Read this column by Tapan Raychaudhuri, former professor of modern Indian history at the University of Oxford, in The Telegraph:
... [T]he education of our MAs and honours graduates, except in the case of a small percentage of them belonging to some elite institutions, consists in memorizing lecture notes. The quality of the said notes determines the quality of our higher education. The truth or otherwise of this statement can be very easily tested by using the method of sample survey.
Assuming my hypothesis to be true, and I should be very happy if it turns out to be false, what exactly do we gain by multiplying further the number of universities at a very heavy cost to the nation? If, as I suggest, our institutions are spreading mainly non-knowledge (for how else would we describe education based almost exclusively on lecture notes?), is it really worthwhile to increase their number? If we want more people with degrees that are worth very little in terms of the knowledge acquired, this target could be more inexpensively attained through open universities and correspondence courses ...
4 Comments:
But then this will defeat the purpose of the beauracrats. To make more permanent jobs for countless "teachers" and other beauracrats.
Univ of Oxford is writing about his country. Why are we geeting worried!!?
shouldn't the same argument be extended to the new IIXs? if the IITs/IISc/IIMs cannot rival even the middle grade US univs in research, should we set up new institute with research funds that train software coders instead?
This gentleman is confusing between the quality of some of our colleges and the need to expand the higher education system. If the state in many of our colleges is not satisfactory, is the solution not to start new institutions to expand the reach of higher education? Definitely not. We must tackle the problem of quality in our colleges but at the same time we must be aware of the need to increase the gross enrolment ratio in Higher education. It is easy to give negative comments. How about some positive suggestions?
Post a Comment