Sunday Posts

University rankings are useless. They reflect irrelevant parameters (like how the ranked universities rank each other), elitist assumptions (how many students they reject) and encourage status quo (how much money they have). Besides, these rankings aggregate all these based on completely random distribution of weightage, which means nothing even if one was interested in some parameters that these include.  We are stupidly addicted to them. We make our children follow ranking, despite the huge financial burdens and emotional costs. Perfectly normal people indulge in corruption. Instead of learning and experience, we chase vanity, flaunting which college our children go to even at the cost of their well-being. We let self-appointed experts, mainly from media, soothe and deceive us with a single round number, pandering our innate silliness that all numbers must mean something. The status quo society that we lived in - ever since the end of history in the 90s - this mattered less than ...

The trouble with Critical Thinking is that we live in a society based on Mimicry. If we take away the mimicry, the whole society falls apart. That innovation is the basis of our economic progress is a modern myth, propagated in an industrial scale. But doing things similarly, rather than differently, is what keeps our society going. The trouble is that we have so convinced ourselves with the innovation myth. The whole idea of capitalist society stands on mimicry. Dating back to Adam Smith, its foundational idea was that we would desire things that others desire, because their desire indicated that these things are worth desiring after all. This is the fundamental idea that creates consumer demand, industrial production, finance capital and so on. It is about aspiring to be the same, rather than aspiring to be different, that drives our economy. Surely, the argument has moved forward since the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. As the individual has become the centre ...

One of the foundational industrial age belief is 'what gets measured, gets done'. This is indeed at the heart of scientific management and all the business models that we so love. The progresses in Information Technology came out of, primarily, our quest for measurements, so much so that we got used to the shorthand - 'Information Age' - when measuring and decision-making based on such measurements are the key organising principle of the whole society. Therefore, it is not surprising that the conversations in Education also revolves around measurement. Much of educational research is about what can be measured and how, driven primarily, but not exclusively, by the politics of public funding, to establish the 'worth' of one thing or another to be eligible for taxpayers' money. The private sector engagement in Education, either through large scale philanthropic engagements by people like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, or in the commercial ventures back...

For those who want to change the world through Powerpoint, there are some fundamental beliefs about Education. Like, education is about 'human capital', making the individuals receiving education economically productive.  And, that, education is important for national competitiveness, the better educated its people are, the more competitive a nation will be.  That education is really about skills - being able to do things - rather than learning: Knowledge can be acquired on-demand and at leisure.  That educators should build close connections with employers and look to align themselves with their future talent needs. These are ideas everyone - at least everyone who count - agree on. And, such agreement means that all the attention, along with all the money, gets diverted to certain specific things. And, with money and attention, a certain kind of education - a specific idea of education - becomes pre-eminent. It crowds out other ideas, drives out all...

Kishore Mahbubani calls India an 'Open Society with a Closed Mind' - in contrast with China's 'Closed Society with an Open Mind' - and he is certainly right. The apparent diversity of India, its vibrant democracy, quarrelsome TV programming and English speaking middle classes hide more than they tell: The first impression of 'everything goes' is deceptive and India presents one of the toughest environments for new ideas. This may sound counter-intuitive to those who are always afraid of the Chinese stealing their intellectual property. I am not necessarily arguing that the Chinese don't, but rather that they do because they are in the same race of creating new stuff. India is a comparatively safer environment not because Indians are more honest or they have greater regards for intellectual property in the Western sense, but because they care less about new ideas.  The other contra angle is certainly that of the great inventors and thought leadi...

Indeed, I have borrowed the title from Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz's classic study, because we are living through a time when the race has entered a new phase, showing up in all its splendour with anxious hinges and critical turns. It's time to decide and act, and every step counts. Of course, technology is not autonomous and we are indeed the 'driver in the driverless car', and the choices we make today will decide whether technologies will tear apart our society, as some fear, or, if it would unleash the next cycle of prosperity. The optimists have empirical evidence, indeed. They cite - and this is what Goldin and Katz were primarily looking at - Industrial Revolution. Despite all the early fears of job losses and social unrest, the technological progress eventually ended up unleashing a new era of prosperity. The prosperity took time to build, and there were many social unrests along the way: Malthus came along to make us think people can be surpluses and...

