The Duke of Cumberland and uncle of Queen Victoria fiercely opposed the expansion of the Great Western Railways on the strange ground that its rumbling “would disturb Eton’s schoolboys.” Founded in 1440, “the nurse of England’s statesmen” has educated scores of Prime Ministers, world leaders and Nobel Laureates, and continues to dominate public life in the UK. The school confers a vast and unfair advantage to its alumni, over the alumni of even the best schools in the state system.

Billionaire Elon Musk has started a new experimental Astra Nova School which is billed as “the most exclusive school in the world”. Musk’s school is the online school on the campus of SpaceX. It is expected to produce billionaires. No surprise for guessing it! The “mercurial, man-child”, says his biographer Walter Isaacson, has “grandiose ambition and an ego to match.” As his money and power grow, Musk now frequently channels his inner Trump.

One of the most expensive secondary schools in the Swiss Alps charges 125,000 Euros per year. In these super elite schools, education is a sense of the way power works in institutions. They are of course intensely hierarchical where the status is marked by dress and form of address. But Musk and other tech billionaires are also building castles of a different kind. They have now entered universities with a mission to launch a war on ideas. Elite universities in the US will now become even more elitist while avenues for higher education are vanishing for the less privileged. The ship of fools doesn’t sink fast. Globally, schools, colleges and universities are proliferating. Boutique universities are minting money. But the internet is spreading a new kind of illiteracy. The reading habits of students have already atrophied online.

It is a loss which will persist for their entire academic life. The vast majority of students belong to the anxious generation. In the system of education that prevails across the globe, a large number of children studying in normal schools are the canaries in the coal mines. They face extremely dangerous, explosive and toxic surroundings. For them, schools, colleges and universities have become increasingly venues of unwellness and factories of unhappiness. Mini Khuc, a Vietnamese-American scholar and managing editor of Asian American Literary Review, argues that we are all differently unwell.

The author of Pedagogy of Unwellness further maintains that “we are unwell in different ways at different time.” Asian-America students, in particular, whom she has interviewed ex tensively, are more vulnerable than others. Khuc goes a step further by suggesting that academic institutions are “incubators of unwellness” as they place a premium on hyper-productivity and compulsory wellness.” When you struggle or fail, you are made to believe it is your fault and that something is wrong with you and not with the schools or the system. She has visited more universities and listened to more students in mental health workshops, discussions, meetings than anyone else in Asian American studies or mental health. Her research is also a “close reading of the university as a structure”.

The cruel irony, she says, is that university’s wellness “makes students unwell”. The university places emphasis on “academic hyper-productivity across the university strata” which is another name for what she calls “unrelenting dehumanisation that relies on the conflation of that productivity with wellness.” Daniel Wilson, director of “Project Zero” at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, says that it is “hard to learn without real-life relevance” Schools must encourage curiosity, sense of be longing and facilitate students’ interactions with the surroundings. More importantly, Wilson posits that our children are “the victims of epistemic injustice and unwellness in the classroom.” Why have schools and universities come to such a pass?

Big is not a strong enough word for the rot in the education system. Our universities are now teaching students to unthink. Or to think conspiratorially. Honest inquiry is unwelcome. Autocrats hate universities and intellectuals. Princeton historian Da vid Bell says that the Silicon billionaires behave like the predatory wolves. Power has poisoned academia. Today, more and more universities are allowing the core academic mission of intellectual inquiry and teaching to be subordinated to other values. Right-wing assault on education is agenda-driven. Billionaires are destroying academia and political leaders are truthing through banality.

Universities, research institutions and knowledge-producing centres are entrusted with the task of thinking on behalf of society. They are expected to subject all ideas to rigorous testing. The university is a place for inquiry, for asking questions. As American philosopher Judith Butler says, it is important to keep questions open. If they are shut down too quickly, “that is surely another kind of failure, since the question is but one way that young people are struggling to exist, equal and free.” She further posits that sometimes you find answers, sometimes you don’t. But “as long as the questions are allowed, conversations are possible.” We are in intellectual poverty.

There is a collapse of critical thinking. There is disdain for truth and philosophy. Truth is now revealed by politicians. Given the manifold crises, we need pedagogy of imagination and storytelling. We don’t need to build a hero who saves everything. As Emiliano Zapata, hero of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, said, “strong leaders make a weak people.” We need to look for a collaborative project, a solution into which we all fit. Stories shape who we are. They drive us to get out of our dreams and mould our beliefs. Stories are magic, they can create other worlds, emotions and ideas. We suffer from what Peter Turchin has famously called “elite mass production”.

To him, elites are a small proportion of the population “who concentrate social power in their hands ~ whether that’s in the military, economic, political, or ideological sphere” Markets and states are now inseparably intertwined. And education is inextricably linked to the politics of power. We keep moving ahead with a policy despite its glaring and recurrent failure. We see progress falling apart. Ours is a time, beautifully captured by John Kennedy, in which “all the truth, and all the right, and all the angels are on one side.” TS Eliot saw that happening when he warned, we have lost knowledge in information and wisdom in knowledge.

(The writer is director, Institute of Social Sciences, Delhi)