Sunday Posts

India has spent millions of dollars and half a decade now on Skills Training, but got very little to show for it. Apart from endemic corruption - this is the new source of money for politicians and bureaucrats - the whole enterprise was marred by lack of imagination: Because this became a business of government hand-outs distributed by people who knows nothing about training or education (worse, they actually believe that there is nothing to know about training and education), the various 'skills programmes' helped destroy the successful private initiatives that grew into India in the previous decades.  However, the need for skills training in India is urgent. There are demographic reasons for this: India will have 10 million working age people joining the non-farm workforce every year, and if they are not skilled in the trades, they are likely to join the swelling army of the disaffected. There are economic reasons - many Indian enterprises are crying for skilled workers...

My objective is to summarise the idea of '21st Century College' and understand the same in the context of education theory, developments in technology and media as well as economic history. This is one project I have taken on in 2015, and chose to turn this blog into a record of my explorations and conversations.  The first question that I deal with is not whether we should be changing with technology - I shall contend that answer is quite obvious and time-tested too - but what really needs to change. More specifically, while we may accept that the '21st Century College' may employ different methods and technologies to educate, should it have different objectives from that of 'traditional education'? Dewey, as usual, is useful here. Writing in 1938, about what he saw as a contest between 'traditional' and 'progressive' education, this was his stance:" The general philosophy of new education may be sound, and yet the difference in a...

The term '21st Century Education' is quite common: At least it is common in certain circles. The underlying assumption is that education is at a fundamental point of discontinuity. The way we educated ourselves in the last - twentieth - century, and before that, wouldn't work anymore. We, therefore, need a different approach to education - and the institutions that can offer us that. The claims are clear and unambiguous, and there is some justification behind them. Life feels so different now, not just because of the millennial turning point, but changes in the material, social and financial realities around us. We may still be operating with the assumptions that a middle class kid should go to college and get a job, but at our hearts, we fear that this is no longer true. Despite the mass of information we collect on colleges - it is an elaborate ritual for the parents of college-going students - we seem increasingly confused which college or course offer us the b...

I have resisted Kindle, again. Despite the state of my room, and the fact that I plan to relocate to another country sometime soon. It is slightly ironic that I am studying the relationship between technology and knowledge, and yet I am reluctant to surrender my book-reading habits to Amazon, however much I may love it.  The reason is, for me, serendipity trumps convenience. In Too Big To Know, David Weinberger talks about our two kinds of attempts to organise the world: Algorithmic and Social. The first one is to let the machine organise, based on a secret sauce of behavioral prediction. The other is to let our friends recommend what we may like, leveraging the possibility that we may now have a network of 'weak connections', who might be able to provide us with insights beyond our immediate environment. The holy grail of this organised world is indeed to optimally combine the two, because we can easily point to the limitations of each approach on its own: This is ...

Brookings commentators see rapid emergence of new Higher Education models in 2015. ( see here ) This is a reasonable expectation, given that so much money has gone into the sector since 2011, and some of the models should now start maturing - and VCs looking for exit - and delivering the goods. The change is already in the air. The College for America has somehow set the benchmark tuition fee rate at $10,000 for the entire undergraduate degree and there are a number of ventures seeking to replicate that. Udacity starts the year by launching an University by Industry, one by Silicon Valley for Silicon Valley, by breaking down the college credentials into 'nanodegrees' ( see here ). As predicted in the Brookings piece, new MOOCs are also emerging - more credit bearing programmes focused on fee-paying students - and a slew of innovative tech-enhanced models coming into the market. The big frontier of all the change is still the emerging markets. There is not much hap...

An old, dated piece on Kolkata, titled ' Why Kolkata will win in 20 Years ', came to my attention. There are a number of things mentioned in this article that I don't agree with: The statement that Mamta Banerjee represents the moral end of Indian politics may invoke ridicule today, and the stereotype of Bengalis as business-averse and that they would need a Bengali-speaking non-Bengali for saving is mind-bogglingly absurd. But the two key propositions articulated here - that Kolkata is one of the most sustainable of the Indian cities, and that it can be fixed with good governance - are rather self-evident. Of course, Kolkata is home and I am partial, and I shall make no claims to objectivity here. However, the fact that I keep writing about it - and indeed, there are many many people from Kolkata spread all around the world will do the same - proves perhaps that there is more to it than the dirty, dreary, poor city that the place appears to be to a casual visitor....

Parag Khanna and Karan Khemka's 'audacious idea', published by Harvard Business Review in 2012, was to ' enrol the world in For-Profit Universities ' in 10 years. They were talking about the 'Global Workforce Crisis' as we are trying to frame it today, along with another issue that we seldom discuss now - that of population! Since then, both of these issues have accentuated: The global workforce crisis has reached serious proportions to start threatening economic expansion (with its short term solutions, such as immigration being politically unacceptable), and the surge of population, which the expansion of global markets was supposed to have absorbed into productive work, caused serious disruptions in a number of countries when such market magic failed to materialise. If anything, the need for an education solution is ever more urgent and important. The 'audacious idea' was however not too audacious as this simply recycled market orthodoxy wit...