Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

‘Crisis of thinking in higher education’

Staff Reporter

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The higher education sector in the country is in the grip of a “crisis of thinking,” vice-chairman of the State Planning Board Prabhat Patnaik has said.

He was delivering the keynote address at a programme organised by the University of Kerala here on Monday to felicitate those who secured a doctoral degree in the year 2006.

Research is getting alienated from universities across the country. One reason is the setting up of separate institutions for research in science and for research in social issues. Many students who recognise the greatness of an academic life are not interested in doing research; they do not get any financial gains out of it.

Today many students after finishing their post graduate studies prefer to get employed through campus placements instead of doing research work. Multi-national companies are siphoning off to the world of business talent that make good contributions in the academic world. As the academic world cannot match the money being given by these corporate firms the number of students joining the latter is on the rise. As a consequence there is a dearth of brilliant minds in basic science and humanities programmes, he said.

The pull of the market means privatisation of education. What is at stake is the freedom for the generation of ideas. However the situation now is that students are compelled to think along the lines of the market forces. The concept of ‘centres of excellence’ is very much in vogue these days. Often such institutions turn out to be imitations of institutions in the West; clones of Harvard. The result is teachers who try to be clones of the West and students who are deeply frustrated. An education that is divorced form the social realities of the land is not education at all, he said.

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