Sunday Posts

My work is in international education. So my mantra is that education must be global! If we are not preparing our students for the global workplace, we are doing them a disservice, I say!  However, an interesting conversation with an young colleague made me pause and think. Her point, on reading India's new National Education Policy, was that the policy talks a lot about being Indian while promising to prepare Indian graduates for the global workplace. She saw this as an anomaly and hoped I would agree!  But here is my own confusion perhaps. I do think Indian education should be more Indian. I actually find the educated Indians disdain for their own countrymen disconcerting and believe that this is a crucial weakness of the Indian society. It weakens India as the Indian middle classes are increasingly disconnected from the real problems of their own country and try out various Made-in-America solutions rather than thinking on their own. And, I believe education, and particular...

As it rolls out its National Education Policy (NEP), India is faced with the dilemma that every other post-colonial nation has to answer: Whether to 'nationalise' higher education, by privileging traditional languages and 'Indian' knowledge over liberal humanities and cosmopolitan outlook? This is not the first time India is dealing with this question. The first time, just after the Independence, the answer was a resounding endorsement of cosmopolitan science, based on a modernist view of nation-building. Nehru wanted an India that looked forward, not backwards. The second time, in the 80s, shorn of the optimism and adrift in the neoliberal world, the answer was low on nation-building aspiration and overtly focused on technological cold-start.  This road now leads us to where we are - a deja vu all over again! The country has been a major beneficiary of globalisation, but its blessings were mixed. A lot of people has been left behind, communities have been replaced by a...

Unlike the Hollywood aliens, the future of Higher Education can not be expected to land in the United States alone. The American universities, of course, lead the world in academic prestige, cutting-edge research and endowments. They are, collectively, the best and the brightest, and attract the best researchers and best students from around the world. And they are not just intellectual world leaders but also represent the biggest education industry in the world, sprouting an ecosystem built around the success and prestige of the great universities. However, if higher education has to change and make sense in the future, this is exactly what needs to change. I write this as I am rather tired of reading literature coming out of the United States which portrays the future of higher education in the universalist terms. It seems that there is only one reality - that of higher education in America - and every other variation from around the world represents intermediate stages of a journey ...

India is where the future of higher education is being decided right now. Of course, the literature on the subject paints a different picture: This is mostly about the future of American Higher Education! The funding follows the same logic - funding technologies and enterprises based on the conversations in the United States.  Implicit in this is the assumption that the United States, the world-dominating civilisation of the moment, represents the peak civilisation, and all the other countries are on a journey - and are at different points - to become more like the United States. Therefore, the future of the future of anything is being more like America.  On the ground, the reality is very different. China has powered its way to global economic top table - and increasingly the academic one too - pragmatically picking and choosing elements of the American model, but steadfastly sticking to its own path. Now India comes to the party, belatedly acknowledging its vast waste of hum...

India's New Education Policy - which sets the legislative agenda for Indian education in the coming years - recommends that the core of India's higher education should be a system of 'liberal education'. It cites several reasons for this: Human capital justifications such as the changing nature of work and workplaces and the need to be broadly educated (what some will call 'T-skills'). What I want to argue here is that this is only a limited view of the requirement and we need to define what kind of 'liberal education' India may really need. The central problem of Indian nationalism has been that while it defined itself against the European, and more specifically the British, imperialism, it was itself built upon essentially European concepts and ideas of nationhood and self-determination. Not only such concepts were only understood by a small, European-educated elite, these did not provide the broader populace any clearer definition  of their own role i...

A close reading of India's New Education Policy illustrates a dilemma at the heart of India's Higher Education: Whether to become more Indian or more global?  For a service economy servicing a global clientele, a Higher Education system that prepares people with global service economy skills is critical for India to build. Higher Education is one sector in India that needs 'liberalisation', thirty years after the rest of the economy opened up. And, besides, it is hard to avoid the global drift when the Higher Ed policy narrative is framed within the human capital paradigm. On the other hand, there is a deep cultural agenda of the policymakers to make Indian Higher Ed more Indian. It is not just revivalism or Hindu fundamentalism. This is also based on an accurate reading of the chasm at the heart of the Indian society, between an English-speaking elite and vernacular rest, which is threatening the cohesion of the state. This is also about undoing the colonial legacy, th...

I always wanted to be involved in higher education in India, but all my attempts so far have ended in disappointments. Sure, there is something in what I want and also who I am speaking with and people who speak with me often have a limited objective in mind: A British accreditation of some sort! But I am beginning to suspect that the special place of college in India may have a role in this failure to imagine college to be anything more than a place to get a piece of paper. My hypothesis is that this difference has something to do with the history of college in India. Its peculiarity - a colonial institution enabling social mobility within the colonial context - is well entrenched in the Indian higher education policy and how the middle classes see the college. In Britain and Western Europe, colleges were conceived as training grounds for clergy and lawyers, residential institutions which not only attended to academic requirements (which was very few in most cases) but also served as ...

