Sunday Posts

I wrote this blog through my 20 year stay in Britain, some years more diligently than others.  No one, including myself, would ever look at the archives perhaps, but if one did, one theme would stand out: Restart!  For the first 10 years of my career, spent in India and then in other countries in Asia, I followed a straight path: Working in companies, growing into more senior role, within the training sector. It was somewhat regular life. I had KPIs and month-ends, appraisals, holiday forms and salary raises, which I worried about.  However, I left all that and came to Britain in 2004. I came without a job - therefore, it was a proper restart! I assumed that my experience within the IT Training sector would get me a similar or a better job, but the IT training industry was very different in the UK and my skill sets did not travel well. I landed up managing accounts in an e-learning company, a role and an industry in which I had absolutely no prior experience.  Therea...

As we learn to live through the pandemic, during which work and professions have been transformed through the use of information technology, the question of what effect technology will have on post-pandemic jobs has been raised again and again. Books that explore AI and humanity have come thick and fast; how we educate a new generation of workers has received a lot of attention too. There is much speculation whether this time, it will be different - and if there is anything to be found in our past experience with technological change.  I work in the faultline of this change and the object of my work has been to enable workers take advantage of technology. In a way, this is the less attractive end of education: This is not about groundbreaking research or completely novel ideas, but rather equipping the middling workers with skills to take advantage of technologies. I shall claim that this no less crucial in economic growth and progress - as without the skilled workers, the benefits...

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, ...

Among the many victims of the pandemic, it will be easy to forget the students who graduated this year. While we focus on the elderly and the vulnerable and try to support those who have lost their jobs or businesses, the graduates - young and relatively less at risk - may appear less worthy of our sympathy. And, yet, the pandemic and the resulting destruction in its wake would mean all carefully laid plans, all the years of toil and dreaming, may fall apart, consigning many to shaky starts and entire lifespans of underachievement. But a further tragedy is also unfolding in slow motion: Those who will come after, next year and further out still. Corona virus may be tamed with a vaccine, but the pandemic has exposed the inherent weakness of the world we were building: Connected economies with disconnected polities, interdependent lives lived by atomistic individuals, a world faced with long term changes where rewards are all here-and-now. The euphoria of the 1990s, after the fall of Ber...

  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...

Liberal Education had a particular meaning at its origin. Or, rather, it had two or more different meanings at the origin: the 'liberal' in English-Scottish sense, an education to be critical and to seek the truth and the German idea of 'Bildung', of continuous self-cultivation. This is a self-consciously gross generalisation, but I think those two ideas should remain at the heart of modern liberal education. It should both be sceptical and hopeful, never a slave of received wisdom and forever in the faith of cooperation and progress. And, this is exactly the same core values modern, secular, democratic societies need: The belief that we can work with one another, better our lives and can make decisions without being told - by some divine or dictator - what we should do, is essential to its existence. The above is rather obvious and well-trodden ground, but importantly, these ideas are historically defined. Some of these ideas, of questioning, of progress, of ...

The most intriguing - and the most timely - policy pronouncement in India's new education policy is its emphasis on a Liberal Education undergraduate. While this is inspired by the American model (at a time when Americans seem to be going the other way) and also the more recent Chinese example, this cuts against the grain of the structure of Indian higher education.  It will be an exercise of fresh imagination altogether, as what a Liberal Education would mean in context have to be defined from scratch. 'Liberal Arts' may have become a trendy subject area to study in some of the new private universities in India, but its object and structure remain largely undefined ( see my earlier post ). The high-level policy intention of unveiling a 'Bachelor of Liberal Arts' gives little detail on what this means. And, indeed, the current theocratic mood of Indian politics anticipate this to mean the opposite of 'liberal'; more scholastic and revivalist, but n...

