Even as the energies of Delhi University’s (DU) faculty and administration are absorbed in battling over the four year program, few are questioning the raison d’etre of higher education more broadly. The real questions today are not how long a degree should be, but the extent to which universities enable their students to think critically and analytically, and the way in which university education builds upon the much larger stock of knowledge available in the world. In particular, the major challenge is how to perform the difficult balancing task of being both disinterested – seeking knowledge for its own sake; and engaged with the issues of society.
While DU’s Vice Chancellor Dinesh
Singh is justifiably concerned only about his own university, the real fault lies
with the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). Rather than enabling a
few elite students to merge seamlessly into the US higher education system, the
grounds on which Minister of State, Shashi Tharoor, justified DU’s four year
program, the Ministry should think of ways to improve what passes by the name
of higher education in this country as a whole. A little travel by cattle class
to rural degree colleges might help. In
some places, leave alone students, even their teachers are hard put to name a
single book they have read in the last year. In others, committed college
teachers face considerable odds, including long hours of teaching at low
remuneration which leaves them with little time for research, mindboggling
commutes, no library facilities and first generation learners for whom there
are no vernacular textbooks. A four year program under these conditions would
make no sense at all, and for one university, even one as large and prestigious
as DU, to function out of sync with the rest also makes little sense.
More importantly, however, higher
education cannot be taken out of the context of education as a whole. It should
not fall on a university, as it currently does, to make good the basic skills a
child should have learnt in school, including reading and writing. The
government’s failure to implement the Right to Education (RTE) in schools says
much about its commitment to higher education as well.
Not only do students graduating from most
of our colleges get no decent education, they often lose the native wisdom they
came with. Whereas earlier, ordinary people used home treatments for many
illnesses, under the weight of commodification, many skills and kinds of
knowledge are being lost, as people purchase most of what they need from the
market. The National Knowledge Commission’s list of some of the traditional knowledge
available in India includes over 40,000 plant-based drug formulations, and over
4502 agricultural practices. Of course, not all traditional practices are good,
and many have inbuilt gender, caste and class biases.
Yet, few of India’s graduates are able
to relate to this immense body of knowledge, either to build on the good or
reject the bad. We are constantly told
by the government and corporates alike that people must leave their farms and migrate
to cities, thus leaving their knowledge behind; artisanal, pastoral, fishing
and forest communities are made to feel their occupations are inferior. The
only job considered desirable is a white collar urban job, and the only question
that appears to excite the minds of our educational authorities is how best to
fill the existing jobs with suitable personnel.
Of course graduates need employment, but
an education policy that confines itself to the less than 10% of employment
that the formal sector constitutes, is bound to shortchange the remaining 90%.
To quote the national Knowledge Commission again, “(p)rincipled
commercialization of our cultural, creative and legacy practices has the
potential of generating employment for at least 100 million people and an
annual revenue of at least Rs.600,000 crores per year.’
One might argue
that DU’s four year foundation courses with their stress on hands on projects are
precisely an attempt to open students up to their wider surroundings. But
university research must be different from school summer homework. Suggested
project work like “Choose any one community other than your own to study how it
has changed” or “Measure the impact of University on the economic life of the
neighboring areas” (sic), has to be accompanied with the basic tools to
understand what concepts like “change”, “impact”, or “economic life” mean. Such
seemingly simple concepts may be quite complicated when one begins to really
study them. For instance, to measure change, one must have a baseline, identify
certain criteria along which one can assess change, explore causality and so
on. All this requires some theory of how social transformation takes place. A
university must liase with the wider world, but not at the risk of losing its
own character and the value addition that serious scholarship offers.
As they stand, many of the foundation courses are
wholly illiterate; quite apart from the grammatical mistakes, even the
formatting of the syllabus available online at the DU website suggests a
hurried cut and paste job. Imagine the
absurdity of teaching students about unrelated topics like “Media, Cinema,
sports, economic challenges and potentialities, access to education;
collaboration in natural resources governance” all in one week (Session 14 of
the course in geographic and socio-economic diversity). As far as I know, India
has only one Constitution, but the same course will teach us about the “Constitutions of India, Values,
symbols” (Session 13). The readings are entirely unconnected to
the syllabus; and just as the history faculty was not consulted in the making
of the course on history, the sociologists were not deemed fit to comment on
geographic and socio-economic diversity.
The four year program may do many things
– but providing higher education is not one of them. The Ministry for Human
Resource Development may have several concerns – but sadly, what Indian
education should mean for Indian students is not one of them.
A slightly different version appeared in the Times of India, May 26 2013
