Only last year we heard Manmohan Singh bemoaning the fact that
not one of India’s institutes of so-called higher learning ranks among the top
200 in the world; now we see the incumbent President of India (himself a most
uncommonly erudite man)
doing the same. In this context, I find it remarkable
that Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, in the capacity of Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta
University, had lamented the ‘isolation and stagnation’ in academics almost a
century ago (long before Amartya Sen had gone to college, or I)! What has
changed, if not for the worse, though India churns out several million college
graduates a year today?
Very closely connected to the issue of perpetually falling
standards in education, from KG to PG, far more serious than lack of funds or
infrastructure I have always held, is the lack of competent and dedicated
teachers. If anything, things have become worse over the last three decades:
despite the considerable hike in salaries (and despite the fact that many
private tutors earn
very sizeable
incomes – certainly much more than the average IT worker, bank officer or
journo can aspire to), very few of my brightest ex students even consider
becoming teachers, especially at the school level, where the foundations are
laid and futures are made. So I am more than a little pleased to see that even
the new Prime Minister has gone public saying that ‘good teachers are one of
the biggest needs of society’, and he has ‘rued that there were very few
available’: see this
news item. Not that it will make the slightest difference –
children and parents alike are convinced that what matters is a combination of
reasonable (not great-) pay and slight requirement of learning, skill, patience
and hard work, therefore if one good student opts for a teaching career, ten
thousand will want to be engineers or hotel managers or stringers for TV…making
even 100K a month as a private tutor at home, one’s own boss and everyone
calling you ‘Sir’ is a vastly better career proposition than slogging for 40-50K
(or even 100K) as an insignificant cog in a vast corporate wheel in Bangalore
or Mumbai, but I guess the only youngster I have really convinced is my own
daughter.
Which brings me to something that our Chief Minister said in a
public speech the other day. She is one of those brave politicians (or driven
by desperate circumstances) who can take the bull by the horns. She has
candidly admitted that it is not within the government’s power to provide millions
of new jobs every year, so young people had better look out for themselves, and
there is nothing shameful or pathetic about self-employment: a lot of
hardworking people are doing very well indeed,
she said, citing the example of a
telebhaaja
(fried savouries) vendor in her own neighbourhood, even if you forget arguments
about the dignity of all labour. What I found imbecile and risible in the same
news article is that some ‘professor of marketing in a Calcutta based B-school’
has remarked ‘at a time highly educated students are suffering because of lack
of employment opportunities, such comments are extremely insensitive’. Let us
take this comment apart, piece by piece:
1.
‘Highly educated’ students? 90% of those in the
age-group 18-24 who are attending some private engineering or management school
(the kind where this kind of oaf can be a ‘professor’), I happen to know, would
make pathetic cartoons of themselves if they were asked to teach any subject to
kids in class ten.
2.
‘Suffering’? These kids are the most pampered
generation the planet has ever seen, the type whose parents buy them bikes,
smartphones and seats in private colleges – what are they ‘suffering’ from,
except maybe obesity and boredom?
3.
How much less would they ‘suffer’ if instead of
taking up some sort of self-employment they became shopfloor supervisors in Big
Bazaar, or insurance policy sellers, or cybercoolies, or ‘professors’ in
private colleges who – I happen to know – are frequently paid less than
government schoolteachers and treated like slaves by the owners?
4.
Why ‘at a time’? Of course this ‘professor’ and
others of his ilk are history-illiterate, but it just so happens that Indians
have been suffering from ‘lack of employment opportunities’ for at least four
generations. Only, strangely, there are far more Bengalis among them than
Biharis, Punjabis, Gujaratis, Marwaris and Sindhis. Something to learn here?
What might this ‘professor’ say?
5.
Why is it less glamorous or respectable to be a
roadside dhaaba owner who makes
several lakhs a month (there are many in Kolkata, and I am sure in all the
other metropolitan cities) than to be a ‘professor of marketing’, who basically
teaches young people tricks to fool people into buying things they don’t really
need? (think: do you need to market insulin?)
6.
What is ‘extremely insensitive’ about advising
people to stand on their own feet instead of expecting parents and the
government to do things for them all their lives? Is it actually a fact that if
a lot of youngsters got interested in fending for themselves instead of wasting
a few years in a run of the mill B-school, a lot of ‘professors’ like this one
would lose their jobs (is it really a job? Look up this
old post of mine…), and
that is what he found most frightening to contemplate?
