New perspective on education
A nuanced argument for a progressive and modern approach to education, which is still in the shadow of the colonial legacy.
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AIKAT MAJUMDAR’S College: Pathways of Possibility is a fascinating sociological take on the higher education system in India. Writing in an elegant anecdotal fashion, the author explores not only the reasons behind the diminishing preference of students for a liberal artscience education over professional education courses such as engineering and medicine but also the historical and social reasons behind this trend.
The book presents a learned and logical argument for a progressive and modern approach to education.
“Is it possible to imagine education today without it being linked to a particular profession? Or does it have something to do with the state of our universities—something that is in turn rooted in their longer histories,” he writes.
The book tries to find answers to these questions and, at the same time, presents newer avenues for arts-science education in the country. It challenges the age-old, well-entrenched notion of education as being nothing more a means of social mobility and the over-emphasis on professional institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITS) and medical colleges.
The writer says: “Getting into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—the fabled MIT—IS an incredibly cool affair, and yet would anyone claim that it is way ahead of a seat at Princeton or Yale?”
While delving into the changing and complex world of higher education in the country, Majumdar depicts its impact on the world outside the classroom. Citing the example of the change of demand in books in the famed College Street book market in Kolkata—where over the years Marcel Proust, Lawrence Durrell, Jorge Luis Borges, and other literary greats have made way for coaching manuals and test prep volumes guaranteeing success in the joint entrance examinations for engineering and medicine—majumdar observes: “Few things record the drastic change in the selffashioning of young India as the seismic shift in the book-scape of College Street.”
He asks if it is possible for a student, just out of high school, to decide with certainty what she/he wants to do for the rest of his/her life. He says: “Artscience education in the general streams seems like a sad back-up, good only for those not smart enough to be chosen for the professions right out of high school.”
However, a good artsscience education, he feels, will give the necessary foundation for students to pursue professional training if he/she so wishes. “The magical thing about liberal art-science education is that it does not— and cannot—assume that the student is headed in a particular direction after college, and hence it does not exclude other possibilities,” the author says.
SCIENCE AND LIBERAL ARTS
The book is an argument against the rigid compartmentalisation of disciplines that often encourage the idea that the liberal arts are in opposition to STEM (science, technology, engineering and medicine). This, the author feels, is a fallacy and counterproductive to imparting a progressive, well-rounded education, as “the foundational S of STEM, science, occupies pride of place in the liberal arts”. He points out that in September 2014, the computer science department of Stanford University, United States, introduced a pilot programme of two dual mathan