A (partial) response to Viplav Baxi's "The Outcomes of our Educational Systems"

I'm responding to Viplav Baxi's post, The outcomes of our educational systems where he ponders over the relationships between educational systems, outcomes and the larger social/cultural contexts in which these systems and learners are embedded.  He asks:

Does a particular type of education system tend to produce the same outcome irrespective of the underlying environment?
Or is it that the underlying social, economic and political environment will cause pretty much any educational system to tend to produce the same outcomes?
Or is it that the outcomes emerge as a result of the interplay between the educational system and the components of the ecosystem it lives in?

The simple answer, of course, is 'yes' - in other words, 'all of the above - and more'. First, the one about, from General Systems Theory, the concepts of Equifinality and Multifinality: in complex, non-deterministic systems, the same antecedents can produce different consequences; also, the same the result can stem from different causes.  Second, while different societies might use similar terms for the problems their educational systems might be facing, they might, in fact, actually be referring to somewhat or significantly different problems. My experience is with K-12 as well as university ed in India and the US. The problems that are similar are because human beings are involved in both cases, and fundamental human behavior and needs are context invariant. Where the problems are different it is because the educational systems as well as the socio-cultural contexts are different.

Modern educational systems employed throughout the world bear a similarity - they are based on a paradigm that evolved in Europe in response to rapid industrialization over the past 200 years. The systems replaced learning paradigms that were developed natively and in context in all cultures. The ideal form learning process is one that is tuned to needs of each individual but such a system is unaffordable and not scalable for masses of learners. Hence modern educational systems are inherently compromised by design. An even more insidious problem with these systems is that were designed for largely stable learning environments where societal needs and structures did not change rapidly. We are are faced with a context where an inherently compromised educational system operates in a context that changes far more rapidly than the educational system is capable of adapting.

In a situation where an education system is out-of-sync with its context, the outcomes are naturally going to be determined by environmental forces. 

The purpose of a broad education: Models and metaphors

One repeatedly hears complaints about the irrelevance of certain courses in an academic program. That the course added no value; and besides, one never will apply that knowledge to one's life, and so why bother.

Why bother?

Why, indeed. One purpose of education is to learn "facts". Facts are important, of course. It is important to know that there are ten millimetres in a centimetre. And a hundred of those in a metre. That the earth is approximately spherical and goes around the sun; and who is the current leader of the nation, and so on. But education has an even more important purpose. One thing that everyone will require to do throughout his or her life is to understand issues and solve problems. Education offers, above all, models, and theories. Models, in abstraction are metaphors, and metaphors are essential to understanding. For everything, ultimately is understood in terms of something else. The larger and more varied one's cache of metaphors, the better one can understand the world in all its complexity, and hence more effectively solve problems. You may never need to construct a chemical process flow involving osmosis, but you almost certainly will find many opportunities to apply the metaphor of osmosis to numerous situations in life.

Yes, a broad education does make you much smarter than a narrow one, because of the rich variety of metaphors it grants you.

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"Don't get that college degree!"

The New York Post is not exactly a fount of intellectual discourse. Still, it's never a mistake to see what the "other side" has to say. Thought provoking article here.

Tenth std. Board Exams to go away? Will pigs fly?

As the father of a boy who just got done with his 10th std. board exams, I cannot but jump for joy upon hearing that the government may scrap 10th standard board exams. I couldn't believe my eyes, but the link came up just above my Gmail messages and I had to go check it out immediately. If this actually happens, I am ready to forgive Kapil Sibal -- a person I don't particularly like -- for all of his real and imagined trespasses. This will be the single most important and radical transformation in the Indian school system in a long time.

I don't particularly care for the current system of education, view board exams with deep distaste, and am absolutely furious with the deranged idiots that inflicted two sets of board exams in quick succession - the 10th and the 12th - on a hapless Indian youth population. I would happily apply just about every vile term in every language every spoken, used to describe people one doesn't like, to the people -- nay, misanthropic cretins -- that created the current system. From the Indian Express article,

“I am thinking of relooking at the necessity of having a Board examination for Class 10,” he said. “A child moves up from Class 9 to Class 10 in the same school and there is no reason for either the student or the parents to get traumatised by the 10th Board exam,” he said. As a first step, the HRD Ministry will consult state governments and state education boards, Sibal said. “I hope to move forward very soon and set up an alternative system of evaluation of students that is based on percentiles rather than percentages.”

