Power or Profit?

Despite all the reverential mythification and mystification of Gurukul and studious, scholarly students, Plato’s academy and Socratic dialogue, literary representations of schools and teachers have often opted for satire, irony, humour and outright abrasive criticism. Many world renowned authors were not great school-goers ~ Mark Twain, Jack London, Charles Dickens and William Faulkner.

Even Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Elon Musk did not find schools adorable. Shakespeare was a school drop-out, as was Rabindranath Tagore, and Kalidas in all probability was not even home schooled. In the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling elided the school education system completely, by mesmerizing readers with the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, an alternative education paradigm. Dickens’ Mr. Creakle, Thackeray’s Betty Sharp flinging the dictionary out of the coach window as she leaves school, Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff and Cathy hurling their scriptural books with disdain are all outstanding examples of the respective authors’ disenchantment with formal education. However the outstanding classic irony about profiteering institutionalized education and pretentious pompous pedagogues was of course the play

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The Refund first published in 1938, written by the Hungarian playwright Fritz Karinthy. Wasserkopf, a student in his thirties returns to school claiming a refund from the principal, as he alleges that his school education taught him nothing that could help him secure a job, nor did it equip him with skills that made facing adult life a smooth transition. Charles Dickens perhaps anticipated that in the 21st century, the cliched Darwinian concept of survival of the fittest would be replaced with the concept of survival of the greediest, without any embarrassment. We are truly in the era of post-eth ics. In his novel Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens observed about the education of a particular person named Mr. Jonas, that “the very first word he learnt to spell was ‘gain’ and the second (when he got into two syllables), ‘money’.” Also, in the novel, Hard Times a Dickensian character dismisses the entire discipline of humanities by asserting unequivocally, “NOW, what I want is,

Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!” Interestingly, for those who perhaps could have missed the implications of fact-based education, Dickens added elaboration, “Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections.

Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, settle everything somehow, and never wonder” (Hard Times). Dickens’ American contemporary Mark Twain too had exp – ressed his scepticism about institutionalized education with his characteristic witty flamboyance, “I never let my schooling interfere with my education… Everything has its limit ~ iron ore cannot be educated into gold… All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal valuable knowledge.” Both Dickens and Twain were school drop-outs. And of course Twain’s unsurpassed icon of freedom and conscientio usness Huckleberry Finn’s response to school is noteworthy: “At first I hated the school, but by and by I got so I could stand it”.

Rabindranath Tagore, who too found school to be a learning by rote rigorous imprisonment cell, alerted teachers that students belonged to a different generation, so formal education had to be a judicious combination of knowledge garnered from the past and present that would prepare the curious young minds for a progressive future. “Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.” Expectedly, Tagore’s poetic persona resonates in the following lines about the ultimate targets of holistic education: “A teacher can never truly teach unless he is still learning himself. A lamp can never light another lamp unless it continues to burn its own flame…The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but that makes our life in harmony with all existence.” I had since felt that the education system had been praised and critiqued ad infinitum by numerous scholars, educators and authors.

Then I was recently introduced by my granddaughter to the American children’s author and cartoonist Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. The first Diary was published in 2007. In 2025, the twentieth book of the series will be published. Kinney’s supply seems slower than the kids’ demand. The Wimpy Kid books are very popular in India too, of course in urban English medium schools as they are popular in all Anglophone schools, whether in the USA or UK, among others. So what is that makes the Wimpy Kid series so kid friendly? First of all the 19 volumes look like diaries, simulating a spiral-bound diary, each diary is of 217 pages. The words on the pages use the Comic Sans font that looks as if the page is hand-written with a calligraphic pen rather than the legacy printed pages since Caxton. Each page carries at least two illustrations and often looks as if it is a prequel to the hardcore graphic novel for children.

The author Kinney is also a reputed cartoonist, incidentally. The narrative is witty, matter of fact details are presented in a manner that can create a jolt in the mind, despite the in no – cuous style. As the narrative commences, school education is summed up in a post Mark Twain manner by commenting about a day in school: “You are there for seven hours, but you probably only spend twenty minutes a day on actual lea rning. And that’s because most of your time is spent on stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with education”. This extract is from Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid No Brainer. The front cover claims that 290 million copies of the books in the series have been sold to date. In Diary of a Wimpy Kid No Brainer another twist in the tale is the fact that the first Principal of the school stole money from the school, began a car dealership business with the stolen money, became rich and famous and the school was named after him as ‘Larry Mack Sch ool’. Eventually Larry Mack landed in prison as his theft was detected by investigative journalists. However the fact that no one was really morally troubled though Larry Mack’s statue in the school was taken down, the name of the school remained intact.

The observation of Gregg, the school-student diarist is not to be missed as he states that the famous who are really notorious impress people so much that they ignore their criminality as success by hook or crook is uncritically admired by ordinary people who are neither successful nor famous. “You’d think people in my town would be embarrassed to have their middle school named after a crook, but nobody around here seems to be bothered by it.” In order to raise money, the school even started a Platinum High Flyers club where students who joined by paying a monthly membership fee could even walk out of class and not be rep – ri manded, apart from many other facilities that were made available to them. An elite class system within the school and also the classroom was accepted by the teachers, students and parents without protest. This may remind readers of Dickens’ headmaster Mr. Crea – kle in David Copperfield, who thrashed and whipped the poor students but was especially kind and obsequious towards affluent students, such as Steerforth. But then Gregg the wimpy kid notes in his diary, “But the Platinum High Flyers Club is not the only way the school is trying to make money.

They’re also selling corporate sponsorships.” In another fascinating book of the series, Diary of the Wimpy kid Old School, the movement of unplugging from the internet and staying away from the screen, motivated by a crusader mother and other family members is absorbingly hilarious as the good old days of manual work and farming are foregrounded in order to create awareness and a balance, instead of the extremism of technology making human cooperation redundant and irrelevant and social media making everyone unsocial, non-communicative with heavy reliance on videos, audios and emojis. Despite all our fears and prognosis that the new generation of students no longer read, that they relate to visuals and not printed words, it is apparent that a new generation of writers like Rowling and her Harry Potter industry, Jeff Kinney and his Wimpy Kid series, where Gregg, the wimpy kid is the first person narrator, the diarist and memoirist, are successful. This 21st century children’s fiction has definitely made a difference in narrative content.

Gregg’s lucid, up-front cerebral responses to places, people, situations, the entire ecosystem and history illustrate that comments and evaluation of school education in literature remains not just riveting but a rich learning experience, as they span caveats to creativity. These books underscore that students in schools are neither fools nor sheep; they are keenly observant and precocious. School Children can discern the hidden agenda of school administration as they notice with disdain how imparting knowledge as power often gets compromised when knowledge for profit overwhelms all other human values and concerns.

(The writer is a retired Professor of English and former Dean, Faculty of Arts, Calcutta University)