Power or Profit?

These books underscore that students in schools are neither fools nor sheep; they are keenly observant and precocious. Schoolchildren 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

- SANJUKTA DASGUPTA The writer is a retired Professor of English and former Dean, Faculty of Arts, Calcutta University

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, humor 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 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 clichéd 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-ethics. In his novel