Revision of Curriculum, from emerging to extinct technologies

 An article in the newspaper set me thinking on what is the purpose of revising the curriculum of an educational institution ostensibly preparing students for the ever changing real world.

Yes, I can understand the utility of dynamic changes in the curriculum if such changes happened in real time, emerging engineering knowledge going mainstream without any lapse of time, or minimal delay at best.

25 years is not minimal delay. Yes, you read it right – for 25 years supposedly one of the oldest and premier government engineering universities in India had not revised its engineering curriculum.

Now, it is pertinent to ask how forward looking was the previous revision, carried out 25 years earlier. My guess is, it was not at all, at least not in one of the “core engineering subjects” – civil engineering.

I can say the above with some level of confidence because I see that the curriculum now has barely nudged since the time I studied, nearly 50 years ago! Sorry if I am not flying high upon hearing the news about curriculum revision – been there, done that etc.

Yes, when I scan through the laboratory experiments students carry out now and compare it with what I did in my days, beyond the basics, there are indeed a number of them that are Greek and Latin to me. I refuse to acknowledge these as anywhere near forward looking. In doing these experiments, students do not, indeed are not required to ask the critical question “Why?” of the results. The presentation skills of students are the foci in the laboratory reports.

I wonder how students would ever learn how to move forward. This is not something unique to laboratory experiments; similar situation exists in the subjects and topics handled in classrooms also. I am teaching – forced to teach – what I learned fifty years ago. You may come back with, “1+1 = 2 has not changed for thousands of years!” True. Yet, if we do not go further and stick only to decimal system in arithmetic, would we have come to the so-called digital world? 1+1 = 10!

In the civil engineering department of private universities where the metric of a faculty member’s productivity is the number of research papers published, there is a preponderance of what I call “substitution” research and concomitant technical papers.

Cement is a four letter word because in its manufacture CO₂ is released copiously. Therefore, any cement substitute in concrete is taken to lead us to Nirvana, through a “Green” construction material!

The above is as absurd as absurd can be. I have enquired dozens of times whether anyone of the researchers I meet daily has quantified “Green”ness of a substitute they are researching. The answer is a big NO!

Some of the substitutes are esoteric – glass fibres, crimped steel fibres, silica fume ... Yes, some of these, like silica fume, fly ash are finding use in building industry, but their environmental benefits or negatives do not seem to be vigorously studied. In real life, the transport lead distances for these materials are likely to tilt the environmental scale from “Green” to “Red” even compared to cement!

In classrooms, students do study about these cement substitutes, but the context does not include any environmental concerns. Indeed, we also need to be worried about the substitutes being causal agents of lung diseases – we will have a “Green” economy for an unhealthy population!

These matters fly below the radar in classrooms. Would the so-called experts think on these lines while revising the curriculum? I am not optimistic. Your guess is as good as mine.

More than about two decades ago, there was a lot of noise about river water transfer from surplus basins to deficient basins – no droughts anywhere in India! An astounding sum, about one trillion USD, was estimated as the required investment. I gave a speech to kind of shore up civil engineering graduates-to-be in a forum that when they do graduate they will be grabbled by their collars and offered jobs. I played my part as a snake-oil salesman to these gullible students to the hilt. But, as we know, it is all water under the bridge. Are students exposed to these ideas in classrooms? No. Would the purported revisions deal with these? No.

We are talking about disaster management as a course. So far so good. But, look beyond the name, it would shock you. As a course in a syllabus, I would expect it to be almost exclusively case-study oriented with analysis, scenario-building etc. In reality, it is none of these. Just a text book to be memorized and regurgitated in examinations. What revision are you talking about, pray tell.

The focus, per the article, is “emerging technologies”. What this means, going by past experience, we will be teaching these when the technologies have gone extinct. Emerging to extinct in the blink of an eye, measured as the period between revisions to the curriculum!

If I lean on what I have learnt on these societal processes, the revision would end up being mere colourful flyers and festoons on pre-existing curriculum, nothing more.

Raghuram Ekambaram