Producing 10 civil
servants every year: Can it be the goal of a VC?
Arun Kumar.
CESP,SSS,JNU
The Tribune, September 25, 2009.
A recently appointed VC of a prestigious University stated
in an interview that one of his important goals is that the civil services coaching
centre of this University should enable at least 10 students to make it each
year. According to the story, he is enamoured of the idea because he along with
19 others made it to the bureaucracy in 1972 thanks to the Rau’s study circle -
a creditable achievement for a coaching centre. However, can this be one of the
important goals of a prestigious University? Alternatively, what does it convey
about the leadership of a premier Indian
University
Should a University at all have a coaching centre for
examinations of any kind, civil or uncivil? What does this indicate about both
University teaching and our centralized testing for various jobs/careers? Why
is it that the training at even the good Universities does not prepare students
for passing entrance examinations? Equivalently, why is it that the competitive
examinations do not test the students on the skills that they acquire during
their routine studies in a good institution of higher learning?
The problem pervades the entire education system from
the schools to the Universities. For entrance to the IITs or Medical colleges,
etc., school students attend coaching classes during their 11th and
12th classes. The regular studies whether in private or government
schools seems inadequate for preparing the child for the competitive
examinations and thereby unduly burdens them. This has led to the phenomenon of
Kota Kota
Coaching institutions prepare their students to cram
material to answer questions in competitive examinations – learning and understanding
are incidental. When IIT and Medical students make it to the IAS and go to the training
Academy in Mussoorie they feel lost because they have little exposure to the
social sciences - a key ingredient into training good bureaucrats. These highly
talented students with their enormous capacity to mug up pass the civil
services examinations but this hardly implies an understanding of what they had
mugged up. Skills needed to be a good doctor or a bureaucrat are at variance
with each other. The training at the stand alone professional schools is narrow
and it remains so because of lack of interaction with students of other
disciplines.
Our Universities are unable to promote much learning
amongst its students partly because the training in schools is indifferent and
out of the pool of talent available, the best are siphoned away by the stand
alone professional courses. Further, students who enroll in colleges and universities
instead of attending classes spend most of the time preparing for something else.
Why do students who work hard at coaching schools do not do so for the degree they
enroll for? Degrees hardly represent
skills but are passports to getting jobs where the needed training is imparted
on the job. Most teaching is insipid so that many students lose interest and exams
are soul destroying. Many teachers are demoralized and go through the motions
of teaching but have little interest in knowledge generation or the students.
The competitive examinations largely test the skill
to mug up and reproduce. Mug books try to anticipate the likely questions and
the successful candidates are those that can sort of predict the pattern of questions
and provide standardized answers to them. Why do these examinations not test
the logical abilities of the students and their capacity to grapple with
difficult problems that have no ready solutions? That would be the real test of
capabilities. This is tough and our students do not get this training in the
institutions of higher learning. Our faculties who set the question papers have
themselves never acquired such skills so they can neither teach this way nor
set questions to test such skills.
The real task of the institutions of higher learning,
like, the Universities or the IITs ought to be knowledge generation. While
doing so they would also build capabilities amongst those who plan to go into other
jobs, like, the bureaucracy or industry. Talent has to be filtered up so that
the best go into knowledge creation. Unfortunately, at each stage there has been
a reverse filteration of talent. The best minds (produced in spite of the
system) are systematically siphoned out into jobs requiring lesser capabilities
since they either pay more or have associated power.
This is a throw back to the days of the Raj which needed
to produce clerks and not thinkers amongst the natives. In spite of sixty years
of independence, we have not thrown away this yoke and restored the preeminence
of thinkers in society. Civil servants have dominated over everyone else. So, society
thinks nothing wrong in fixing salaries of University teachers in relation to
the bureaucrat’s salary scales. The top dog has to be the Secretary to the
government of India
Many academics having failed to get into the
bureaucracy or the corporate sector have come for teaching so that in their
hearts they believe they are doing a lesser job and often lack motivation. Good
teaching requires commitment. One inspired lecture is worth more than hundreds
of insipid or often incompetent lectures that kill the interest of the
students. That is why one cannot measure the productivity of a teacher as of a
factory worker whose task is to perform routine and repeated tasks. One cannot
measure output by how many students pass indifferent exams where little
learning is required.
Few academics and even fewer bureaucrats and policy
makers understand this overall picture and at times identify the problem as one
of indiscipline – say, lectures and examinations not being held - but what of
the content? Dissent is the basis of knowledge generation and ought to be
cultivated systematically in the institutions of higher learning. However, this
would be anathema to a bureaucrat and unthinkable to an Army General - their training
militates against the spirit of a University.
Yet, our ruling elite readily appoints either these
worthies as the VCs or those academics who have these tendencies either because
of political convenience or as a reward for their subservience. The search
committee members are compliant worthies willing to do the bidding of the
political masters in the hope of getting plum postings – a patronage system all
the way. Clearly, the role of institutions of higher learning is incidental for
the elite class. No wonder the priorities of the VCs are typically things that are
incidental (like, producing civil servants) to the main task of a University. If
the future of the nation was not at stake one could laugh it off and today that
is all we are able to do because the rot is deep.
