Education and politics have always been bound in a subtle, and often uneasy, relationship. One forms the mind; the other directs it. Education teaches us how to think, while politics tells us what to think about. Together they shape the moral and intellectual architecture of a nation. Between them lies the most contested territory of all — the making of the citizen. Every society uses education to transmit its values, but politics decides what those values are. That is why the classroom is never a neutral space. It is an arena where ideas of nationhood, history, and identity collide. The battle over what to teach, how to teach, and whom to teach is, at its heart, a struggle over power — over whose story becomes the national story.
In recent years, across the world, education has been pulled deeper into political contest. Textbooks are being rewritten, syllabi reshaped, and subjects reinterpreted in light of new ideological visions. Debates rage over how colonial history is told, how race or caste is discussed, how religion is portrayed, and which thinkers are highlighted or erased. The question is not merely academic. When a history textbook omits certain facts or amplifies others, it reshapes the collective memory of a generation. When philosophy and political science are reduced or replaced by utilitarian subjects, we redefine what counts as knowledge itself. The politics of curriculum is, therefore, the politics of consciousness — deciding what young minds should remember, and what they should forget. Michel Foucault once observed that “power and knowledge directly imply one another.” Education is the most refined form of that power. It disciplines, categorizes, and legitimizes. In the hands of the state, the classroom can become either an instrument of emancipation or a mechanism of conformity.
Parallel to ideological control runs another, quieter form of politics — the economics of education. Over the past two decades, education has increasingly been treated not as a public good but as a private commodity. Universities are ranked by market performance; students are viewed as consumers; and knowledge is valued only if it promises employability. The results are visible. Private schools and coaching centres proliferate, while government schools struggle with underfunding. Higher education, once a path of upward mobility, has become a site of exclusion. The language of policy speaks of “outcomes,” “efficiency,” and “innovation,” but rarely of curiosity, empathy, or civic responsibility. This economic turn has a political cost. When education becomes a privilege rather than a right, democracy itself begins to hollow out. A society that measures learning only in job placements forgets that the deeper purpose of education is not to reproduce the economy but to renew the republic.
The digital revolution has introduced yet another dimension to this debate. The COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of students online, exposing stark inequalities of access. For some, learning became a laptop on a desk; for others, it disappeared entirely. Now, with the rise of artificial intelligence and algorithmic learning, the boundaries between teaching, technology, and surveillance are blurring. AI promises personalized education, but it also raises disturbing questions. Who programs the algorithm that decides what a child learns? Whose values are coded into that software? Technology may democratize access to information, but it can also centralize control over knowledge. In authoritarian contexts, this convergence of data and pedagogy can become dangerous. Digital education platforms are easily monitored; dissenting thought is easily flagged. The classroom of the future risks becoming an instrument not of enlightenment but of quiet conformity — education without freedom, learning without thought.
Beyond policy or technology lies a deeper question — what, after all, is education for? Is it merely the transmission of skills and information, or is it the cultivation of wisdom and judgment? Education, at its highest, is not about producing efficient workers but reflective human beings. It is about nurturing the capacity to discern truth from noise, to weigh competing claims, and to act with conscience. It is not confined to schools and universities; it begins in the family, extends into community life, and matures in one’s participation in the world. A truly educated person is not one who knows everything, but one who knows how to question — with humility, with empathy, and with courage. Education must awaken what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum calls the “narrative imagination”: the ability to see the world through another’s eyes. In times of deep political polarization, such imagination is not a luxury; it is a civic necessity.
Perhaps nowhere is the tension between education and politics more visible than on the university campus. Across the world, students and teachers who question authority face pressure, censorship, or surveillance. Universities are asked to “stay apolitical,” as though knowledge itself could be detached from life. But education that fears politics ceases to be education. It becomes indoctrination in slow motion. The real purpose of education is not to protect students from uncomfortable ideas, but to equip them to face those ideas critically. As Paulo Freire wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system, or it becomes the practice of freedom.”
A free university is not one without politics, but one where every politics can be debated. The ability to question authority — whether state, market, or tradition — is not a threat to democracy but its lifeblood. When we silence the campus, we shrink the imagination of the nation.
In the end, both education and politics ask the same question: What kind of human being do we wish to create? The answer defines not only our classrooms and parliaments but our collective destiny. John Dewey, the American philosopher, saw education as the foundation of democracy. “Democracy,” he wrote, “has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” If schools and universities stop nurturing curiosity, compassion, and dissent, democracy itself begins to age and stiffen.
The true measure of a nation’s progress is not how many engineers or coders it produces, but how many citizens it inspires to think ethically and act courageously. Education must remain the conscience of politics, not its servant. It must teach us to ask questions even of the systems that educate us.
We live in a time when every aspect of learning — from textbooks to technology — is being politicized. Yet the answer is not to depoliticize education, but to humanize politics through education. A society that fears ideas is a society that fears itself. The classroom is not just a place where facts are taught; it is where freedom begins. To defend education, then, is to defend the future of democracy itself.
The writer is Assistant Professor, Imphal College