Yessss! Kapil -- or is it Mr. Sibal, Esq. or some such silly thing? -- I am prepared to launch a movement to name a holiday in your honor if you push this through quickly. I wish you had done this last year before my son had to suffer it, but there are a lot of kids in the country who would gladly replace every picture and bust of Gandhiji with yours when this is over. This is a watershed moment in Indian history. Finally, it appears, we are ready to hang up the ghost of the British Empire that has hung over us like a dark, threatening cloud for the past six decades. It is from the British that some of our India's great cargo-cult intellectuals learned to create two separate board examinations, separated by just two years. The British do it in the 11th and the 13th, but we decided to make it a total of 12 just to be in sync with the rest of the world. We ended up with a grotesque monster that has driven numerous Indian children to suicide, with the so-called 'intellectuals' looking on with smug expressions on their faces from their lofty perches.

I don't know if the percentile system of evaluation is going to be superior means of evalution. I think we need a clean break and construct a radically different means of promoting learning and building productive citizens. But we have to start somewhere, and getting rid of some of the detritus from our foolish socialistic past will do us a lot of good.

So, Ave, Kapil Sibal, all hail thee!

American education, Indian price?

Nobody will argue that Indian families place a premium on formal, institutional education. A big part of it is because getting a college degree is highly correlated with (relatively) decently paying employment. But a very significant part of it is because education is considered intrinsically valuable -- education is viewed as something that makes one more cultured, more informed, and a better human being. I'm not sure that what passes for formal education in India actually accomplishes much of that; my own memory is of learning a lot of stuff despite having to suffer formal education -- the real learning happened on the margins. Not because the content of formal education was lacking, but certainly the manner of its delivery, the process. And the ethos, the environment, and a whole lot of other things. And this was at purportedly reputed institutions -- which the majority of institutions today, are certainly not.

What abounds in India is what one might call cargo-cult education: it imitates a certain form of education that was prevalent in decades bygone, and believes it emulates British or American education, but all it really does is to go through the motions, and that too not particularly well. The result: bad education, badly executed. Those who learn anything at all, and even excel in life, do so despite, not because of their so-called education.

The roots of the problem go back to the British Raj when the colonizers asphyxiated traditional Indian institutionalized education and created a very few institutions based on British model to produce graduates that would serve the Empire. But the Indian governments that succeeded them did little to improve the situation; if anything, they exacerbated the problem. Young people who had the means or the talent or both, left India at the earliest opportunity for Western lands, usually English speaking ones, and most never returned, for their talents, skills and experience were neither appreciated nor accommodated.

After 60 years of despoiling the educational landscape, the newly re-elected Indian government seems to want to improve the situation, by inviting Western universities to set up shop right here in India. Now, I'm a little wary of this, but as long as it does not drain Indian resources, I can't see where this initiative could go wrong. After all, every year, hundreds of thousands of young Indians, their academic ambitions blocked by either the lack of available slots or the low quality of Indian education seek to escape to foreign universities, often suffering racism and other indignities as well as going deep into debt to fund their dreams. According the WSJ article,

Only 9% of college-age Indians have college educations, far lower than in China and many other Asian countries, according to a 2006 study by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, a New Delhi think tank. About 160,000 students a year leave India to study abroad, according to the National Knowledge Commission, an advisory group to the prime minister.

If the same universities had branches in India where they could deliver the same education at the same level of quality for a much lower price - that would keep a lot of that money in India and help preserve the honor and dignity of these ambitious young people.

More importantly, the presence of such institutions on Indian soil would raise the aspirations of Indians and send a wake up call to other Indian institutions -- as occurred when the Maruti Suzuki 800 automobile was introduced into an Indian market dominated by the ancient Ambassador and Premier Padmini cars -- and force them to raise their standards.

As often happens, however, there is a slight problem: it appears that the universities want the Indian government to subsidize their entry into the country.

But, he said, given the U.S. economy and shrinking endowments, colleges may need incentives from the government of India to be able to afford to open.

