Need for Education Reforms in India

The Macaulayan habits die hard – the clichés will be overworked and the stereotypes reinforced ad nauseam - the reformist fervour of the recent academic and pedagogical discourse has to calm down on the backburner, the cold feet are here to develop and stay- the school examination and admission season has set in. Following an eventful year of public debate on our education system in general and school examination paradigm in particular, these months are poised to have an air of banality, the moments of insipid reality check when the procedural demands of the entrenched system will take precedence over the substantive vision of reforms. It is in this context that the terms of discourse, and the resultant debate, on the education system need to be recast, preventing it from degenerating into a diatribe between ivory tower mandarins and ardent reformists.

The reconfiguring of the public discourse on the education system has in some limited sense captured the popular imagination, fuelled as it has been by an unlikely combination of catalysts- Yashpal Committee’s recommendations, HRD ministry’s proposed reforms and a celluloid product from the tinsel town. However, as the devil of any blueprint for reforms lies in details, the crusaders for reforms have opted to be angelic and serve as obfuscating pedants.

The glaring limitations of the school education system should not act as a red herring for ignoring the dismal state of the higher education system in India. The higher education system in India has a behemoth structure, almost representing a cumbersome monstrosity with 214 universities, 38 institutions ‘deemed-to-be universities,’ 11 institutes of national importance, 9,703 colleges, and 887 polytechnics. The government has gone through perfunctory rounds of critically reviewing the existing system and the diagnosis as well as prescription runs on predictable lines. Last year the final report of the Committee on ‘Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education’ (Prof. Yashpal Committee Report) was another addition to it. Committing itself to implementation of the core of the recommendations, the HRD Ministry sought to blend the reformist orientation with the tenets of access, equity and excellence. However, beyond perfunctory lip service, the qualitative and logistical aspects of the reform need to be addressed with a blend of strong political will and pedagogical imagination.

The question of reforming an entrenched system of pedagogy and academic evaluation is a question concerning socio-economic and cultural milieu, epistemological outlook and the nature of professional classes as well as a question of a society’s quest for excellence, sense of intellectual inquiry and logistical feasibility. Diagnosis of the rut in the academic system has to be sympathetically understood in its historical context and the strange blend of objectives that it sought to achieve for the cross section of professional classes in India.

The Macaulayan minute on Indian educational system had the imprint of Benthamite utilitarianism, wedded to the condescending civlizational objectives of carrying “white man’s burden”. T he utilitarian objectives of equipping the British rule with English educated young men and modern professional classes not only served the British rule in good stead but also ushered in the first serious interface of the educated Indian class with the western science ,philosophy and literature . However, the success and survival of the Indian functionaries in the Government and the educated Indian professional classes was a product