Sunday Posts

College Education may indeed change as the social demands of it transform radically. We can debate whether this is good or bad - I have argued elsewhere that there is little objective discussion here and a lot of self-interested talk - but one frightening consequence of this is the impending demise of Humanities. This threat is less clear in some countries than others. An extreme case is India, which is fast becoming a nation of Engineers (and also Doctors and Lawyers), where humanities is usually treated as a subject for girls, or those who are not expected to make a living. But this is also pronounced in countries like the United States, where humanities funding is under threat in many states, and even in Western European countries, which were traditionally focused on liberal education but that edifice is being dismantaled rapidly with the roll-back of public funding of Higher Education. In response to this decline of the humanities, a number of books and articles have been wri...

Conversations change. The idea of a Nineteenth century college education could be, with some generalisation, summarised as one to build the character of the student, with the assumption that with those character strengths, they would be able to learn and lead in different walks of life. But, as professions start to emerge, Character was no longer enough. In the professional society, technical skills came into prominence, and indeed, became the point of education. The conversation reversed - a good technocrat was understood to possess the character anyway. These ideas may be at an inflection point yet again, but before we get into this, it is worth wondering what character meant and why we abandoned its quest for technical skills in the first place. I am acutely conscious of the gross generalisations that one has to make in a conversation like this, including the implication of epochal change - that one thing neatly went out of fashion when the other thing came in. For a fact, we ...

I was in the United States when the news of US Supreme Court disallowing gay marriage bans hit the wire. I did not follow all the developments, but picked up the news dinnertime while looking at the TV in the dinner hall of the hotel. Delighted, I turned to colleagues sitting at the dinner table and declared my joy at such a landmark judgement. The two other non-Americans present at the table obviously agreed, but only American colleague present shook his head in dismay - I am shocked! he said. In the ensuing discussion, I picked up the reasons for his objection, stemming from his belief, some perfectly justifiable ones once you accept the basis - the religious belief - to be valid. And, I do, as I am aware that my delight is also informed by my own preference (and belief) that people should be free to choose who they want to marry! The fact that I continue to believe my colleague is a perfectly decent, rational and reasonable individual, even if he disagrees with what I think one of...

A kind commentator dropped by and left a comment in one of the older posts, pointing out that the approach I wanted to promote - a practical education built around the humanities - is what he calls building of character. In the work he does, he focuses on Character and Competence, side by side, which makes abundant sense.  Indeed, character is a high sounding word with a lot of legacy, most of it going back to colonial times. So, talking about character in my work, which is mostly done in developing countries, is not going to be straightforward, without explaining what it is going to be about. But, such explanation is needed and timely, because one could perhaps claim with justification that the technocratic nature of education is the reason why we have the social problems we have. But even before we go into the discussion about character, it is important to state, perhaps re-state, the case why we need to look at humanities seriously. Those who believe that humanities ed...