The Future of Education

Higher education doesn’t mean only for the production and reproduction of knowledge, social mobility and economic growth of a nation. One of the major successes of higher education in diversified societies like India is to create space for multiple cultural negotiation and dialogue, democratization of research activities and curriculum designing. In this context, higher education has a significant role in making of a conscious and critical civil society as well as producing of active citizen for nation-building process. 

On this background, this paper makes a theoretical understanding of the emergent of various subaltern voices in India in the decade of eighties for their language, culture, identity and epistemological worldviews within the mainstream education. Further, the free flow of media and technology beyond the national boundary and the transnational people’s migration under the process of globalization strengthens the cultural integration among the diverse marginalized communities within the higher educational institutions. One of the major sociological explanations towards this emerging trend of plural discourses in Indian higher educational institutions of recent time is due to the modernization process adopted by the postcolonial state. The inclusive planning for social justice, equality and economic growth under the ideology of ‘mixed economy’ in the starting period of post-independent India empowered the socially and culturally deprived groups to speak about themselves in the later phases of nation building process. In this context, modernization came to India as harbingers of development and empowering large section of rural poor, marginalized women and historically defined culturally handicapped groups such as lower caste, women and tribe.

Key Words: Modernization, National Character, Marginalized Community, Empowerment, Subaltern Consciousness, epistemological pluralism, Globalization and cultural integration.