FEATURE

B M Hegde
Education must make healthy minds; not just wealthy careers.
(contd. from last issue...)
Inclusive education for a country like India:
India is a very rich country with the largest world population of the poorest of the poor existing along with the super rich; the former are, of course, in a large majority. Nearly sixty-seven million children in India have a peculiar disease, Nutritional Immune Deficiency Syndrome, (NIDS) which is deadlier than AIDS. While the whole world population of AIDS is just about 33 million about which there seems to be so much interest among the public and the medical profession, NIDS is not even mentioned in textbooks in medical school! Those children die in hundreds daily. The question of their going to school does not arise. Even if they did they would not be able to go any further as they have inherited small hippocampus major, the part of the brain vital for memory, recall, creativity and learning. The reason for that defect is again poverty in their mothers when they were pregnant. Since the first trimester of pregnancy is when all the human organs are formed in the foetus inside the womb, if the mother suffers from malnutrition, organs are poorly made and they produce permanent damage in the offspring later. If we want inclusive education in India we have to tackle poverty at a war footing. Nutritional midday meal for pregnant mothers is a must-much more important than midday meal for the children!
Business called education:
That will also put an end to this pernicious belief among greedy industrial honcho’s that education is a multibillion dollar industry which they think they can grab and make profit along with getting social respectability! Their unhealthy mind is the fruit of our present higher education they received both in India and abroad, especially our new breed of business managers who are the ardent followers of Mandeville. Even in the National Health System of UK the hospital managers seem to have damaged the system so badly that the powers that be are having second thoughts about new NHS reforms. Teaching business management in isolation without teaching social philosophy, social conscience, moral responsibility and business humanism will bring forth a set of unscrupulous greedy sharks who would market unethical business tricks of the trade. While it is true that education is a mind sharpening business it is definitely not a money spinning business.
Down side of elite education:
Let us look at the down side of elite education. I can never do better than this young sharp brain of an associate professor of English at Yale, William Dereswiecz, in his classical paper, Disadvantages of Elite Education, in the journal, American Scholar? He is the victim of such education himself right from day one in elite private schools through two decades in Harvard and Yale and many other Ivy League institutions. William was not talking of the usual "curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you." He was talking about the unspoken and unsaid things in normal educational parlance such as "the private and affluent public "feeder" schools, the ever-growing para-structure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it…Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow."
The glaring disadvantages of elite education are that it removes one from the stark reality of life in this world. The student does not have touch with the most important problem of life-poverty. Students from such schools are uncomfortable in the company of the poor and people coming from non elite schools. The former are fed that they are the best and those institutions especially the Ivy League try and see that their students get the A grade all the time. If one were to audit the average grading, GPA used to be around 2.6 in most institutions. Now most government institutions in the USA have an average of 3 and private ones of 3.6! If a student in a State college gets A grade it is true "A" as s/he has no avenues to make it to A otherwise at any rate, as happens in Ivy League where As could be manipulated. Elite schools create an atmosphere where greed gets generated in the student’s mind. Students are reminded that they are the best and they are the leaders of the future. Many of these leaders are not in touch with reality. One example he quotes are Al Gore and John Kerry from Harvard and Yale. Both are smart, intelligent, and successful but have been miserable failures with the electorate. I can quote the innate electoral wisdom of people like George Bush in the USA or Lallu Prasad Yadav in India, neither of them is from Ivy League.
In life also we try and give A grade to some people in preference to others. One example is the fat pay packets that the top managers of some private companies get. In the industry they are "A" graders. If one had a trained healthy mind during his/her education he/she would have realized that it is unethical, even down right sinful, to receive a pay packet which is more than hundred thousand times the pay of the lowest paid employee of the same organization. Both are born alike and both will die alike. The only difference is the different opportunities they had in their early educational career-one coming from the Ivy League where he got in because of what William describes above, in addition to his affluence in society. This gap between the haves and the "have nots" that has been growing wider by the day, thanks to unhealthy educational system, is at the root of many social ills-Noblesse Oblige.
We have had the IITs created by the brains of an American University Consortium which has helped create a new class of Indians who pride themselves to be superior to others vis-à-vis their pay packets at campus selection lists. It is a shame that even the institutions pride themselves by advertising the offer of pay packets for their alumni as synonymous with the quality of education that they impart. I would be happy to know in which field IITs have taken knowledge forwards in India during their existence. "Knowledge advances not by repeating known facts, but by refuting false dogmas." With that definition of Karl Popper the only research which is worth its salt is refutative research. I know of no such work being done by our IITs which could set River Ganges on fire.
Industry-Academia marriages:
There was a time, a couple of decades ago; when Universities thought that they would be better off getting themselves tagged on to some industry for mutual benefit and for better funding of research etc. Within a very short span of time such arranged marriages ran into rough weather. It was soon realized that the corporate greed started manipulating research activities to such an extent that genuine research flew out of university widows! In the UK many such marriages have ended in agreed divorce without alimony payments, though! The grip of the vested interests on science research is still worrying. They manipulate textbook writing to research grant distribution and research publications in "leading" journals and sexing-up data to suit their business even today! This is worrying to say the least.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, one could take the best of both the worlds and make a new system that incorporates the positives, bereft of the disadvantages of either for future education in India. Foreign Universities will, of course, be most welcome as they would give a tough competition to our Universities to come up to survive in the midst of such healthy competition. But we must not forget that Universities exist ONLY to make healthy minds. Careers are secondary in University education. Career based vocational education at the end of good primary education at High School level must be encouraged to lessen the unnecessary burden on Universities. It is necessary to emphasize that education is not a money spinning business lest all our efforts to give our country a new ethical "healthy mind making" educational system to prepare our youth to be healthy world citizens of tomorrow, should go down the drain as happened in the past.

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis." -Dante Alighieri

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