Whoever calls the shots in the government ought to ensure that:

• any incentive provided to universities doesn't exceed the benefits it might generate
• the foreign institutions create a curriculum and androgogy that is suited to the needs of India and Indians even while it breaks away from the stale and obsolete patterns that have been used in India for perhaps a century or more
• the institutions share their knowledge and expertise with Indian institutions and help raise the standards of Indian higher education; this is not too much to ask: with a population of over a billion and steadily growing, not even all the universities in the US can satisfy the Indian thirst for education, and so there is room for everybody

Idiots

Pathetic.

Donald Norman, the distinguished interaction design researcher and former university professor turned Apple fellow turned consultant, received his PhD in psychology from Stanford University. Prior to this, he received an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from MIT. Hang on to this data point for just a bit.

I was waiting for my son to finish up his exam at his school and happened upon the physics teacher. This pleasant and intelligent man is working on a Master's degree in physics by correspondence through some remote university that agreed to take him. He has a major problem. Turns out that he has an undergraduate degree in engineering. He knocked on the doors of many universities, but none would let him enroll in a master's program in physics. The reason? His undergraduate degree was in engineering for gosh's sake! Imagine that! He didn't have a bachelor's degree in physics.

Now how harebrained is that? Physics is the mother discipline for practically every field of engineering. Here is a man over the age of 40, a physics teacher, entirely out of his own interest, wishing to pursue a master's degree in physics and university administrators with brains smaller than a fruit fly refuse him admission. What kinds of idiots set academic policy in India? What is this thing called the University Grants Commission? Is its primary purpose to ensure that the bulk of Indians remain without college degrees and those that do are subjected to the most intense torture during the process? Does the UGC have any understanding of the nature, purpose and process of education? Why are Indian universities so bad that hundreds of thousands of Indians are willing to incur the crushing burden of loads to send their children to third rate universities in Australia -- a nation well-stocked with racists who revel in maiming and killing Indians?

Idiots! And these people have the gall to refer to themselves as 'intellectuals'. It seems that in India, a deep understanding of Marxist theory is sufficient to turn one into an 'intellectual'.

Nothing short of a complete overhaul of education - free of any ideology and focused entirely on REAL EDUCATION - essential and urgent today in India

Education, Sheducation

Atanu Dey is usually a good read, and this post of his presses one of my hot buttons -- education in India. Innovation is my shtick, and I am convinced that large scale innovation in all areas of our society is essential to pulling this nation out of its -- at least partially self-generated -- morass. While anybody, regardless of skill and learning, can be innovative -- and frequently are, as can be observed in the great resourcefulness of the mass of poor in India -- education alone can help the nation make massive strides in innovation. There is no alternative to having a literate, well-educated society if we are to achieve any significant measure of social equity. Literate and educated people are more likely to stand up for and demand their just due; and such necessities as they demand, as we have learned, are the mothers of invention -- and innovation.

Oh, there is innovation in India, in the education sector, but unfortunately, the major ones are rather unsavory in nature. Decades of slothful, myopic -- and in my opinion, diabolical -- union government policies, peddled under the guise of socialism and social equity have robbed our nation of the capacity to deliver education to the masses. Students are pressured -- sometimes driven to suicide -- to prepare many years for board and entrance examinations to attend the woefully few academic institutions available for them in comparison to the demand. It is scandalous -- though, ironically, presented with great pride -- that India's IITs and IIMs have a far smaller ratio of admissions to applicants than the prestigious Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley and Oxford universities: despite the fact that these institutions are superior along practically all measures to the Indian ones. It is a paradox that the most well-prepared Indian students end up in the IITs and IIMs, and it is only those who don't make it to these institutions that end up seeking admissions in the far superior foreign institutions. And there are the hordes of others who end up in places like Australia and become victims of hate crimes even while they contribute signficantly to that nation's economy.

India's education policies -- created and maintained by an elite group of so-called 'intellectuals' typically of the leftist persuasion -- are ironically opposed to the creation of elite institutions and the maintenance of their elite status. They spare no effort in trying to dilute the intellectual tenor of the institutions even while doing little to alleviate the shortage of quality institutions. The genuine leftists of China, on the other hand, have pulled out all the stops in building a large number of world class -- and elitist -- institutions that admit only the best (of which, that population has no shortage). Their admirers in India would rather see Indian education sink into oblivion at the hands of a meddlesome State.

