COMMENTARY

Economic & Political Weekly EPW may 10, 2014 vol xlIX no 19
17
Janaki Nair (nair.janaki@gmail.com) is with
the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi.
Who Will Educate the
Educators?
Janaki Nair
While Delhi University is facing
the wreckers ball, the Ambedkar
University, Delhi has become a
viable, vibrant space of thinking
and learning. The new political
masters must simultaneously
perfect the art of judicious
intervention to save the former
and the craft of withholding the
temptation to interfere with
the latter.
R
ecently, we had sobering news
that as many as 98% of teachers
who took the Central Teacher
Eligibility Test failed in the attempt.
This, after the Central Board of Second-
ary Education (CBSE) had already dumb-
ed down the syllabus following the pre-
vious years dismal experience. Educa-
tionist Krishna Kumar pointed out that
an agenda on education will hardly be
visible (or audible) as long as the high
decibel campaigns of political parties
and news channels alike dominate our
public life. But there is hope yet. The
announcement in the Bharatiya Janata
Partys (BJP) Delhi specic manifesto
(endorsing an earlier commitment of the
Aam Aadmi Party AAP) that it will save
the students of Delhi Universitys (DU)
four year undergraduate programme
(FYUP) from the waste of a precious
year is timely and must be made
more than an election promise for all
parties. Regardless, that is, of who wins
the polls.
The FYUP has now become a four letter
word among many vocal students and
anxious parents, who see no academic
merit in the dubious foundation cours-
es even as they are forced to pay for the
extra year. (As I write this, an unsavoury
skirmish between the members of the
Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad
(ABVP) and a faculty member has ended
with the administration closing down
the student union!) DU has given the
term gap year a whole new meaning. It
is not a year that a student voluntarily
takes out from institutional life to reect
on possible roles she will play in our
complex and challenging environment.
It is a year that the institution compulso-
rily takes out of all enrolled undergradu-
ates (and their parents), to produce a
calculated, dangerous boredom. Now,
with an eye no doubt on the votes from a
publicly discontented student body, the
BJP/AAP manifestos turn attention to the
rapid changes that were introduced last
year. This should give the mandarins of
higher education a few sleepless nights.
It also gives us an opportunity to ask a
few questions about the goals and
achievements of higher education in
contemporary India.
Sea of Mediocrity
DUs FYUP was thrust on a largely unsus-
pecting and unprepared student and
faculty body in the name of a new real-
ity that needed grasping, in contrast to
the classical mode of overburdening
COMMENTARY
may 10, 2014 vol xlIX no 19 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
18
theory-based dissemination of know-
ledge (from the DU website). Stock
phrases such as out of the box apart,
there was no clear assessment of the
problems of the earlier system. Neither
were the virtues of the new one spelt out
while making these momentous chang-
es. Out of the box, so far, has only
meant jumping into the sea of medio-
crity, so that before long, college teach-
ers too will qualify for the same level
of incompetence as our schoolteachers.
Unseemly haste, rather than serious
collaborative thought, has produced
change all right, though in the direction
of precipitate and premature decline. It
is vital to rethink, if not reverse these
changes. For some time now, critical
thinking has been replaced by skill
building from the high school syllabus
upwards. Multiple choice questions and
short answers have taken an appalling
toll on Indian intellection, on the ability
of students to sustain arguments, think
deeply and evaluate information in a
complex manner. Language learning, at
one time a staple of our undergraduate
programmes, has been let go without
even a whimper. All we now have
throughout the secondary education
system is language stripped down to its
bare minimum: communicative abilities.
This has been extended to the higher
education programmes as well. Now, by
emphasising simple concept based
learning hands on training and substi-
tuting practical orientation and skills
for critical thinking, the DU system may
be producing mechanical operatives,
talk show hosts and event managers. It
will soon be turned into a vast system of
accreditation rather than an institution
of higher learning.
