The ability to do things differently than was done previously must rank as one of the more desirable features of any entity. Individuals and institutions that have the flexibility to change as circumstance change are more successful than others. Those who are confident of themselves can dispassionately examine what about themselves needs change. It takes intelligence to figure out what is wrong and how to fix it. It takes courage to admit that the current system just does not work. It takes optimism and self-confidence to know that one has …

A BusinessWeek article of 14th September, “Next: An Internet Revolution in Higher Education,” makes the case that the way higher education is done will be changed by the internet revolution. This is not the most earthshaking bit of news you may have heard since it is fairly obvious that nearly everything has been affected by the internet and in the future, every aspect of human society will be qualitatively different as a consequence of the ease with which information is recorded, stored, transmitted, searched, and retrieved.

Furious re-arranging of the deck chairs going on as the ship sinks. “The Class X board exams will become optional in all CBSE schools from the coming academic year (2010-11).” (rediff.)

India’s higher education must reflect the dynamics of its economy and the diversity of the needed human capital for powering its growth in an increasingly competitive globalized world. The circular causation between an effective higher education sector and the economic growth makes the sector especially amenable to positive feedback effects – once the process is initiated, the system automatically builds up capacity to keep the growth of the sector to match the growth of the economy. Policy choices dictate the initial conditions and kick-starting of this virtuous process.

It seems to be the season for focusing on education. I will do the conjecturing below but first here are a bunch of articles on what’s going on in education in India.

An addendum to the previous post on “Education and Corruption.” Here’s a story that I recently heard which illustrates the engineering of scarcity in education and the resultant bribes and low quality. No names are mentioned because the people involved are powerful people in the government.

The Indian education sector is in distress. How does one explain the lack of outrage among the population at something which affects them so forcefully? Could it be because they are not aware of how dysfunctional the system is? That must at least partly explain the apathy. Perhaps they know but accept it with the fatalistic resignation of the type that accepts corruption among public officials? Perhaps they mistakenly consider pervasive corruption as normal. But how can they not see that government control of education, the rampant corruption, and the …

There are some topics that make me see red. In that state, I cannot even think rationally, leave alone write coherently. I am so angry that this is not going to read well for sure. But this has to be said. Those who are ultimately responsible for the violence against the Indian students in Australia should not be lynched. Lynching would be too good for them. I am not talking about the red-necks and skinheads (or whatever their Australian equivalents are) who attack foreign students. I am talking of the …

I received an SMS just moments ago: “A thirteen-year old’s day in Surat: school 7 to 2. Daily tuitions 4:30 to 7:30. Saw ICSE standard 8th textbooks. Detailed and depressing. What a state!”
No surprise to me as I have observed the same sort of insanity in the case of the children of friends and family.

The greatest scandal and the greatest failure of the Indian governments (all of them, and practically all of them have been Congress) has been in education. A great economy and a great education system go hand in hand — though it almost always starts with the education system supplying the fuel that powers the engine of growth and development. Any dispassionate observer of the Indian education system (and I am one of many) cannot but conclude that it is one of the most distressed. It has never been very good …

I am a big fan of Sir Ken Robinson and have been so since I first came across his talk on TED of Feb 2006 (which I had blogged in September 2006). Here’s a treat for those who have not watched that performance — and I say performance advisedly as he could be a stand-up comic any day of the week.

One of the many important point he makes is that the current school system kills creativity. In a more recent talk, he goes into how the current school paradigm …

In the previous post, “The Future of Education and Technology,” I wrote that technology will have a disruptive influence on the present education system. But that is par for the course since the influence of technology on education has always been disruptive, rather than incremental. One could say that the education system in general has long periods of stasis punctuated by some technology-driven disruption.
In the following I will argue that the system is ripe for another of those disruptive events that will push the system from its current state …

In what is to follow, I will focus on what is a core concern of this blog: education and related matters. One thing is certain in a world of uncertainty: the system will change. So I would like to ponder the direction and magnitude of the change. It is also certain that the change will be technology based and in a sense will be technology driven. I will take some lessons from books and the web. One book that I have spent some time with recently is “The Race between …

This month’s Pragati is about “What the new government should do in its first 100 days.” I have a piece in there about the structural changes required in education. What else is new, you’d ask. Below the fold are the editorial comments for the issue. Please read and distribute.

Nicholas Kristof in an op-ed in the New York Times asks:
Quick, what’s the source of America’s greatness?
Is it a tradition of market-friendly capitalism? The diligence of its people? The cornucopia of natural resources? Great presidents?
No, a fair amount of evidence suggests that the crucial factor is our school system — which, for most of our history, was the best in the world but has foundered over the last few decades.
As I wrote in 2001, “The most devastating impact of our dismal educational system is that we are condemning …

One of the persistent themes of this blog is the dismal failure of the education system. There is a direct relationship between the excellence of the educational system — human skills — and the broad performance of the economy. So even without knowing much about an economy, if you find the economy in dire straits, you can as a reasonable hypothesis maintain that the educational system may be dysfunctional.

PanIIT 2008
It’s coming up to that time of the year again when a very large group of completely self-absorbed people with very inflated egos gather to congratulate themselves on how astonishingly amazing they are and how they are the almighty’s gift to humanity, if not the entire creation.

The PanIIT 2008 site declares: “IIT Alumni 2008 Global Conference is being held at IIT Madras, from 19th to 21st December. With 3000 alumni participants from around the globe, a galaxy of eminent speakers, and selected sponsors who are leaders in their industry, …

Richard Baraniuk: Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning. (Filmed Feb 2006)

Jonathan Drori: Why we don’t understand as much as we think we do. (Filmed Feb 2007)

[Thanks to Manish Dharod for the links.}

An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal (Aug 13th) by Charles Murray, “For Most People, College is a Waste of Time” has many points that I agree with. (Hat tip: R S Malapati.)
For a while I have been convinced that it is better to separate teaching from testing and evaluation. See this post “De-linking Teaching and Testing” (Feb 2005) where I wrote:

A new world
That the world has changed radically in just this generation is nowhere more evident than in matters that have something to do with information and communications technology. The evidence is all around us — including this fact that I am writing this on a laptop somewhere in India and anyone with a connected computer anywhere in the world can read it. It is hard to overestimate the profound changes. Perhaps because the changes are so overwhelming that we consider them normal and so unremarkable. However, understanding the consequences …