Education Minus

                                                                                              Education Minus

This is about weekly (I think) waste of space and newsprint in the daily newspaper The Hindu. This half page piece comes under the rubric Education Plus. Now you know where the heading for this post comes from!

Why the change of sign? The word plus indicates something more. Give me credit for figuring out that the word negative indicates something less. In this case, less than what? Less than something called holistic teaching/learning, and the generic yet holistic education. I have been reading seriously the Education Plus segment in the newspaper almost ever since it started, but it struck me hard only about a year ago.

The opinions (they are nothing but opinions though they could be splattered with some numbers, mostly meaningless) for the most part handles not how students should think about their future and possibly who to approach for such guidance, but about how parents should drive their wards in their choices. 

The parents are sharply focused on the job market. They want their RoI in triple digits.Hence, coding and more coding. This is where the problem starts. No, I am not talking about some airy ideas of contributing to society, to humanity, to world peace, being productive in a holistic way (I am going to be throwing ‘holistic’ every time I merely feel like it whether it carries any meaning at all, and if it gets boring, please quit reading)−all dreamy stuff−but the simple everyday stuff like employability, how fat the pay check needs to be to be able to make a mark in the marriage market, how to be hyper-competitive (don’t share anything with anyone), and most important of all, how to be cozy enough to teachers (to get that additional half a mark). No true friends. Not in the university and never outside of it.

The opinions in Education Plus are expressed by someone in the field of education. Are they current teachers toiling away in classrooms and in their homes (grading work) or someone who had been there, done that? Is it and administrator in a university or high school? Is it someone who has some remunerative contacts in a western university seeking to establish a an outreach (I am using this word most advisedly−outreach means downmarket, and India is downmarket for western universities) campus in India.

Is it an entrepreneur looking for a place to park the excess funds he has so that those funds get excesser? (I have had personal experience as an outsider in an interaction between an entrepreneur and a serious academic leading a life of retirement and did not care for making more money for the entrepreneur. The good thing was the meeting was held in a five star hotel, and I gorged myself on lightly fried cashew nuts, sandwich and coffee). By the way, such an entrepreneur goes by the generic name Edupreneur (education entrepreneur). Every funder of a Deemed-to-be university is an edupreneur! If you saw the history of these universities, you would invariably find someone putting a foot in the door, push one’s way through and become a highly respected edupreneur!

It does not matter.

Next, come to what is said in these opinions. Always, I mean always, the phrases “conceptual learning”, “innovative thinking”, “move fast and break things” (thank Mark Zuckerberg for this gem of a thought!). Given all these new fangled ways of how to educate, I wonder how people became achievers in the olden days, and there were more than a few. Even more recently, like my generation was not devoid innovators, inventors and they did break things! You may figure out who did what.

Ask these so-called educationists to give you a solid example of conceptual thinking, and I will bet to one that they cannot. In fact, many a time an empirical thinking drives one towards conceptual thinking. During my decade long teaching stint in a university, there would have been more than a hundred times I would have probed the minds of the students with puzzles. A few of them solved it, and if you were to ask them how they came up with the answers, they would not know. They just kept trying. Concepts do not lay themselves on a silver platter. Concepts EMERGE! From what? Thinking and drawing lines at the water line as waves erase them, all dynamic.

I am going to test my readers: what is your immediate answer for how ocean tides are produced. If you said attraction of the moon, you fail! Try answering the following: what could be an earth bound parallel to ocean tides on earth? When you figure out the answer, you would have figured out what is conceptual thinking, which cannot be taught in a class.

What is nearly parallel between buckling of a column under axial load and motion sickness when being driven on a hilly road with hairpin bends? Both lead to instability. This particular conceptual probing is given in the introduction or the first chapter of the book on Stability of Structures, a beast of a subject in my PG program.

Now, I am going to present the result of innovative conceptualization, only in photos, and that is that for this post and as it comes to Engineering Plus, in my mind.

 

 

     Raghuram Ekambaram