India’s education spectrum, ranging from school education to research, has been the focus of many far-reaching changes in recent years. Educational institutions in India are characterised by immense diversity ranging from those located in the heart of India’s capital to those in mofussil towns.
Our underfunded and ill-equipped public institutions are tasked with providing education to large sections of citizens who are battling adverse life circumstances, while also trying to match global standards of knowledge production and dissemination. The size and diversity constitute a challenge. They are also sites for building a society based on equality and dignity. However, rather than imagining education as a mode of developing values of critical citizenship, recent changes suggest a penchant for techno-managerial solutions. The new guidelines for direct admission to PhD programmes upon completion of the four-year undergraduate degree is one such example.
This is a time of sweeping and somewhat reckless changes, often selectively adopted from starkly different contexts, adding to the woes of higher education in India. The guiding principles are lofty and aim to make India an intellectual storehouse. However, the chosen pathway needs serious rethinking, keeping in mind questions of access and diversity.
Skilling for employment and the pursuit of doctoral research require equally rigorous, but very different approaches. Sadly, the current model fails to satisfy either. The hasty introduction of too many changes, the absence of adequate physical infrastructure, shortage of trained faculty, lack of funds, relentless homogenisation and increased dependency on technological solutions to what are essentially epistemological and pedagogical challenges are some of the reasons.
The four-year undergraduate programme (FYUP) with its focus on skill education, and a substantially shrunk discipline-specific learning, is an interesting experiment provided our educational institutions, especially our public institutions, have the funds, infrastructure and faculty expertise to turn these ideas into reality. Colleges are scrambling for resources, classrooms, teachers and in the process, many aspects of the FYUP are being reduced to a formality, while compromising heavily on domain specialisation.
The research component in the touted four-year undergraduate programme is expected to prepare students for doctoral research. This is based on the assumption that all undergraduate programmes across all institutions in India would be able to equip their students with rigorous training in research tools and methods. While the structure offers multiple exit options to the student, it remains to be seen how many students are actually able to stay on till the fourth year, given the imperatives to earn a livelihood and shoulder domestic responsibilities. On the other hand, there is also little clarity on employment possibilities for those who do exit midway.
Further, the idea of a research intensive fourth year leading to direct admission to PhD seems to rest on the assumption that research is only a skill-based enterprise. If appropriately skilled in research methods, a scholar can arrive at “findings and conclusions” in the minimum possible time. This approach fails to consider research a reflective and deeply deliberative exercise. If a PhD is only about solving a specific problem within a stipulated period of time, how can it justifiably be described as a Doctorate in Philosophy?
While the PhD programme is sometimes seen as a lonely furrow where some chosen people engage in esoteric intellectual puzzles, it is in practice a socially located pursuit of knowledge. Along with well-known skills such as writing, communication, problem-solving and troubleshooting, a PhD programme should instil critical, creative and calibrated thinking — skills needed for consolidating our democracy and robust citizenship. A PhD programme hopefully creates in the researcher the ability to question and re-imagine rather than accept whatever is presented as a fact. It also inculcates a commitment to integrate the individual pursuit of knowledge with the larger community’s needs.
The new guidelines for PhD issued by the University Grants Commission seek to flatten institutional and student diversities and create a uniform admissions process. But such streamlined mechanisms are neither attuned to the diverse needs of students nor that of institutions. A techno-managerial approach that seeks control and regulate sees this diversity as a problem that needs fixing and what better tool than supposedly neutral technology-assisted solutions?
This has resulted in the conduct of computer-based tests that contain multiple choice questions (MCQs), not in keeping with the idea of research that requires, at the very least, the ability of critical thinking and questioning. Often, there is a mismatch between the expectations of the programmes of study, especially interdisciplinary ones and the entrance examination. Unfortunately, the total dependence on a single MCQ-based exam has, in a very short span of time, resulted in the mushrooming of cram schools and guidebooks.
The challenge of diversity of institutions, faculty, and students within higher education can be seen either as a problem or as an asset. We must not lose sight of the specificities of our social needs and in our rush to become the “teacher to the world” create students who are unable to make meaningful interventions in the contexts that they work and live in.
Greater patience and caution while bringing in such sweeping changes would help us retrace our steps, in case it is required. Not doing so belies a hubris that is unbecoming of decision makers in the field of higher education.
Menon and Kothiyal are professors of Gender Studies and History, respectively, at Ambedkar University, Delhi
