( Highlighting mine: cm)
We Do Need That Education...
China is re-orienting and investing in its higher
education sector to meet the challenges of the
future, but India continues to ignore the
systemic collapse that is crying out for an
urgent and drastic overhaul.
HARSH V. PANT
A few days back, two news stories appeared in the
Indian media. One was the absence of Indian
universities from a list of top 200 (not 100!)
higher educational institutions in the world
while as many as 10 Chinese universities made it
to the list. The other was about the letter that
the Aligarh Muslim University Vice Chancellor has
been forced to write to the parents of his
students threatening to convert the academic
session into a "Zero Year" in case of a repeat of
campus violence -- in mid-September, earlier in
the year, the university had been forced to close
down after violence and arson on the campus in
protest against the murder of a student. These
news items are symptomatic of the rot that has
set in the Indian higher education system, which
seems to be in the news only for wrong reasons.
Amid all the claims about the rise of India as a
major player in the international system, it is
often ignored that India continues to face some
fundamental obstacles in its drive to achieve its
full potential. One of the most significant of
which is the crisis in India's higher education
system, something that gets drowned in the din of
those feel-good stories about the engineers and
managers emerging from India's premier
professional institutions such as the IITs and
the IIMs.
Sometime back, inaugurating a national conference
of Vice Chancellors (VCs), organised by the
University Grant Commission, the union human
resources development minister, Arjun Singh,
described higher education in India as a sick
child and asked that it should be given a new
direction so as to be able to better serve the
cause of the nation's youth. Seeking a road map
on higher education from the VCs, he asked them
to define "what should be the content, extent,
methodology and basic ingredients of higher
education." While Singh's comments certainly need
to be welcomed, especially if they are able to
generate a debate in the country on the future of
higher education, it is indeed surprising that it
took him more than three years to address what
should have been his top priority when he assumed
office. It is also interesting to note that some
of the minister's own actions in the past three
years have not exactly served the goals of
improving the quality of higher education in the
country.
Knowledge is the key variable that will define
the global distribution of power in the 21st
century and India has also embarked on a path of
economic success relying on its high-tech
industries. But given the fragile state of
India's higher education system, it is not clear
if India will be able to sustain its present
growth trajectory. While India's nearest
competitor, China is re-orienting and investing
in its higher education sector to meet the
challenges of the future, India continues to
ignore the problem as if the absence of
world-class research in Indian universities is
something that will rectify itself on its own.
While India may be producing well-trained
engineers and managers from its flagship IITs and
IIMs, it is not doing so in sufficient numbers.
There is also a growing concern that while
private engineering and management institutions
are flourishing due to rising demand, their
products are not of the quality that can help
India compete effectively in the global
marketplace.
India has the third largest higher education
system in the world, behind only the US and
China, that is churning out around 2.5 million
graduates every year. Not only is this catering
to just about 10 percent of India's youth but the
quality of this output is also below par.If we
leave aside the IITs, the IIMs, and some other
institutions such as the AIIMs, the Indian
Institute of Science, and Tata Institute of
Fundamental Research, we will find a higher
education sector that is increasingly unwilling
and unable to bear the weight of the rising
expectations of an emerging India. The Indian
universities, which should have been the centre
of cutting edge research and hub of intellectual
activity, are more in the news for political
machinations than for research excellence. Years
of under-investment in higher education and a
mistaken belief in providing uniform support to
all universities irrespective of the quality of
their output has made sure that the academics
have neither the adequate support to provide
top-quality education to their students nor do
they have any incentive to undertake cutting-edge
research. India desperately needs
research-oriented globally recognised
universities to be able to participate in the
modern-day knowledge-based global economy to its
full potential.
In his perceptive meditation on the state of
higher education in the US, The Closing of the
American Mind, Allan Bloom concludes that "a
crisis in the university, the home of reason, is
perhaps the profoundest crisis" for a democratic
nation. Though the crisis that he was drawing
attention to arose from a different set of issues
facing the US academia in the 1960s and 1970s,
the present crisis in the Indian universities is
equally profound and has the potential to
directly affect the future of India.
This brings us to the larger issue that is at
stake in this debate about the future of higher
education in India. Because of the demands of the
market, most students today find engineering,
medicine or management to be the most lucrative
options to study. And the Indian education system
is such that it has created an artificial divide
between various streams so the context in which
its engineers, its doctors and its managers are
emerging is not shaped by the liberal ethic of
higher education, something that should be the
essence of higher education. Social science and
humanities are being devalued today vis-à-vis
science and technology which can have some
serious consequences.
Democracy requires a questioning citizenry
brought up on liberal education that gives its
citizens the ability to interrogate and
investigate the claims of authority. The real
value of liberal education comes from a
distinctive quality of mind and character that
encourages the ability to explore moral and
political questions from a variety of
perspectives. India's higher education has long
ceased to ask big questions, the most important
of which should be: What kind of citizens is the
Indian education system producing?
Some scholars have pointed out that a process of
privatisation of higher education system is
underway in India, a result not of some
comprehensive programme of education reform but
as a consequence of the collapse of the public
sector and the withdrawal of the middle classes.
This is indeed a worrisome trend and it is hoped
that the government realises that just by pumping
more money into the system or by building more
universities it will not be able to remedy the
underlying rot in the system.
With the National Knowledge Commission calling
for a fundamental change in higher education and
the HRD Minister finally realising that something
drastic needs to be done, the stage is hopefully
set for a radical overhaul of the higher
education sector. However, despite its tall
claims, the present government's record so far
inspires little confidence that it is up to this
task as it has continued to ignore the systemic
collapse of Indian higher education for the last
three and a half years.It would be a grave
travesty if a government led by an educationist
himself fails to do anything to stem the rot in
India's higher education.
Harsh V. Pant teaches at King's College London
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