Sunday Posts

The coffee-houses were once called the 'penny universities', for a good reason. These enlightenment era spaces - free spaces, as one commentator has called them - allowed trading of information and meeting of minds. Those were the places where ideas could have sex and imagine the world anew. Coffee, replacing Gin as the drink of choice, stimulated and energised, but Coffee Houses were more than just coffee. It was about knowledge and ideas, a conduit of assimilating the great leaps in science and technology into social practice. It allowed congregations very different from the social clubs, being open to all-comers (almost) and allowing the chaos, the democratic surround, that facilitated a creative revolution. College is indeed the other enlightenment institution that is still with us. One may say college dates back further, back to the medieval or even ancient times depending on one's point of view, but the college that emerged out of enlightenment was ver...

The future of college is a popular conference topic. The discussion usually starts with the obvious - that the college must change as the economy is changing - and revolves around a familiar complaint - that the state-funded colleges are too bureaucratic, too expensive and too slow to adapt to changing realities. And, in the end, comes the panacea, privatisation, and not too subtle discussions about global higher education as a multi-billion dollar business opportunity. The problem with this narrative is that, first, private college education isn't that new - it is very much part of the problem rather than the solution - and, second, the pursuit of global college has so far been a graveyard of good intentions. Too many people, enthused by the conference speeches and reading the pumped up projections global consultancies churn out, have tried to create the culture-free non-regulated college-in-the-air, only to be rudely disappointed as the student millions fail to materialise....

I have argued elsewhere that the expansion of formal higher education is precisely the wrong thing to do at a time of great technological change, as college lacks the inclusiveness and openness of informal learning, and expansion of college discourages spread and persistence of informal learning opportunities ( see the post here ). This prevents the diffusion of technology, as lack of inclusiveness and openness in learning mean a lot of people are left out, unable not just to take advantage of technological change to improve their economic prospects but also missing out on applying the technological possibilities in solving their own day-to-day problems.  Now, I want to take this argument further: The college does not just fail those which it excludes, but also its own graduates. This is because the college, in its current form, does a really bad job at developing two most critical abilities that one needs to succeed in the globalised and automated workplaces (and societies...

Should Education become more local, or global? This was a question posed to me in a conversation: As in these cases, I improvised an answer. But, as usual, the obvious answer is not necessarily the right one, and is indeed worth interrogating. Most education, at the present time, is locally focused. This is because Education, at least mostly, is a part of the State, that funds its existence and direct its agenda. Many educators around the world work for the State, or at least, their wages are subsidised by the State. Even in cases where a global institution sponsors education - Church is the most prominent example - the State controls it tightly, through curriculum and credential.  The dynamic of work and commerce, however, has been global. The WTO-inspired globalisation touched far corners of the world over the last few decades, as did the crumbling of the cold war politics. English as a language has gained currency, even in China, and the Internet and the Worldwide Web ...

I wrote earlier about the tension between The College and The Coffee-House - between formal and informal systems of education and knowledge sharing - and I intend to focus my attention on this in my work in 2018. My thesis is simple: Most learning is experiential, contextual and situational; however, learning as a socially mandated function must have form, be broadly applicable and based around general principles. This tension is indeed central to the idea of knowledge, between the high ground of theory and field of practice, and it is a dialectical relationship. The societies value both, but often more one than the other, depending on economic and political situations of the time. Generally, stable societies privilege 'scribal' classes and formal learning, but breaking of times and paradigm shifts are generally brought about by ideas emerging out of practice; therefore, when times change, Coffee-houses play a crucial role. In our own time, right now, we have privileg...

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...

Over the last several decades, the politics of college has reached a consensus: Everyone seemed to agree that more people attending college is a good thing. The usual conservative position, that college should educate a gifted minority who would assume the 'commanding heights' of the society, has been undermined by the proven link between 'gift' and wealth, as well as the claims that we live in a knowledge society. The weary refrain indulged in Britain's top universities - that the elevation of Polytechnics as Universities in the 1990s was not the abolition of polytechnics, but rather that of the universities - is considered an elitist view. People like Charles Murray, who complains too many people are going to college, are usually viewed as out-of-date and out-of-touch. What's fashionable is the commitment to expand public access to Higher Education, such as the one Obama declared, and the promises of eliminating college tuition fees, such as the one that mad...