Producing 10 civil servants every year: Can it be the goal of a VC?

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 11^th and 12^th 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 schools that prepare students for the competitions. Soon schools would come up in `Otak’ to prepare the children for entry into Kota schools. Where will the process end? Bright young children lose much of their childhood in this mad race and for what? Anything but learning.

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 (the top of the pack of glorified clerks) and the salary of a teacher has to be several scales below that. In fact, the Chairmen and the members of pay commissions of University and College teachers have been Professors but none of them have protested at this preposterous idea and fixed the salaries of teachers in the lower scales. Indoctrination has been such that they have accepted the superior status of the clerks.

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.

arunkumar1000@hotmail.com