Philosophy of education
The matters in our burgeoning private universities would even make the angels weep. God save education and the country!
“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”
-Robert Frost
There is a craze for Western type of English medium education. Firstly, those students become cocooned in a shell far removed from the millions of their peers who cannot afford such education! They develop a holier than thou attitude towards the other sections of society. They truly believe that those who did not go to such elite schools are lesser mortals who are incapable of joining their elite club. Such individuals demean others who have not been to such institutions little realising that some of the great thinkers of this country had no idea about those institutions.
In fact, those who came up the hard way in life are best suited to rule this country as they have experienced poverty personally to know where it pinches and how to alleviate poverty.
A study in the US showed how the Ivy League institutes are churning out mediocre students at the tax payers’ cost. In an article entitled “Close Harvard to save America", an economics professor in Ohio has shown how these elite institutions are being favoured by the tax authorities. Giving an example the professor shows how five of those institutions in the last one year collected $one billion in endowment funds on which they do not pay income tax. Neither do they pay income tax on their huge endowment fund fixed deposit interests while the ordinary citizen pays nearly 25% of his income in taxes from which the government has to fund hundreds of state colleges which educate almost 75% of the country's students. The latter also give scholarships to the poorest of the poor to the tune of 75 %.
The following paragraph from the same economics professor at Ohio University tells it all: “A student graduating from Yale or Princeton, with their roughly $2 million endowments per student, has a ticket to a well-paying job, while one graduating from the College of St. Joseph in Vermont, with its $29,000 endowment per student, does not. Only 12 percent of the Yale and Princeton students have Pells, compared with 71 percent at St. Joseph. (Pells refer to US Federal govt.) Pell Grant is a post-secondary educational Federal grant sponsored by the U.S Department of Education-enacted to help undergraduates of low-income families in receiving financial aid." The difference between elite and non-elite/commoner colleges in the USA seems to be stark.”
Perhaps if somebody does (or has done) a similar comparison in India the difference between elite and non-elite college education would be similar. The people who give large endowments do not do it for nothing. They have an eye on seats for their progeny and friends in the long run. This breeds mediocrity. That is what is happening these days.
The other big blow for good teaching is the undue importance given to research in western universities. There are these ace professors who live on grant collection, paper production on a mass scale and lecturing and conference attending. They rarely have time to spend with students to teach. Teaching has taken a back seat. Even to get tenure positions in Ivy League institutes it is the research CV that matters. No university gives importance to cultivate a good teacher who has a flare for teaching and making students feel comfortable. The other side of the coin is that standards of research have come down so much that a recent study showed that more than 95% of research done in these universities does not take knowledge forward and in many cases is not even worth the paper on which it is written. Professors have little time left to guide their doctoral students properly and PhD thesis standards are falling.
There are exceptions to what this Ohio professor was saying. Exceptions only prove the rule. One alumnus from Berkeley has this to say. “There are good teachers like Walter Levin at MIT, Richard Karp at Berkeley, etc., who are not only top researchers but also top undergraduate teachers. They teach beginners, unlike in India where senior teachers teach only senior students. Their lectures are highly inspirational and change many a student's career. And these teachers are not exceptions; people who are predominantly driven by research go to industry research, which is a lot more comfortable life than tenure-track positions. Only those that are passionate about teaching join academia and are willing to go through the pains of getting tenure. At Berkeley for example, I sat in undergrad 101 classes (although I was a PhD student) of some great teachers, simply to get inspired, or to look at the subject matter from a different angle. The top universities in US have "best teacher" awards, to encourage and motivate teaching, and such awards are a real honour, "much more than a Nobel prize", as they say in Berkeley.
Adam Smith had noted similar trends in Oxford of his days! With tenure posts of professors and the latter receiving their salaries from the tax payers’ money, teaching standards had fallen there even at that time. Adam Smith had shown how job security removed the need to work hard to please the students’ curiosity. In the past the professors had to get their salary from students when the latter were satisfied. If you compare this with the present western fad for big salaries in tenure posts and job security there is no incentive for good teaching at all. To keep up the facade that these great institutions get only excellent students they practice grade enhancement methods. So no student who gets into Harvard gets anything other than “A” grade! Even the grades have become very liberal. In the 1950, the average GPA was 2.5. Today it is in the range of 3.5-3.9 out of 4! It is not that western students have become super intelligent in forty odd years. It is a proof that grade meddling is accepted in those institutions.
Now we come down to our institutions. If that were the scenario in the West one can onlyshudder to think of the goings on in our institutions including the large privateinstitutions where all these and more should be going on. The same applies to Indian elite institutions. The matters in our burgeoning private universities would even make the angels weep. God save education and the country!
(Professor Dr BM Hegde, a Padma Bhushan awardee in 2010, is an MD, PhD, FRCP (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow & Dublin), FACC and FAMS. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Science of Healing Outcomes, chairman of the State Health Society's Expert Committee, Govt of Bihar, Patna. He is former Vice Chancellor of Manipal University at Mangalore and former professor for Cardiology of the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, University of London.)
Educate, Empower, Elevate
Prof. Bholanath Dutta
Founder, Convener & President
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