On the surface, it's a paradox: As the fortunes of political liberalism decline in India, the popularity of liberal arts at the Indian universities increase.  Indeed, one may see no paradox here at all: Indians, after all, are richer than they ever were since the independence. Also important is the professions of those sending their children to these university courses: More often than not, they have earned their money in business or employment in the private sector, unlike the government-sector parents that paid for most students only a generation ago. It's also true that some shiny new sector now offers employment prospects that were not there a generation ago: Private sector education, media and internet, international travel and tourism have all grown in size and stature. All these together may offer an explanation of why Liberal Arts are all the rage. Except that it doesn't. The preference of Indian employers have not changed significantly and even if a...

The surprising popularity of Liberal Education Just as Liberal Arts colleges are closing in the United States, in Asia, Liberal Education is the new hot thing.  Most surprisingly, in India, a country where university education was created as a gateway to government jobs and where students, especially male students, pursue formal education for the sole purpose of employment, Liberal Education is suddenly very popular. Private universities, whose fortunes are closely tied to their students' earning potential, are surprisingly keen on liberal education, as they seek to follow the example set up by Ashoka (and a few others), an US-style High-End liberal arts college set up at great expense by a group of Indian entrepreneurs. One could say that this is not surprising and India is following a path China has followed for some time. Or, for that, even Japan. It may be a common trend that (as in Japan), Engineering and other disciplines draw most high calibre students in a poo...

 The conversation in India has now turned to liberal education. About time, one would say, to recognise a major problem - that the education became too vocational, too narrow and too focused on jobs that don't exist anymore - and do something about it. As the great Indian engineering machine that produced millions of graduates with an overtly theoretical training and pushed them into various IT services companies doing process jobs stuttered, the desperate search for alternatives led to the discovery of liberal education. Like all Indian 'education thought', this idea of Liberal Education came from the vocational angle, imported from North America in style and content, and without much thinking about its purpose and context. Only now, when the graduates of the new Liberal Arts colleges reaching the job market, and endorsements from leading corporations and celebrity intellectuals making it an attractive proposition for private investment, which is driving the expansion ...

In earlier posts, I wrote about my current exploration of possibilities of a Liberal Education for the 21st Century (See A Liberal Education For The 21st Century and A Liberal Education for India ). For last several years, I have been looking closely at the Education-to-Employment (as well as Education-to-Enterprise) transitions, a territory far removed from Liberal Education ethos and conversations, but the main lesson I took away from this work is that what we offer now is too narrow an education, and the solution of the talent problem - the challenge employers are facing in finding the right talent as technologies disrupt industrial business models - lies in broadening the scope of education. The other part of my life, study of the history of the education systems, emphasised the point further: A narrow education at a time of great technological change can turn a 'demographic dividend' into an unmitigated disaster (See An Education for Decline ). This is the background ...

In the conference circuit, the most common complaint against Higher Education institutions is that they do not understand employer requirements. Thereafter comes the slide that cites either the World Bank or the World Economic Forum, or some neoliberal think-tank, and maintains that employers are, most crucially, looking for 'soft skills': Ability to communicate, collaborate, think critically and empathise with others.  Languages hide as much as they reveal. In another day and age, one would call those very attributes human skills and recognised the problem as one of narrow education. And, this alternative perspective is exactly what we need: The problem is not that the education is not specific enough, but it is too specific. The Higher Education institutions, since everyone, students, their parents, regulators and governments have become outcome obsessed, are endlessly chasing 'employer requirements', in a world where the recruiters are always focu...

In an ironic twist, many large employers in India complain that the education Indian graduates receive are too narrow.  Surely, the same employers, riding high on growth of IT services, helped model a tertiary education system - second largest in the world in terms of student numbers - as one narrowly, vocationally, defined. The glamour of the IT services industry, with an urban cosmopolitan life and the chance of lottery-draw for offshore opportunities, completely transformed Indian middle class life over the last two decades: That the whole ecosystem of Middle Class education, from Senior School to Business School, aligned itself to these new opportunities, is no surprise at all.  But this expansion has now stalled, offshore is becoming off limits, and the industry is transforming rapidly.  Rather than each corporation trying to develop their various enterprise-wide systems from scratch, and thereby, handing out huge multi-year development contracts to be ...