There is not much we agree upon these days, except that more and more people should go to college. This has become the self-evident truth of the late Twentieth century, and achieved the status of a divine revealation in the twentyfirst. Contrarian views, voiced from time to time by a few elitist conservatives, who believe college, along with the privileges to govern in perpetuity, should be preserved for a small group of people, look dated and out of place even among the political right. Countries speak of knowledge economy and equate it to the size of college-educated population. Technologists speak of automation and artificial intelligence and see college education essential for producing, consuming and living in the world they wish to make. Economists speak of productivity and equate it to the level of education. Everyone everywhere seems to think more college would mean more progress and well-being. This, without any real evidence! College, historically, has been a system of ...

I wrote previously about the College Trap ( see here ) - how college can't be denied to anyone in a democratic society and yet, the prevalence of college may privilege one kind of learning over others and undermine democracy itself - and, as someone pointed out to me, this is quite antithetical to my own ambitions of setting up a college eventually. At this point, my broad point about the inaneness of college education needed more empirical justification.  For a concrete example, I thought of picking Research Methods, that one thing that legitimises an academic degree, that magic wand that baptises a graduate. My choice is deliberate: I hated it and have long thought about why I hate it. And, the affectionate place that it holds in the academic imagination - in fact, it is itself the academic imagination - makes it a suitable candidate for interrogation.  I shall provide some more justification in case you are wondering what the fuss is about. Let's start with the qu...

It may seem a strange question, but this is one of the key debates in Education: Should Education be about acquiring knowledge or developing skills?  One side of the debate are people like E D Hirsch, Michael Gove and advocates of Common Core; on the other a diverse group of business executives and left-leaning educators, from those who think education should be about skills business needs to those who think what goes on as knowledge is really the dominant culture and it discriminates those from poor or minority backgrounds. Yes, I generalise, and there are many shades of argument on both sides. At the core, however, is the debate about the purpose of education along the lines of knowledge versus skills. It is important to remember in context that this is not an idle debate: The objective of both sides is to affect some sort of complete transformation of the education system. Besides, it will also be a mistake to think that both sides are starting from scratch and fightin...

I hope some people will agree with me if I say EdTech is over-rated. It's a nifty term, much broader than the older, nerdy, E-Learning; it is also a conscious claim to affinity with its famous and richer cousin, FinTech. What one gets to hear in the EdTech conference circuit is boasts about how many millions companies are raising, which is really meaningless in a world of loose monetary policy and inflated private valuations. The other most common refrain is how Educators don't get EdTech, which really means that this may be a set of characters in search of a play. Most of its boldest claims - Clouds of Schools, Self-directed Learners, Universal Access - remain forever in future, and only companies dealing with boring stuff - compliance training, video content, Learning Management System etc - make any money.  However, the overselling of EdTech creates bigger problems than sub-prime investment and pointless conferences. It crowds out the conversation about Education Innov...

Introduction   In the second decade of the new millennium - now - new questions about human abilities and human worth have arisen. A vast industry of computerisation and gradual rise of ‘machine intelligence’ challenged the prospect of ever-improving urban middle class life, replacing a vast number of secretarial, administrative and other ‘middle ability’ jobs with computer programmes, cheap workers overseas, and increasingly, with robots. Stagnated wages, disappearing jobs and breakdown of the ‘American Dream’ in its many global variants have led to a new ‘struggle for existence’ in the workplace. This technological phenomenon also meant an inversion of the role of Capital and Labour in the production process. With decline of large factories and their unionised workforces in the West (replaced by large factories and their non-unionised labour in China and Indonesia) and with most people turned into keen consumers of latest gadgetry, collective bargaining has fallen out of p...