India - with its new education policy - wants to make a new start. In a world of weakening institutions, China-US competition and a rapidly changing climate and disease environment, this is overdue. India's young millions is great power, but also great responsibility: If not tended, its demographic dividend can turn into a demographic disaster. But the first call of duty for an Indian educator is to address the elephant in the room. For far too long, Indian higher education carried on the colonial legacy, casting successive generation of Indians in the empire's shadow. Despite its independence, and perhaps because of the troubled legacy of its partition, India remained a marginal player in the world higher education scene, consigned to following the agenda rather than shaping it. Its higher education system, always big and now the second biggest in the world, curtailed its own aspiration and carried on the business as usual. It has failed its people, comprehensively and spectac...

India's new National Education Policy argues for a new Higher Education system, which will have a Liberal Education undergraduate curriculum at its heart. This is great news. Globalisation since the 1990s shaped the Indian economy and particularly its service sector, which, in turn, shaped the priorities of the Indian Higher Education system. But, of late, populist politics in the Western nations and automation of work have started changing the shape of the global value chain. India, which banks its future on 'demographic dividend', must adjust to this emerging economic reality - and must construct a new model of Higher Education alongside.  But, while we should welcome the commitment to reimagine the undergraduate education, and free the Indian student from the Engineering fetish which has stunted a generation, it's important that we don't just mimic some American formula of Liberal Education. We must keep in mind that in the United States, Liberal Education colleg...

For the students in India, 2020 changes everything. It's been a while that the usual formula - entrance examinations, engineering degrees and IT jobs - was looking shaky. But, now, with the economy in a full crisis mode, a new imagination is needed. With the old ways of doing things falling apart, the only safety now is in finding one's own way by being really really good at something.   But how does one know what she can be really good at? A broad education, which allows intellectual freedom of exploration and synthesis, is hardly offered in India. A society obsessed with safe careers, students specialise early: Most peoples' lives are spoken for when they reached secondary school and they start taking special coaching classes with an eye on the profession. The community, the family and the parents decide what the student would do in life: There is very little choice, very little experimentation, to be allowed in a decision that one has to live with all her life. However, ...

When India was made, no special need for making Indians was felt. That should be somewhat surprising. There was this great aspiration of building a republican polity based on universal suffrage.  The whole Indian freedom struggle was a long pedagogical project, led by Gandhi but also enthusiastically enjoined by leaders at various levels, of transforming the political imagination and creating new rules of engagement. 1947 was not just the realisation of that project, it was to be a beginning of a more comprehensive transformation of what it means to be an Indian. As Independence unfolded, various leaders, Nehru and Ambedkar among them, stressed how this would require a new political imagination. There was the vast and ambitious project of the constitution, pulling the disparate communities together into the union. And, yet, precise little was said about what it means to be this new Indian; the debate was muted and deemed unnecessary. The educational enterprise that the new country ...

My blogging is inextricably connected with Lord Macaulay. Indeed, the root of all this is my belief that even if India was made, the task of making Indians is still unfinished; an education that combine cultural confidence, economic emancipation and political imagination fit for nation-building is yet to be found. But, more directly, I caught onto blogging as I came across the well-known meme about Macaulay conspiring to destroy a prosperous India with English language, wrote a casual and rather amateurish post debunking it and then got drawn into a debate that continued for more than a decade. Truth be told, that engagement was central to how my interests changed from the technical nuances of delivering education to the cultural history of it and why I came to commit myself to history of ideas as my field of study. But, then, it's not just a personal fixation; with the Hindu nationalists in ascendance in India, it has become a nation one. He is the bogeyman of English education, w...

  It's not often that I get to do things I like, but, as it happens, the lockdown came with a little gift. I was asked to develop, by an Indian entrepreneur with a strong commitment to education, a framework for a Liberal Education for one of his schools. And, as a part of this exercise, I was asked to develop a critique of Indian Education, if only to set the context of the proposal I am to make.  I claim to have some unusual - therefore unique - qualification to do this job. I am, after all, an outsider in all senses. I have lived outside India for a long time, but never went too far away, making it my field of work for most of the period. I have also been outside the academe but never too far away: Just outside the bureaucracy but intimately into the conversations. I worked in the 'disruptive' end of education without the intention to disrupt and in For-profit without the desire for profit. Along the way, the only thing I consistently did is study educatio...

The trouble with writing the history of modern Higher Education in India is its non-autonomous nature. The first Indian universities were set up more as government departments rather than academic institutions. In fact, the first such university, in Calcutta, did no teaching itself for the first half-century of its existence and its functions were limited to conducting examinations and awarding degrees. And, this is not a dead legacy which Independent India has done away with: There was no cultural revolution in India after the independence (though one may argue that one is underway now) and the institutional ideas of the British-Indian higher education were preserved, rather than discarded, in the brown Raj. That education system has, as I have argued elsewhere, failed both the Indian nationhood and limited the country's economic potential and it should be easy to appreciate the need of a complete rethinking of educational forms and priorities without necessarily agreeing wi...