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Years ago, Dr Cyriac Mathews, formerly additional director of Collegiate Education, Kerala, shared with me a story that has remained with me ever since. A teacher was dictating notes to his students with enormous confidence. Halfway through the lecture, one of the brighter students interrupted him politely.

“Sir, the last sentence you dictated is structurally incorrect. There is a grammatical problem.”

The teacher did not pause for even a second. “There is no possibility of that,” he declared. “These are the notes given to me in my student days by Father Peter, who had studied in Rome.” (Name changed)

The joke is not really about Rome. It is about a civilisation’s relationship with authority – and about the remarkable durability of its notes. The world may change. Knowledge may change. Society may change. Yet the notes remain untouched, sanatan, because they were once authorised by someone who supposedly knew better.

The teacher does not examine the sentence. He does not ask whether it is correct. For him, its authority lies in its provenance: Fr Peter studied in Rome; therefore, the note must be right.

That is learning for many: The world changes, but the notes do not.

Knowledge ceases to be knowledge when its truth derives not from argument but from pedigree. A sentence does not become grammatically correct because it travelled from Rome. Nor does an educational policy become intellectually sound merely because Delhi has stamped it.

But sadly, we have increasingly constructed a system in which authority, rather than inquiry, determines what counts as knowledge; and in which conformity to a prescribed standard is mistaken for learning.

Perhaps we should therefore begin with the Constitution.

The constitutional question

The word concurrent is not an obscure constitutional technicality. It implies acting together, occurring together, sharing authority. A Concurrent List presupposes a relationship between the Union and the States in which neither is simply expected to dictate to the other.

Education was not originally placed there.

When the constitution came into force, education was in the State List. This reflected an important understanding of its nature in a country as extraordinarily diverse as India. Education is inseparable from language, culture, local history and social experience. The educational needs of Kerala cannot simply be assumed to be identical to those of Punjab, Assam or Tamil Nadu.

Then came the 42nd Constitutional Amendment in 1976, during the Emergency. Among its many centralising provisions, it moved education from the State List to the Concurrent List.

This did not create NEET, NET, NAAC or NIRF. Nor did it automatically transform education into a centrally administered subject. But it altered the constitutional location of educational authority. The Union was no longer confined to the limited role it had previously occupied.

Also read: ‘Secularism Was Always Part of the Basic Structure of Constitution’: SC

To understand what that earlier limitation meant, we have to return to the Constituent Assembly.

The debate of August 31, 1949 (p 789) concerned the Union’s legislative power over certain institutions of higher education, scientific and technical education and research. Ambedkar’s proposal concerned “Co-ordination and maintenance of standards.” V. S. Sarwate objected that even this might become an unnecessary interference in the provincial sphere, defending “diversity and variety” and freedom for educational experimentation.

Dr P. S. Deshmukh raised a related question: if university education remained with the Provinces, what exactly would the Union’s power to coordinate and determine standards authorise Parliament to do? (p 792)

Then Basanta Kumar Das proposed something much closer to what we would today call a National Education Policy: coordination of the educational activities of the States “for the purpose of maintaining a uniform national educational policy”, together with financial assistance to maintain a uniform standard of education throughout the Union. (p 793)

The possibility of a centrally coordinated national educational policy was therefore not something the Constituent Assembly had failed to imagine.

They imagined it – and did not incorporate it. Das withdrew the proposal. (p 797)

Ambedkar’s own concern was considerably narrower. He was worried about universities lowering standards or manipulating results in ways that would make qualifications meaningless. His example was almost comically mundane: if one university treated 15% as a pass mark for a B.A. degree and another treated 20% as the standard, what would the word “graduate” actually mean? (p 796)

His concern was with protecting the credibility of qualifications, not with designing a uniform national educational philosophy.

The framers were concerned with protecting standards, not standardising education. They could distinguish between the credibility of a qualification and the diversity of the institutions that produced it.

Sarwate’s insistence on diversity was not an argument against standards. It was an argument against confusing standards with uniformity. That is the constitutional imagination from which we have travelled so far.

When the state changed

But something else changed alongside the constitutional shift: the old language with which we had construed the world.

The Friedmanite turn supplied capitalism with a new language. In his celebrated 1970 essay, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”, Milton Friedman argued that the corporate executive’s responsibility was to conduct business in the interests of its owners – generally, to make as much money as possible – while conforming to the basic rules of society.

The shift was subtle but profound. The question of an institution’s ethical purpose could increasingly be displaced by a question of its permitted conduct: not what ought an institution to do but what it is permitted to do.

The state no longer had to stand simply outside the market as its regulator, as an ethical principle. It could become the maker of the rules through which markets were created, measured and monetised. Standards, examinations, accreditation, rankings and certification could themselves become markets.

The state entrusted with protecting standards could increasingly become the architect of a market in standards. The regulator and the regulated could begin to benefit from the same machinery. The result is a peculiar inversion of the constitutional........

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