The Government’s move to restructure higher education is welcome. But it has missed on the most glaring omission in this regard which is a overhaul of under-graduate curricula which still suffers from Macaulay obsession of textual knowledge, writes Devesh Vijay
The Union Government has launched a major restructuring drive of the higher education system in the country which calls for extensive deliberation among all stake holders. There are several promising reforms proposed by the Modi Government, which includes promotion of new world-class universities; increased autonomy for grade-A colleges; new online learning resources; and linking of teachers’ promotions to research as well as students’ feedback. Such promises, if implemented with rigour, can come a long way to reform the educational sector in India.
However, it is unfortunate that the latest draft of the National Education Policy is reticent about some other reforms without which a turn-around in the country’s 40,000 odd degree colleges would remain a pipe-dream.
The most glaring omission in this regard is the overhaul of our undergraduate curricula which still suffers from Macaulay Obsession with textual knowledge and written exams at the expense of skills, values and all-round development of pupils’ personality. Afflicted with such foundational limitations, our higher education naturally fails to serve the pedagogic needs of pupils, as well as of the community.
While only a handful of our learning institutions figure in top 500 universities in the world, a vast majority of our colleges that engage about six million students now, are practically dysfunctional due to rampant absenteeism among teachers as well as students; dearth of learning materials in many Indian languages; corruption in appointments and promotions; mass copying and circulation of fake mark-sheets in some States and, most critically, overwhelming under/unemployment among pass-outs who waste a good part of their youth just cramming for a few thousand Government jobs often after graduation.
The rot is so deep even in Government colleges that students enroll in parallel coaching and even after spending lakhs in these centres, still queue up for clerical and even grade IV jobs of sweepers and peons as present pedagogy leaves them wholly unprepared for life after college.
In this context, the most important measure that can help change our under-graduate teaching is re-balancing of curricula to give more space for skills and values alongside textual knowledge and upgradation of ‘extra-curricular activities’ as mandatory facets of college education.
When we talk of expanding skill training in colleges, we are not referring to just vocational skills that have been high in the Government’s agenda, but a broader range of ‘life-skills’, including social skills and emotional balance, first aid and disaster response training, physical fitness and entrepreneurship, logical thinking and legal literacy and inculcation of community service and civic values besides sports.
Upgrading ‘extra-curricular’ learnings in colleges would not, however, actualise their full potential. To make them truly vibrant, they need to be made a part of the curriculum and their grades must be shown in degrees too. Further, if selections for careers like civil services and entrance to IIMs and IITs etc, could also be linked to the candidates’ skills and values (by according say, 10 per cent weightage to them in entrance to these valued streams), pupils’ and parents’ attitudes towards holistic education would change too.
To assess and compare pupils’ social work, fine arts and innovations, online videos showcasing these skills could then be considered in final selections by concerned boards. A major benefit of such a correction would be that lakhs of aspirants for civil services and engineering would be drawn into community work, entrepreneurship and wholesome personality development instead of pouring all their energy into mastery of texts in their most critical and productive years.
Fortunately, a majority of the proposed ‘extra-curricular’ learnings do not require major funding or fresh recruitment and can be imparted through short courses conducted by the existing staff. An undergraduate curriculum that is liberated from academics’ obsession with texts and ideologies would not only be useful for a vast majority of students, who do not plan to become researchers or university teachers, but would also help in showcasing and rewarding many non-academic skills nurtured more easily among the peasant and working class families and first generation learners.
The broadening of the curriculum at the undergraduate level, however, would increase the load of learning on students. To balance this, readings must be pruned and leaner texts must be brought in so that academic specialisation is deferred to post-graduate studies except in select honours courses catering to those who may decide early on academic careers. This does not disregard the value of intensive academic learning but proposes merely that gains from deferring such details to post-graduate courses are more for majority of undergraduates than the loss accruing from thinner texts for those approaching 20.
A rigid divide between vocational education and academic courses is being re-thought globally. A meaningful reform in this direction, in our country, could be found in incorporating at least one humanities/social science paper in each semester in all polytechnics, IITs and Kaushal Vikas Kendras to balance market-driven learning with a golden touch of humanities as tried in many technical institutes in the West and in our own IITs too.
These proposals may sound radical to the academic bureaucracy trained in Macaulyan pedagogy; but in reality they are overdue and essential to save millions of undergraduates from the clutches of a dated process that was brought into India to produce clerks and was questioned by original thinkers from Rousseau and Russell to the Mahatma and Tagore repeatedly. It is nothing but intellectual inertia which prevents us from giving the youth what they need rather than what we academics learnt, years ago.
(The writer is Senior Fellow, Indian Council of Social Science Research)