‘Going to the field is compulsory for our students’ – told a professor, ‘…even I go to field regularly. As you see, the knowledge of the farmers is quite poor, particularly about the latest technologies.’ ‘We go to collect data to understand farmer’s problem’ – chirped a student from behind.

Our agriculture education still sees famer as only an outside stakeholder – we ‘go’ to ‘them’ to understand ‘their problem’ and ‘offer solution’. While uttering this sentence in front of professors and students from an eminent university, explicitly mentioning the quote-unquote, I realised – I failed to convey what I wanted to mean through this sentence. Various such responses came to defend their position vis-à-vis my observation.

We were burning our hands by conducting a certificate course on Agroecology for researchers, activists and practitioners since last 7 years. About 170 students from 15 States of India and 4 other countries attended. Agroecology, as a subject in mainstream education system was fairly new in India that time. Though methods of agroecology have been ‘practiced’ since long – the science of it is quite new, so is the movement. There were farmers’ movement and peasant’s movement in India – but is mostly around economic issues, land right and forest rights. Even the current farmer’s struggle was revolving around market issues only. Agroecology learning still brings out the connotation and expectation of an organic agriculture or sustainable agriculture course. It has been a challenge in initial days of the course to make pupil understand that it deals with open ended questions where the students get to learn through problem solving related to real phenomena rather than pre-fixed prescriptions.

The initial expectations of the pupil were mostly to learn techniques of organic farming. Overfocus on technology had been a modern phenomenon of simplistic way of handling a challenge. As the days go by, the divide between Science and Technology is slowly melting away. The modern-day Science has become quite simplistic and reductionist – like providing a quick prescription – which is also looming in to our education system, particularly agriculture. One pesticide for one pest, is a wonderful example of such reductionism. Even the so-called alternatives to conventional input intensive agriculture are also falling back on a prescriptive mode offering technologies. Beejamrit, Jeevamrit, Mulching, Brahmastra.This is a different domain of discussion though – but overfocus on techno-fixing has also creeped into our agriculture education system conveniently.