The Ugly side of Education

• Dayan Ejaz
• Oct 2, 2024
• 2 min read

“Ilm Roshni Hai”, sounds familiar right? yes, it is something we all have heard growing up from our teachers and parents. But have we imagined a society where education does not illuminate dark minds with brightness? Where it isn’t inclusive of all the races and hence normalizes typical stereotypes to corrupt the minds of the young. Where it doesn’t serve to bind all the ethnicities together under a single curriculum but breed ethnic violence in the process. We have all seen it now.

The academic discourse isn’t neutral at all. It perpetuates hatred and racism through curriculum whereas teachers work as enforcers of these ideologies and jeopardize the cognitive abilities of students to a great extent. Several state-centered motives are taken into consideration when designing the syllabus and this limits the mental capacities of students to think outside the box and hence dampens the critical thinking. Certain biases are ingrained into the teaching practices, whereby children in early stages of intellectual development grasp the flawed ideologies and ultimately indulge in intolerant behavior in the future. This further leads to ethnic violence and the root cause becomes the education that they received.

Now that we have an idea that education can somehow deteriorate the principles of inclusivity, diversity, and tolerance based on the prejudices instilled in the academic discourse, we look at an example. The picture on the right is from a children’s textbook

from a Southeast Asian country, that is teaching some types of words and their antonyms based on pictorial representation. Yes! a standardized curriculum book that hundreds of students follow and base their understanding on. This speaks volumes about the inherent cultural stigmas that comes into play when designing curriculum and so the “neutral” education is posed as a threat to the cohesive impact of education. The picture reeks of western beauty standards embedded in the society and how that is normalized globally. This idea draws similarities to the normative processes we touched upon in the course, where the normalization of a concept, in this case the western beauty standards, fragments or deviates to an incorrect classification of the beauty criteria established by the West. Consequently, the assimilation of western standards, shown by the pictorial representation of Ugly and Beautiful in the textbook speaks much about how the world embraces the western concepts.

To put it simply, certain biases permeate through the academic discourse by the normative processes giving rise to disparities and ultimately leading to conflicting situations. This broadly refers to the way education can be related to conflicts based on the curriculum and emphasizes the urgent need for a critical reevaluation of educational content to foster inclusivity and understanding.