Comments on: Reasonableness

By: gaddeswarup

gaddeswarup — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:35:11 +0000

Atanu,
Sorry; that was probably not the right response to your query. I was thinking more of higher education. It seemed to me that there is no one concept of a university but different ones which evolved differently in different countries to different needs and
situations. Perhaps what I had in mind was that education about rights, wrongs, duties and responsibilities should come earlier in primary and secondary educations (usually some specializations already start in secondary education). I am not sure whether this makes sense either but this is what I had (vaguely) in mind.

By: gaddeswarup

gaddeswarup — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 07:51:20 +0000

Atanu,
My impression is that American universities evolved in response to market forces right from the beginning. One difference from European universities seems to be ‘less state control’ and the efforts to be self sufficient. But originally, they did not go for profits but responded to different needs of the country and various communities. Some recent efforts to run universities for profit do not seem to be so successful. There is a nice paper on the evolution of American universities by David Labaree in the Recent Papers section of;
http://www.stanford.edu/~dlabaree/
” Market, Politics, and American Higher Education: An Institutional Success Story”. He is quite careful about what he means by success. One does loose out on the kind of things you mentioned but state controlled universities do not seem to be achieving it either. I myself feel that a reasonable aim is to run higher educational institutions as non-profit self sustainable institutions. Where and how does one teach civic virtues etc. This should come in primary education which seems to be even bigger mess with 40% teacher absenteeism in some states. Will the various religious and private organization for profit achieve this? Probably unlikely but any education is probably better than no education.

By: shiv

shiv — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 05:35:00 +0000

Nice. Very resonable