Consequently, the world of education in India is seething with corruption --hefty bribes and capitation fees for admission to the few government-rationed seats at institutions run by the very politicians who create education policies. Oh, the humanity! The high prices (and low quality) are clearly the consequence of a controlled education economy. Free competition (with regulation and oversight in order to ensure quality) is a key means to delivering what the public sector has not, in the past 60 years delivered, and given the evidence, is unlikely to deliver for a long time.

One final quote from Dr. Dey:

A very rich businessman who had made his massive fortune in a major city in India wanted to give back something to society by financing a world-class university in the state in which that city is. He submitted a proposal to the state government. There was no response. Months later the chief minister of the state admitted in private to the businessman that the proposal of a good university in the state was unwelcome competition to other politicians of the state who run private engineering and medical colleges.

Coupling Education to the Institutions of Modern Society

In my previous post I launched a polemic against the 'corporatization' of education: by this I mean an education system whose primary goal is to supply corporations with skilled, trained employees. I am not at all against corporations, or even capitalism -- corporations are a means of pursuing the goals of a capitalist society. Capitalism, in turn, is expected (or believed) by many to be the most effective means of building and maintaining a just society that satisfies the needs of the largest proportion of the people. The jury is out on this one, but that is not the focus of this post (or even this blog). While I no quarrel with corporations per se, I am rather leery of having corporations call the shots on most or all that happens in society. If a society, culture, or nation stands or fall on primarily on the strength and stability of its corporations, that society dwells on rather shaky ground -- and we see this happening in the United States as we speak. In the US, the health of corporations has an direct, immediate, and massive bearing on all that happens in the nation.

A nation, society and culture has to be much more than one of its institutions, however large and significant it might be. I am as much against the control of a society by corporations as I am opposed to its control by the State, by Organized, Controlled Relgion, or by a Monarch or Dictator. Regardless of the nature of the institution, human will, human desires, and individual passion must reign supreme; all other institutions must be subservient to the human spirit. Institutions are tools, machines that ought to aid the Journey of Humanity rather than subvert it.

Since human tribes began to agglomerate into larger social groups, human society has experimented with despots, supreme religious heads, faceless states/communism, and with corporatism. All of them have been fraught with significant problems the moment they begin dictating terms to other social institutions and to the individual. When corporations began to design and sell music, quality suffered.

The process of 'secularizing' institutions, including education, results in removing from those institutions a sense of larger purpose. Ultimately, every individual needs to confront the question of his or her purpose in this universe. And that purpose ought to be more than merely 'flipping burgers', 'building bridges', 'increasing sales', 'reducing costs', 'introducing new products' and so on. When academic institutions strip away everything other than the mechanics of work, then the soul of education disappears. Business education was 'secularized' -- the only things that are taught in class have to do with sales, profits, operations and so on. Matters of purpose are banished from discussion because they raise uncomfortable issues that are often unanswerable in value-neutral terms. The recent meltdown and the backlash against MBAs has caused at least a few business schools to wake up. Harvard Business School is at the forefront of this new movement, if for no other reason than self preservation. Here's what the New York Times has to say:

When a new crop of future business leaders graduates from the Harvard Business School next week, many of them will be taking a new oath that says, in effect, greed is not good.

Nearly 20 percent of the graduating class have signed “The M.B.A. Oath,” a voluntary student-led pledge that the goal of a business manager is to “serve the greater good.” It promises that Harvard M.B.A.’s will act responsibly, ethically and refrain from advancing their “own narrow ambitions” at the expense of others.

What happened to making money?

That, of course, is still at the heart of the Harvard curriculum. But at Harvard and other top business schools, there has been an explosion of interest in ethics courses and in student activities — clubs, lectures, conferences — about personal and corporate responsibility and on how to view business as more than a money-making enterprise, but part of a large social community.

“We want to stand up and recite something out loud with our class,” said Teal Carlock, who is graduating from Harvard and has accepted a job at Genentech. “Fingers are now pointed at M.B.A.’s and we, as a class, have a real opportunity to come together and set a standard as business leaders.”

At Columbia Business School, all students must pledge to an honor code: “As a lifelong member of the Columbia Business School community, I adhere to the principles of truth, integrity, and respect. I will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” The code has been in place for about three years and came about after discussions between students and faculty.

In the post-Enron and post-Madoff era, the issue of ethics and corporate social responsibility has taken on greater urgency among students about to graduate. While this might easily be dismissed as a passing fancy — or simply a defensive reaction to the current business environment — business school professors say that is not the case. Rather, they say, they are seeing a generational shift away from viewing an M.B.A. as simply an on-ramp to the road to riches.

