Education must contribute to personal fulfillment. For that to happen, education — especially higher education — must remain harnessed to growth, rather than greed. Greed too generates its own genre of questions. But questions of greed cannot cater to personal happiness simply because they do not facilitate the full unfolding of a person.

It is not an accident that Eliot’s Prufrock cannot bring himself to asking the overwhelming question. The questions we ask reveal best who we are. What are the questions that we, as a people, raise or suppress? A teacher cannot overlook the continuity between the classroom and the life-world of the young people she teaches. She has to be, hence, not only mindful of the need to create room for questions in the pedagogic space but also remain attentive to the questions they are scared or unwilling to ask. The time has come to wonder seriously how we can make classroom learning — to borrow the useful expression of Erich Fromm — an ‘activating’ rather than ‘passivating’ experience.

The writer is the Principal of St. Stephen’s College and Member, National Integration Council