Education – Beyond Outcomes and Beneficiaries, to include Processes

Believe it or not, the idea for this post came from a newspaper discussion article on Supreme Court of India’s purportedly arguable and contradictory stances in certain cases. The heading for the post is a straight lift from the piece. I plead guilty of plagiarism.

Now that managing education has become more of a concern than education itself, there is a sharper focus on measurements. Measurement of what? Outcomes. Who are the beneficiaries? The edupreneurs. What are ignored? The process of education.

I passed my Secondary School Leaving Certificate exam in 1970. Those were in a way, innocent days, at least for me and my cohorts. It was the time we knew that after successfully passing the Bachelor’s degree examination in four years, we can head for the bank exams and are bound to be placed in some bank or the other. Recall that it was soon after banks were nationalised and every hamlet in and around the country was blessed with a branch of at least one of the nationalised banks. There were bank jobs galore.

I took another path, the less travelled one, not because I was a rebel but because I had cousins, a few years older to me, who took that road. I became, I would like to think, a technocrat.

With that small but perhaps unnoticed detour, let me come to the process of education. There are literally millions of ideas put forth by billions of people of what education should be, what it should guide students towards and so on. Here, I would like to take the path of the contrarian – what education should not be.

First, education should not be formulaic, in adjectival sense, “... in accordance with a mechanically followed rule or style.” Edupreneurs are already up in arms, brain-washed as they are by the management-types.

They shout, “We have to avail the multiplier effects of education through scale. If sixty is the limit of number of students in a class and if I get only 59 to a course, my RoI takes a deep dive! Hence, only ‘mechanically followed rule or style’,” they say.

It is quite simple. Just get the management-types out of your hair! Ask them, “On the one hand you are talking up the case of multi-disciplinary research with freedom to mix and match; on the other, you are asking for strait jacketing of educational disciplines. Go figure!”

“Though you are an edupreneur, bring your conscience to the fore, at least once. If only forty students sign-up for a class, do not drop that class from the curriculum. Give more attention to individual students and ironically, your RoI may go through the roof!”

“Idealism!” you say.

I retort, “A realistic life is meaningless if not sprinkled with star-dusts of idealism!”

Second, come to one of the other holy jargons – blue-sky thinking. This is most inappropriate for India. Look at the sky from anywhere in India on a clear night (leave aside mountain tops) and you would be hard put to locate even Sirius, the brightest star in the firmament, during the season it must be visible. That is how blue-skyless the atmosphere over India is, atmospheric-wise as well as in research in science and technology topics.

Every putative “Research” oriented appointment anywhere – in the academia, in the for-profit corporates – comes with the caveat, “...this many number of ‘research’ papers in two years, or else...’”

With this Damocles Sword hanging over one’s head, the appointee, of course, will take the least path of resistance – do research not even at the fringes of existing knowledge but at its core! Her acolytes in education intent on doing projects with the sole purpose of getting a degree, of course, will fall in line.

Damn blue-sky thinking. I have never heard of a researcher knowing in advance what she would find through her efforts.

Third point: can you ever measure education?

Harvard University has the best collection of ants in the world, no exceptions. Professor E. O. Wilson of Harvard died recently. It was his contribution to the institution.

What, a collection of ants is one’s contribution? Some recent history is due here. The good professor, when he was a pre-teen lad growing up in Alabama, a state in the US, took a shine to watching insects in his rural homestead. He saw how ants go about their tasks, so orderly and no fuss. This is how he came to establish the ant museum at Harvard.

Jump forward a few years, and when he was finding it difficult to get tenured at Harvard, Stanford University sent out feelers (from the west coast to the east coast of the US) to lure him, unsolicited. Getting wind of these westerly winds, Harvard quickly tenured him! That is how the pre-teen boy became a Professor Emeritus at Harvard when he died. What was the RoI for Harvard? The simple fact that it did not allow a positive RoI for Stanford on this count! Your loss is my gain!

Yes, Harvard learnt to its horror that RoI in education/research is beyond any so-called objective measurement (an ant museum is no metric!). Prof. Wilson was also, on the way to his pre-eminence, awarded Pultizer Prize! Read one of his fiction pieces here.

He is also Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL)! The RoI for Harvard went through the roof!

Do you believe this?

I do not. Why? Because I want to do away with this concept of metrics in education in the short term, and in toto. Did our gurukuls measure their outputs? I will let you answer this question.

Education is, as indefinable as it is, beyond being pigeonholed.

The Ur source of metrics in education is an infertile cross-breed – an off spring of management ideas and measuring education.

If you try to measure education, you would be giving birth to a hyena.

The process of education is defined by the indefinable, “Continuing Curiosity”. No silos.

Raghuram Ekambaram