Jargonized Education Reform

 

Jargonized Education Reform

If you graduated with a degree before year 2024 CE, your degree is worth nothing. Don’t worry, I am 70 years old and I am still surviving; holding three degrees, all worthless.

Whenever I read anything about education in our newspapers, magazines, or hear on TV, read with difficulty on mobile phones, the message is crystal clear.

Indian education system, from pre-school to Ph.D, needs to be reformed.

And, the only way such a reformation can come about is through a plan that is sprinkled with jargon. No jargon, no reform.

I have started out with a bang, but I don’t know whether I can carry it through till the end. Oh, you say, I can end wherever I come to a dead end. Yes, that is a good idea and I will follow it.

Recalibrate is a technical word in precision measurement. You do not ask your vegetable vendor to show you his calibration certificate. But, management people use it too often to mean nothing more than change. You need to calibrate anything, even your bathroom scales, towards a standard, but in managementese the end point need not be specified. If you show change, meaningful or not, you have calibrated. Hence, this word is a jargon, not begged, not borrowed but stolen from engineering.

Reimagine–one has to imagine first and only then anything can be reimagined. People in management start off with reimagining, without ever having imagined anything. Automatically they are faster than anyone who understands what there is and then reimagine. The company I was working for hired McKinsey & Company, one of the big four consultancy companies to improve the company’s operational work flow and thus increase profit. There were four members, all MBAs, from IIMs and they went to four or five offices in Mumbai, Jaipur, and  Nagpur, flying Business Class, and got all the data, I mean, data and data only. Then, perhaps over a week they figured out an MS Excel based workflow, and cost and revenue (billing) sheets. This is what I call Reimagining without any preceding imagining. Their solutions followed the time-untested one-size-fits-all philosophy. This is managementese at its worst.

Have you ever heard the term reform without getting the idea that whatever you had thought earlier was a “rude produce,” in Adam Smith’s words–needs wholesale change. I did not think so. This is a management trick. Without ever saying so, they have occupied the prefrontal cortex in your brain, the seat of higher order thinking, unique to human, they say. The first thing you must do is to carry out the forensic analysis of the dead system, and come up with a live alternative. Here, ironically, the alternative is also dead as it has been used an infinite number of times.

Oh, it so yesterday to call it a Library. It is, in managementese, Information Resource Centre. Yes, this name change will make students flock in droves to the library (oops, the Information Resource Centre) and involve themselves in Deep Learning, the buzz word. If you believe that, I own the bridge across River Cauvery in Thiruchirappally and it’s on auction–start bidding.

Outcome-based education. Go to the start of this post. Whoever you may be, you have no idea what the outcome of your four years effort spent in a UG course will be; if you were unlucky, you got the Master’s Degree and further went on to successfully compete Ph.D. “All for nothing...” of Dire Straits is the song you must be humming. So, at the age of 17 or 18, you are mature enough to know what you want in life. As I said, I am “Seventy, going on eighty,” and I am still unaware of where I want to be. And, parents are in a tunnel deep underground in the darkest of dark places. Their wards are smarter than they are, they would never admit except when boasting to friends and relatives.

Apprentice-Embedded Degrees. A new concept? No, the old rag wrapped in satin. I, in 1975 when I was 21, went through the apprentice-embedding process at the then (and even now) the most prestigious construction company in India. I hated it. I saw I was suited for desk work and that is what I prepared myself for and ended up, tolerating the occasional mud splotch. Yes, that I reckon is success.

[A]ppropriate use of AI. The implication is there can be an inappropriate use of AI. These management people never acknowledge that possibility and put AI on top of the ever-unfinished Tower of Babel.

The last such managementese word: ecosystem. I may have been guilty of using this decades old neologism (an oxymoron?) somewhere, sometime, but I have put an end to it. Ecosystem has a specific and sharp meaning in biology, particularly in evolutionary biology. So, as much as recalibrate, this word is a borrowed word and is jargon.

OK, I will stop here. Take what I have said apart and get back to me. I will be ready, as Arnold Schwarzenegger said in the movie “The Last Stand”.

Raghuram Ekambaram