EDITORIAL

library, the hostel, the canteen, the lawns and the gardens and, overall, the life of a university campus cannot be created on-line. The colleges and universities not only facilitate dissemination of ideas and information, but they also give a platform for critical engagement through dialogues and birth to empowered agency, thus future leaders in different walks of life. Mechanization of education would mean death knell for the very idea of education. At a time of big data and complete gaze (by national and global regimes) virtual education (online) will kill critical thinking and promote intellectual servitude. The teachers and students will be bid “good bye” from the campuses, as education will be mechanical with no room for dialogue. Education budget can cut to size by the masters of neoliberalism. We are definitely in for major paradigm shift in education post-COVID. The pandemic is being used as a pretext for the increasingly pervasive diffusion of digital technologies. The face-to-face contact, dialogues and dissent will disappear and lectures will be monologues. Physical presence, counselling of the weak and stressed, depressed students, the library visits, habit of reading books will depart for good. Group discussions and seminars will also disappear, which were an inseparable part of pedagogy. Campus life and the lived experiences amidst campus culture, where world cultures meet, will vanish. Students would be reduced to career-seeking selfish creatures. Friendships and relations that are built during college and university days which sustain us in our later life cannot be built through on-line education. Small towns, the university hubs, which used to come alive after the admission session every year, will lose their vibrance and mobility, and millions living in the small towns will lose their livelihood. The system will try to coerce the students and experts into the new order as the course-curricula and the module production will be the monopoly of the ideologues in power. Should we accept new servitude that the digital education promises to bring? A scholar to reckon with in the field of Indian pedagogy, Professor Abhijit Pathak in one of his recent lectures asked: Shall the teachers give their nod to this technological barbarism ?

Sanjay K. Roy

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