Opinion Why a noisy classroom must not be silenced
We ask students to be Socratic and implore them to argue, debate, question, dissent, but our courses are structured like the Bhagavad Gita, where, after a conversation between two tributaries of thought, one must be integrated with the other,
‘Agree’ derives from ‘gratus’ — to please. The kind of agreement that is being forged, besides revving up our stock of agreeability, is to please oneself — to feel safe that there is no other opinion besides ours. 
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“Why aren’t you noisy? Why are you all so generically polite? Why don’t you want to say anything to disturb us?” I find myself saying this to my students from time to time, my voice perhaps never forgetting to italicise the “us”. It has taken me some time to understand that it might not be their fault. Our pedagogical practice, such are its invisible codes and modes, protects us from the dissent and disagreement that we celebrate in the classroom: We are like the teacher who stands beside an archer teaching them how to shoot at a faraway target; our proximity — being beside instead of, say, across, distant from the archer-student — protects us.
“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating,” writes John Cage in Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961). We seek the obverse, we coordinate our pedagogy for the opposite, for harmony. In our rhetoric is the urge to free ourselves from what we have been conditioned to characterise as noise, in our idioms is a hankering for versions of silence — we dislike the idea of “noise” so much that we call the seemingly unserious “bakwas”, as if the unimportant emits noise.
We do not want to acknowledge the fundamentalist character of agreement, the absence of necessary noisiness — our students write emails that are tailored to make their personalities seem agreeable, that make it seem that universities are finishing schools for teaching academic etiquette and corporatised politeness. Drugged by good intentions, compelled by our desire for a fairer world, and convinced that our belief in teaching particular knowledge systems is the only possible way to achieve this, we’ve structured the pedagogical form of our courses and syllabi around the telos of eventual agreement. In the process, we have failed to teach our students that the silence of agreement, whether it is achieved through bullying, bureaucracy or pedagogical faith, can be noisy, the kind of noise that they tutor themselves to avoid in their interactions with those in power. Such is its architecture that we sit with those who agree with us, whether in faculty meetings or Parliament.
We teach Plato’s Republic and ask our students to be Socratic, we implore them to argue, debate, question, dissent, but our courses are structured like the Bhagavad Gita, where, after a conversation between two tributaries of thought, one must be integrated with the other and become one stream, as Arjun was persuaded by Krishna. From the “argumentative Indian” we are now coaxed, bullied and instructed to become the “agreementative Indian”.
This idea of agreement that is emerging from our classrooms, where a common enemy — whether systemic or an individual — is fought with all the might of our theories and good practices, is gradually rendering us incapable of having conversations with those who do not share our intellectual and emotional histories. We’re being led to think of “tradition” as having been built from consensus instead of disagreement. We’ve become academics who, in various subsets of affiliation, brought together by disciplines, research areas or family and friend networks, perform what has been characterised as compulsive nobility. We defend our discipline and its practitioners, those that share the same networks, with a kind of skill and verbal violence that is often damaging to the health and careers of those attacked. The battleground for this is various: The academic conference, the classroom, and, now quite often, social media.
“Agree” derives from “gratus” — to please. The kind of agreement that is being forged, besides revving up our stock of agreeability, is to please oneself — to feel safe that there is no other opinion besides ours. It is control by proxy. Jukti, tarka, galpo — logic, debate, story — the trinity that produces philosophy, art and science, is gradually being bleached away by this compulsive expectation of agreement. This is why, irrespective of political ideology, we have all been turned into bhakts, into devotees and unpaid employees of those we must agree with, whether family, RWA or the nation. Like children who take it as a slight when an adult says that pink is not their favourite colour, we take everything as a personal affront. The Bhakti poets had rebelled against institutionalised agreement — bhakts today only agree with each other.
In a country where spouses can’t often agree on where the wet towel should be kept, it is silly and strenuous to keep playing the Agreementative Indian.
Roy, a poet and writer, is associate professor of creative writing, Ashoka University. Views are personal
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