this community will inform all our future possibilities of living together as social groups.

This inclusive nature of the classroom space is one of its greatest contributions to the process of learning. It is this accommodation of the variety of social locations from which our students come that has contributed to the civil discussions and debates and conversations through which the process of thinking is initiated. It is these conversations that take place across the lines of gender and caste and religion and nationality that inaugurate the process of critical questioning. Learning, as an inherently disruptive process, always goes astray of the etiquettes of academia. Classroom conversations can reposition the participants in a radically egalitarian practice of speech. Such a conversation demands a difficult translation of social ontologies, a disorientation of knowing, a process of becoming unfamiliar to oneself. It is through such conversations that education becomes a radically transformative process of recognising the common vulnerability of all human beings and the mutual care and support that we owe each other if we have to survive as a species.

When the classroom becomes a space where students are disciplined into a narrow uniformity, then learning becomes a means of straitjacketing the body and the mind. When the uniformity of the classroom is shaped by political considerations and implemented through the authority of political power, then teaching is replaced by indoctrination and learning is replaced by unthinking parroting of political ideologies. When education becomes the handmaiden of hate, the creativity and joy that sustain the great variety of life are destroyed. When teachers become the gatekeepers of bigotry and parochial political interests, they forfeit their right to the trust and responsibility that a community places on them to guide and shape its future possibilities.

When the classroom is used to catalogue, classify and exclude, it inaugurates a future of insane hate and mindless cruelty. Such classrooms become the laboratories of those who have lost the sanity that is required to sustain human existence through the mutuality of kindness and love. In such classrooms, students are instrumentalised into votes and reduced to the colour of the shawls they drape across their shoulders or the scarves they wear over their heads. They are taught the mistrust of hate and trained in the violence of anger. Then, educational institutions will shut their gates to students who fail to display the uniformity of the uniformised body. And in the classrooms, teachers will close up the processes of thinking, wondering and questioning. And educational institutions will shut down the processes of learning and teaching and experimenting with the many ways in which we can build an equal, inclusive, compassionate and intelligent society.

Hence, it has become incumbent on us to initiate classroom dialogues and listen to the faltering, almost illegible, voices that speak from the shadowy social margins, that are in a constant struggle against invisibilisation. I have struggled for a friendship with my students that could only be achieved by disrupting the classroom hierarchisation of knowing and learning. I have tried to listen to the polyphonic social rhythms of their voices. I have tried to understand their speech through the grammar of their speech, and not mine. My students have shown me great generosity by bringing their worlds to the classroom. They have listened and spoken and argued with a civility that was disinterested and without rancour. They have constantly pushed me to the precarity of uncertainty.

Together we have maintained the dissonance of knowing and being. We have wrestled with texts that have shaken us and made us forever uncomfortable. We have together unpacked the orders of meaning and the canons of knowledge. And we have done this as companions, as friends, as equals. We have translated the multiple social worlds to which we belong, to each other. We have initiated a process of difficult listening and faltering speech. We have experimented at shaping enabling, egalitarian spatialisations of the classroom. Sometimes it has been an exhilarating process and sometimes a frustrating one. I thank the generations of students who have shared with me this process of learning the order of the world, excavating the genealogy of its making and interrogating the politics of its being. Without your companionship and your speech, this could never have been done. Let us protect this classroom, that we shaped together, from all onslaughts and guard it even as the world which should sustain it seems to be falling apart.

The writer is professor, department of English, Mangalore University