Sunday Posts

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 ...

Whether one is a technology utopian or a skeptic, everyone seems to agree that we are seeing some revolutionary technological breakthroughs and that these would change our lives inalterably (the disagreements, mostly, are about whether this would be good or bad). The focus of my work is to think what these changes mean for work and for education, and how educational innovations would be fit for this 'second machine age'.  Fundamentally, I believe that we are entering a THIRD age of what we have come to call 'Higher Education'. And, by this, I mean the social functions related to creation and dissemination of knowledge necessary to define the relationship between the nature and us, and indeed, inbetween ourselves. I use the broad definition to stay outside various policy terms - college, universities, research and teaching institutions etc - and focus on the fundamental idea, that our relationships with nature and between ourselves is a knowledge process that requi...

If one contrasts the way Colleges usually deliver education - defined around a set of textbooks, driven by lectures and reading and assessed by essays - it should be clear that Project-based Learning, where learning is defined by a set of real life tasks, driven by collaboration and interaction and assessed by outcomes, works better. Here are six reasons why. First, the best way to learn is by doing it. We all know this. Even the college model of lectures, textbooks and essays is itself built around this assumption - it is teaching one to become a scholar, by doing scholarly work. It is a proven model and has worked for centuries, well grounded in the experiences of what Hannah Arendt called Vita Contemplativa , contemplative life. The objective of college has changed, though, and now we expect the college to prepare for Vita Activa , life of labour, work and action. The best way to prepare for this life is through activities. Second, while a contemplative life may be expecte...

I have been touring India for last three weeks promoting an education aimed at bridging the education-to-employment gap. This is a persistent problem that we notice in the West: That universities are all designed to serve themselves, promoting abilities and attitudes in their best students which serve their own ends, best students do best becoming an university professor. The businesses, whose requirements are different, often have to retrain the people they require, and it is very difficult for them to make their voice heard in the curriculum and teaching in the university. One of the solutions to this problem, therefore, is project-based learning, where the employers and educators are brought together in a common endeavour, where practical work counts as much towards the degree as academic excellence.  At the outset, India has this problem of the severest kind. Every employer seems to complain that they are not able to find people they need. The education institutions are o...

Vocational Training is supposed to be a big thing. This is heralded as the answer to the problems of productivity, particularly in countries in Asia and Africa with rapidly growing population. The idea is simple: Get the poor people in a classroom for a few months and make them learn something useful and then get them to work in a factory or profession. Once it is done on large scale - India says it wants to train 500 million people in next 10 years or so - the whole economy can change. The trouble is that it does not work. I have articulated my complaints about the Indian vocational training system earlier, and hence I shall not repeat it here. I usually receive a stock answer when I talk about the short-comings of vocational training as it is done in India, that it is all down to poor execution. So, when outdated skills are taught, students do not engage or the trained students do not find a job, it bears down to the flaws of execution. I shall contend that these failures have ...

I was recently at a seminar where IBM's Global Head of University Partnerships were speaking. In an insightful talk, he outlined the profile of an ideal candidate that IBM wants to recruit: This is a person with T-Skills, one deep skill but a broad range of interests, he said. This is quite common among employers, hence worth exploring. However, whether or not an employer defines this in such precise terms as IBM, this is still worth looking at, because the break between education and employment may be seen as a T-skills conundrum. The desire for T-Skills can be somewhat obvious: Work in business organisations today are defined by an unquenchable thirst for greater efficiency and to infinite flexibility to ward off uncertainty. To achieve efficiency, they are increasingly specific, demanding in their job adverts an absolutely ready candidate who can add value right from day one. This is more true because most jobs are created today by start-ups and SMEs, which are under even ...

As the economies around the world starts to recover, our worst suspicion will be confirmed: This is likely to be a jobless recovery. Employers, living through austere times, have not just squeezed out every bit of efficiency they could by use of machinery and stretching their staff, but also are scarred psychologically: It would take a long time for them to expand their workforces imagining a rosy future again. Yet, the numbers at Education institutions are higher than ever before: As I write this post, the British universities are celebrating an ever higher intake, despite a three fold rise in tuition fees, while moaning, as usual, the loss of 'standards', indicating that people who wouldn't have previously gone to universities are now going there. This setting makes it 'the best of the times and the worst of the times' for Higher Education. Never before more people wanted it, and never before its value was so disputed and its practitioners so undermined. The...

The link between education and employment appear broken and educators usually get blamed for it. This is somewhat paradoxical: At a time when graduate salaries are holding up despite the global recession and more people than ever go to College, their work should be celebrated. The corollary fact that too many people also remain unemployed after getting a college education can equally be blamed on rapidly shifting job market, something outside the educators' direct control. The employers, sitting cozy in these debates, have some blame to shoulder too: Over time, they have become very specific about who they employ, and adapted the mantra of 'hire slowly, fire fast'. The national governments love heaping the blame of unemployment on the educators' door, with the political objective of deflecting the blame from themselves as well as to craft a justification for reducing the budgetary allocation for Higher Education. One would think that the educators usually do thems...

One of the colleagues asked during the Education Investment Conclave, which took place last week, what it means in practise. The question was directed to me, and my answer something to the effect that it means preparing the students so that they can be employable all their lives, not just get the first job. What I was thinking is that what goes on in the name of employability is so very lame, the writing of CV or preparing for interviews, all directed to somehow crossing the initial barrier into work, based on the implicit assumption that getting started is the most difficult thing. There may be some truth about the difficulty of getting started, but that's only half the story, if that. Employability isn't about just crossing the threshold into employment; in fact, in most cases, the employability problems start thereafter. The candidates don't get why it is so important to turn up for work at time, why you can't afford to lose temper, why you have to work in a...

Apprenticeships are all the rage, and rightfully so: There is possibly no better way to learn some of the trades without actually doing it alongside a skilled master. While this is universally understood and accepted, what's not so clear is that government funding this and colleges and training companies running it really works. Despite the talk around apprenticeships, many really end up with dead-end positions, with little prospect or pay, loads of work and little learning. The training often tends to be motivational fluff, just the kind one hoped to escape when choosing to go down the apprentice route, and instead of the 'master', one usually gets a failed practitioner as the Guru. Call it modern apprenticeships, this has to nothing to do with what it was in its traditional form. The communities are all gone: They have been stripped away by our organized dislike of unionized labour. The pride of work has also been taken away: It is about the money one earns and often...