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The weblog of Utkarshraj Atmaram

Posts Tagged ‘india’

India’s education problem

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

My Trimester 1 end-term exams at SPJIMR ended a last week. Having spent a few months studying management at SPJIMR, I was reflecting over my engineering education experience and how it compares to my current academic experience.

The management education at SPJIMR largely revolves around understanding – most of the tests are open book/open laptop, and don’t require any rote learning. The Mumbai University exams were an altogether different experience: “mugging up” was an absolute necessity, a vast majority of the student ‘projects’ were farce, and the syllabus was completely outdated.

Today, I was going through an article by Elizabeth Haas Edersheim, which speaks about two initiatives taken by the Government to tackle the primary challenges being faced by the Indian education system: (1) revamping an outdated curriculum and (2) upgrading the faculty.

While making the curriculum up-to-date and ‘upgrading’ the existing faculty are necessary, I believe that the primary challenges are two other inter-related issues:

  1. Ensuring good quality of education amid the exponential increase in the number of educational institutes
  2. Attracting bright minds to the teaching profession

With incompetent regulatory bodies like AICTE (which is mired in controversy and corruption) at helm, the increase in the number of educational institutes (esp. MBA and engineering colleges) over the past decade has not resulted in a proportional increase in quality of education. On the contrary, the number of ‘accredited degree mills’ has increased significantly.

There are a number of colleges (esp. MBA institutes) that charge lakhs of rupees as fee, and as a result have excellent infrastructure to showcase. These institutes have great-looking brochures that boast about the quality of education and rich academic experience on the offer. But, the truth is that the academic standards in most of these colleges are pathetic, to say the least. What’s the reason?

First, there is lack of good faculty: teaching, as an occupation, is not the primary choice for vast majority of the bright Indian students. Most of these students prefer taking up MNC jobs, which promise them a good salary and a higher standard of living. Many of those who are interested in teaching end up teaching in coaching classes, which offer them better salaries. Those belonging the academically inclined and research-oriented minority, are forced to limit themselves to the the top Indian institutes or the renowned foreign universities, where they get respect and money for what they do, in addition to good students and a wide range of opportunities.

This has become a vicious cycle: Because the salaries in most colleges are not good, these colleges attract incompetent faculty. Because the faculty is incompetent, the students are incompetent. Because both faculty and students are incompetent, the colleges do not have a sound reputation. Because the students are bad and the colleges are not reputed, the competent academics stay away from these institutes, paving way for incompetent faculty members who are ready to work at low salaries.

Issues like caste-based reservations only add to the problem.

The main challenge that India faces is ensuring that the bright minds in the nation have incentives (monetary or otherwise) to pick up teaching as a profession. This will automatically result in a better education system.

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BJP Manifesto: The bogus Macaulay quote refuses to die

Saturday, April 4th, 2009

BJP’s Lok Sabha Elections 2009 manifesto (PDF), released yesterday, starts with the preface written by Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi (“To build a prosperous, powerful nation, recall India’s past“).

I found L K Advani’s IT vision (released a few days ago) and some other parts of the BJP manifesto very impressive. But, I can’t say the same about Dr. Joshi’s piece. It was the typical “India was the most advanced nation, but the British destroyed us” rant. While I agree that the British rule was responsible for a lot of bad things that happened to the Indian subcontinent, it’s hard to ignore the most glaring mistake in the manifesto – the spurious quote attributed to Thomas Babington Macaulay. Dr. Joshi writes:

India’s prosperity, its talents and the state of its high moral society can be best understood by what Thomas Babington Macaulay stated in his speech of February 02, 1835, in the British Parliament. “I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief, such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such high caliber, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very back bone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self esteem, their native culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.” This policy was implemented very meticulously by Britishers and the education system was created to make Indian’s [sic] ignorant about themselves.

Well, the problem is that Macaulay’s Minute on Education (2 February 1835) doesn’t contain these words, and Macaulay wasn’t addressing the British parliament on 2 February 1835 – he was in India.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Could this quote be from some other speech by Macaulay, then? I don’t think so. Anybody who has read Macaulay’s speech, would know that a man like him would have never praised India so generously. It’s hard to imagine Macaulay talking about India using words like “such high moral values, people of such high caliber” or “spiritual and cultural heritage”). As evident by the speech made on 2 February 1835, he had a superiority complex:

“I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”

“And I certainly never met with any orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit [sic] poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations.”

“…when a nation of high intellectual attainments undertakes to superintend the education of a nation comparatively ignorant…”

“(On Sanskrit and Arabic literature) But to encourage the study of a literature, admitted to be of small intrinsic value, only because that literature inculcated the most serious errors on the most important subjects, is a course hardly reconcilable with reason, with morality, or even with that very neutrality which ought, as we all agree, to be sacredly preserved. It is confined that a language is barren of useful knowledge. We are to teach it because it is fruitful of monstrous superstitions. We are to teach false history, false astronomy, false medicine, because we find them in company with a false religion. We abstain, and I trust shall always abstain, from giving any public encouragement to those who are engaged in the work of converting the natives to Christianity. And while we act thus, can we reasonably or decently bribe men, out of the revenues of the State, to waste their youth in learning how they are to purify themselves after touching an ass or what texts of the Vedas they are to repeat to expiate the crime of killing a goat?

Obviously, the infamous quote mentioned in the BJP’s manifesto is a fabricated one. It was not fabricated by BJP, though – the story goes earlier than that. Burjor Avari, in his India: The Ancient Past (p 19-20), while citing this quote as an example of “tampering with historical evidence”, writes:

“No proof of this statement has been found in any of the volumes containing the writings and speeches of Macaulay. In a journal in which the extract appeared, the writer did not reproduce the exact wording of the Minutes, but merely paraphrased them, using the qualifying phrase: ‘His words were to the effect.’ This is extremely mischievous, as numerous interpretations can be drawin from the Minutes.”

Now, I certainly don’t agree with Macaulay’s opinion on the Indian literature. And, by no means, I’m one of those “Macaulay’s children”. But, do we Indians need to propagate a fabricated quote to prove how great India is?

Recently, when we were celebrating the success of Slumdog Millionaire, some of our compatriots alleged that we Indians are “obsessed with western recognition”. Isn’t this fabrication, in an indirect way, an obsession with “western recognition”? Isn’t cooking up a quote about the greatness of Indian culture and misattributing it to an inimical British man an indication of being obsessed with the “western recognition”?

Belgian orientalist Koenraad Elst has written a detailed article on this spurious quote: A dubious quotation, a controversial reputation: the merits of Lord Macaulay. He says that the oldest traceable source of this quote appears to be a journal called The Awakening Ray (vol.4, no.5). Thanks to lazy writers who do not bother checking their sources, this quote has found its way to several blogs, books, news reports and other media.

While I agree that the Indian education system needs to be overhauled, I don’t think propagating fabricated quotes would be of much help.

This quote apart, there are many other things in Dr. Joshi’s preface that I’d like to comment on (the bit on the “Indian civilisation” being the “most ancient”, “foreign attacks and alien rule”, the statement about educated Indians having lost sight of India’s cultural and civilizational greatness, religions having existed “peacefully” in India etc.), but I’d save these for another post.

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