The Hindu : The education wars

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jan 08, 2004

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

The education wars

By Pratap Bhanu Mehta

While every other sector of the Indian economy is being deregulated, education is becoming one giant appendage of the Human Resource Development Ministry.

FOR ANYONE under the illusion that the Ministry of Human Resources Development would limit its myopic designs for higher education to rewriting a few textbooks, the last few weeks should come as a wake up call. Every major institution of higher education, from the Indian Institutes of Management to the Indian Institutes of Technology, from universities to professional bodies such as the council of architects, from private institutions to foreign players are now subject to a single-point agenda that defines higher education policy: control and centralisation. While every other sector of the Indian economy is being deregulated, being given the space for experimentation and innovation, education is becoming one giant appendage of the Ministry and its minions like the University Grants Commission and the All India Council of Technical Education.

The quest for centralisation and control can be seen across more dimensions than would be decent to list. Day-to-day interference in autonomous bodies and institutions over matters ranging from appointments to finances is increasing. The UGC is proposing a model act for all universities, the sum and substance of which will be to erode university autonomy. And the UGC seems to be under the bizarre illusion that there is a single solution for the more than 200 universities in India. Even the appointment of professors of eminence will under new proposals be centralised. Curricula are being standardised, by insisting on greater implementation of the so-called model curriculum of the UGC. This model curriculum, of uneven quality in any case, is based again on the bizarre pedagogic principle that all curriculums across the country should look similar, that teachers should have minimum autonomy in bringing to the classroom their sense of the importance and excitement of the subject. The UGCs proposals are more about creating administrative structures rather than facilitating high quality innovation and will do nothing to enhance the quality of higher education.

The Ministry, the UGC or the AICTE are becoming assertive in dictating admissions policies, proposing more standardised tests, and common examinations. This seems innocuous enough. But its net effect will be to stifle creativity and innovation in education. The centrality of competitive examinations in our admissions process is ruining rather than enhancing the quality of education. These examinations are again based on false pedagogic principles.

We have an extraordinary tendency to take an institution from the West and then exaggerate its scope to the point where it subverts the original intent of the institution. We tend to forget that in the American academic system, test scores, be it SAT, GRE, GMAT, or LSAT are only one small component of an admissions process that still heavily relies on educational performance in your institution, letters of recommendation, work experience, achievement and so forth. These tests are treated as markers of threshold eligibility; they are not the criteria for admission. In India tests have more or less come to displace every other consideration. The HRD Ministry's suggestion to have the IIMs even abolish group interviews is symptomatic of the extent to which these tests are now treated as central to admissions at the expense of everything else. What are the consequences of this centrality?

Competitive examinations have almost entirely displaced performance in your regular institution in the order of importance. There is thus very little incentive for students to see their regular courses as anything but placeholders while they take entrance examinations. Is it possible to even imagine a vibrant academic culture if an educational system consistently gives signals that your performance in regular classes will not count for as much as competitive examinations? The entire academic orientation shifts towards cracking examinations at the expense of curiosity, experiment and a sense of learning. It is small wonder that our universities have become basically irrelevant to a student's life prospects in any meaningful sense.

The place of standardised examinations is a complicated matter. The issue of principle is this: should autonomous institutions, within limits, have some say over their admissions policies, or do we want a one-size-fits-all solution? And when professional bodies, for instance, the Council for Architecture, were running examinations, why the mania to transfer control of them to a single body like the AICTE? The only possible reason is not pedagogic but political: the quest for control. Do we want one gigantic education bureaucracy that knows more about bureaucracy than education shackling the system with as many regulations as possible?

The UGC is rightly urging institutions to raise more resources on their own. But the UGC should first acknowledge that it has in the past set perverse incentives by cutting grants of institutions that did raise resources. And now it will set standardised targets for resource generation, within very short-term time horizons that are almost guaranteed to pressure universities into offering courses that are incompatible with their mission.

The story of the centralisation mania could go on. It is true that private universities and foreign educational institutions need some quality control. But in the name of quality control, the UGC is again going to stifle private initiative. For one thing, most private institutions still have to get affiliated to a state university to grant degrees, and are thus prevented from any innovation whatsoever. In the name of regulation we will again get control. Second, we should honestly ask: what is the locus standi of the UGC to be a custodian of quality control? The state system has for decades perpetrated an education fraud on millions of students. By admitting that university degrees are not worth much and therefore even full time BA and BSc students be allowed to pursue a "vocational" degree simultaneously, the UGC has acknowledged what a fraud Indian higher education is, especially for 70 per cent of the students enrolled in basic social sciences, sciences courses across the country. And more than 100,000 of our best students every year are voting by their feet and leaving, often paying a packet to do so.

Even at the risk of sounding graceless, the saddest part of this story is the complete self-abdication of institutions of higher education. Few Vice-Chancellors are willing to take a stand to protect the autonomy of their institutions and invoke provisions of their Acts that clearly suggest that the UGC should have little locus standi on regulating fees, curriculum, admissions and academic programmes. The UGC is happy to become a conduit for HRD Ministry and university administrations in turn a conduit for the UGC's designs. The teaching community has very little credibility in wider society to be able to defend its claims well. Its own self-serving conduct in the past, its domination by teacher-politicians, and its constant succumbing to divide and rule tactics of administrators, give the impression to the wider society that teachers are part of the problem not the solution. When was the last time a DUTA or a JNUTA had any creative ideas about protecting the professional integrity of universities? Most of our talented professors have seceded from the system in the sense that the only way they can survive is by not taking strong stands on institutional issues, by avoiding controversy. To put it simply: there is no institutional initiative, innovation in pedagogic practice, and collective action on principled grounds or leadership coming from within the teaching community itself. This is the vacuum that politicians, bureaucrats and occasionally even judges are now easily occupying. The IIMs' brief protest notwithstanding, when was the last time higher education professionals managed to take on the Ministry on a matter of principle and win? Is it any wonder that politicians feel emboldened to dictate terms to even the most hallowed of our institutions?

I once described Murli Manohar Joshi as the most successful Minister in this Government. He achieves the tasks he sets for himself. It is a measure of his achievement that he can contemplate such far reaching changes in higher education, whose purpose appears to be greater centralisation and control, rather than enhancing the quality of education, without too much effective opposition. The war over the soul of Indian higher education is already being lost, because the Ministry knows exactly what it wants, while educational professionals continue to pretend that nothing of significance is happening. But make no mistake: higher education will come under more political control. While other sectors gain new freedoms, higher education will be killed by a mania for control.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Opinion

News Update

Stories in this Section

ANOTHER ATTEMPT AT SAFTA

SHARING RIVER WATERS

The education wars

The ruins hold the answers

An onerous responsibility