Ambedkar University
It is our good fortune that while one
institution, whose achievements have been
completely ignored in the name of 21st
century demands, is facing the wreckers
ball, another institution is quietly being
built up in this National Capital Region
(NCR). I am not referring to the multi-
tude of private universities which are
harvesting the windfall, both in terms of
students and faculty, provided by the
rapid changes at DU. I refer to the
Ambedkar University, Delhi (AUD) a
state university which has, over the last
six years of its existence, become a viable,
vibrant space of thinking and learning.
It has declared its mission to create sus-
tainable and effective linkages between ac-
cess to and success in higher education.
It has jettisoned the clichs, and not crit-
ical thinking. It is striving to provide af-
fordable and yet sustainable fee struc-
tures. Thus far, judging from its pro-
grammes and its students, it has encour-
aged creativity and non-hierarchical
structures of learning.
Will AUD succumb to the iron law of
Indian institutions and quickly go
down the DU path? What will the fate of
this young institution be in the hands of
possibly new political masters? Will the
two institutions, one a central univer-
sity, the other a state university, be treat-
ed as spaces to capture through sys-
tems which have been perfected by both
right wing and left wing regimes in this
country? Will the edgling be given the
support and encouragement it needs,
and will the hoary institution be given
the corrective surgery it requires to save
it from oblivion?
Yea Sayers
Karl Marx, a discredited thinker in these
times, perceptively remarked in his
Theses on Feuerbach, that it is essential
to educate the educator himself. In these
parlous times, higher education experts,
senior academics, and thinkers have
largely been bypassed in favour of cro-
nies and yea sayers, opportunists and
political appointees. It is a sad day in-
deed, when we can only desperately hope
that the new crop of politicians will edu-
cate the educators, bring them back on
track, renew and revitalise the system
for goals that extend beyond their ve
year terms. Yet, an opportunity for re-
thinking higher educational institutions
has once more opened up in our NCR.
Increasingly, in the DU case, faculty
accountability is being seen as an exter-
nally mandated, administratively driven,
procedure which now, in a move that
seriously dees all known intellectual
norms, involves the students themselves
in spying and reporting. The AUD on
the other hand, is attempting a process
of evaluation which is driven by the
scholarship of teaching and learning,
strongly focused on academic concerns,
rather than evaluative ones, and there-
fore, one hopes, on knowledge building
outcomes. The teachers and students are
seen less as adversaries and more as
collaborators in the business of learning.
It is early days yet for the younger uni-
versity, so it would be premature to sing
its praises too loudly. But DU is danger-
ously close to throwing away a good,
nationally respected system of higher
education, including a complex and
challenging tutorial system, for an ill
tested, morally questionable alternative.
Both, the attacks on the older univer-
sity system and the building of a new
one occur against the background of a
shrill, high decibel clamour for private
investment in higher education (prefer-
ably foreign investment). Private invest-
ment is seen as the panacea for a wide
range of real and imagined ills. What has
largely been achieved in the health sector,
a marked and irreversible shift away from
state public health systems to networks
of private, prot-maximising healthcare,
and to some extent in the privatisation
of secondary education, will now be
speedily achieved in higher education.
Unlike the disastrous fate that has
been pressed on DU by its highly moti-
vated administrators and their disturb-
ingly novel innovations, the AUD experi-
ment teaches us that ambitious educa-
tional programmes can thrive only through
consultative processes, hard thinking
about consequences, by encouraging
creative syllabus design and by keeping,
in this grotesquely unequal society, the
twin goals of quality and equality rmly
in sight.
If these two routes to higher educa-
tion, one a rapid descent and other a
well-deserved rise, are to serve as les-
sons themselves, the new political mas-
ters must simultaneously perfect the art
of judicious intervention (to save DU)
and the craft of withholding the temp-
tation to interfere (to support AUD).
These are tall orders to place before a
political class which, judging from our
recent past, will be inclined to pack its
bags for a study tour of institutions in
the antipodes.