Sunday Posts

I did write about developing countries and western education before (see What's Wrong with Western Education , and its Part 2 and Part 3 ). But it is also interesting to see how far this agenda can be carried forward, and how this argument about an indigenous education plays out in the face of globalised politics. These are exactly the issues on the table in India, where the newly elected government wants to push through a neo-liberal economic agenda along with social conservatism. India is hardly unique in this, it must be mentioned, many governments, including United Kingdom's, is doing the same. But the debate in India warrants some consideration, given that this is predominantly young country setting off in a quest for a past. Usually, the conversation about foreign education, as I noted earlier, is painted in black and white - either you like it or you don't. That this may be a far more nuanced issue than just liking or disliking it, is usually ignored, because ...

I was in an Education Symposium in Singapore last Saturday and had this moment of truth: As one of the speakers were complaining about the lack of employer engagement in education, someone sitting next to me turned and whispered, "those who complain that employers don't care about education may not have met a real employer yet". The latter is indeed the correct position to have, at least in a conference such as this, which is somewhat focused on the Education-to-Employment gap. The unannounced assumption behind such gatherings are always, as fashionable today, that education is out of sync with the wider commercial realities of the day, and there is a real concern from the employers that the modern education does not deliver the skills they need. The students, whose primary motivation for spending additional years in college is to have access to middle class life, are worried about it too. In short, whoever delivers a more relevant education for employment, wins. ...

Let's start with the outrageous: Why is it that a woman wearing a Niqab a sign of oppression while consuming umpteen bottles of wine and getting drunk a sign of freedom? While this may appear to be a question designed to irritate the French, what this is really about is a concept the French pioneered: Liberty!Liberty is central to the proposition of Western Education in the traditional societies - it is supposed to make one free - but when one is in a debate such as this, it makes sense to go beyond the rhetoric and what this stands for. Western Education, which could be defined as a system of education representing the values and beliefs of the European and North American societies and which are usually imposed on societies of lesser means with superior financial and publicity support, draws its legitimacy from four interlinked philosophical claims: That it makes one free, that it creates refinement, that it helps to build superior and prosperous societies, and it enables ag...

I wrote a note on Western Education yesterday. The immediate context was this film - Schooling The World - which puts many of the issues to the fore. While I mentioned two distinct objections to Western Education, its association with decline of the traditional societies and ways of life and the recognition of the imposition of a power structure implicit in such education, the film's argument is essentially that it is not one or the other, and the destruction of the ways of life is indeed because of the imposition of the power structures. In a way, I do what the film is against - try spreading Western education. However, I don't think if I stop taking Western university courses to India and elsewhere, and choose to take courses from the universities in India instead, anyone will be better off. Because the 'Western' is no longer just where the system of education comes from, but a way of thinking, deeply embedded in universities in India as well. The points made b...

One strand of argument in many developing countries is that western education destroys local cultures and ways of living, and causes misery and destruction. This is at the heart of some of the most potent social debates that are going on, in India and in many other places. Both sides of the argument present this as a black-and-white thing: Either western education has brought all progress, or it has destroyed all good things that ever was. As usual, the truth perhaps lies somewhere in between. Many well-meaning western academics and intellectuals, who have no intent to harm anyone else, perhaps see anything less than wholehearted appreciation of what they do as an act of ungratefulness. After all, 'western science' is primarily responsible for the great improvements in standards of living in the last three hundred years. What's called Western Education spreads the message of scientific progress and rationality, and this has been the argument for spreading it even for ...