Those graduating today, they say, are far more concerned about how corporations affect the community, the lives of its workers and the environment. And business schools are responding with more courses, new centers specializing in business ethics and, in the case of Harvard, student-lead efforts to bring about a professional code of conduct for M.B.A.’s, not unlike oaths that are taken by lawyers and doctors.

Further,

“There is the feeling that we want our lives to mean something more and to run organizations for the greater good,” said Max Anderson, one of the pledge’s organizers who is about to leave Harvard and take a job at Bridgewater Associates, a money management firm.

“No one wants to have their future criticized as a place filled with unethical behaviors,” he added. “We want to learn from those mistakes, do things differently and accept our duty to lead responsibly. Realistically, we have tremendous potential to affect society for better or worse. Let’s humbly step up. We are looking out for our own interest, but also for the interest of our employees and the broader public.”

Nature has a way of reminding us that none of our institutions is greater than the fundamental purpose of our existence, the quest to discover and fulfill which must be front-and-center on every individual's agenda. And the institution of education, while providing individuals the means to earn a living, develop their skills, and realize their potentials, must not be kept from also investing in those students the motivation to find and fulfill their purpose. Those institutions and curricula that eliminate from their portfolios all those educational opportunities that are seeming unrelated to specific work skills are robbing students blind of the chance of accelerating the process of becoming human.

It's good to have bright, young friends ...

... it's true ... they are alive and alert and bring all sorts of wonderful gifts whose full worth even they may not be aware of. I have at least one such young friend, Janardhan Rajan, who alerted me to the existence of this cool book called Brain Rules (Amazon, another) by John Medina. I love books about the brain, cognition, mind, intelligence and so on, and I am now compelled by forces beyond my control to acquire aforesaid book. Anyway, here's one quote that is totally, totally germane to this blog that I picked off of this cool presentation by Garr "Presentation Zen" Reynolds. (It's got 131 slides, but you'll love it!)

There is no greater anti-brain environment than the classroom and the cubicle.

I didn't say it -- Medina did. And the guy knows how the brain works: at the molecular level, too. Anyway, classrooms killed me when I was a student, and I have presided over the cerebral deaths of thousands of students as someone compelled by circumstances to confine my students to a classroom (a stricture I violated from time to time). I've railed against lectures and classrooms for years, and now comes a book that confirms what I have long believed.

So what is it about our society that keeps us from doing any better? Why has "education" remained one of the great con jobs of modern times, a con job so perfect that the "most successful" of the victims will swear by it and do everything in their might to defend it? I think the analogy of the frog in a pot that is slowly brought to boil and hence fails to jump out and save itself may be apt. We had a system in place to handle a small number of students selected for a lecture type of environment. And the we decided to scale up the model to handle tens of thousands of students in lecture halls. Didn't work. And yet we persist with it.

Modern educational methods compete with astrology, medical quackery and cosmetics for promising far, far more than the actually deliver. The sad thing is that since education is so greatly valued that people engage in wishful thinking and buy into the whole scam. There has been the occasional child that has exclaimed that the king wore no clothes, but few are listening. The lucky ones are those who are both talented and also so unfit for formal education that they choose to drop out and rely on their native abilities to achieve their goals. In a sense those who are not brilliant but are in fact suited for formal education -- a big chunk of the population -- work their way through the system because they seem to be succeeding in it even though it is, in fact, not giving them as much as it promises. But they care little, because they 'know' that they need it in order to 'succeed'.

This brings me to Ivan Illich's classic critique of modern education, Deschooling Society. I've got to take a look at that book again, but now from the perspective of a wizened old educator.

Formal education used to be a means for the small fraction of people of a reflective bent of mind to gather the means by which they could explore life's purpose and perhaps try to answer the great questions that faced mankind. From that noble purpose, formal education has been coopted and debased by a corporatized society that has transformed education into a machine that churns out cookie-cutter drones who will staff their factories and offices and produce standardized goods and services, punctually, and with a smile. Sadly, neither the so-called education, nor the decades of work under the corporate roof help the individual confront the fundamental existential questions that have always been at the back of his mind but which he never had time to think about, so engrossed was he in his work, and distracted at other times by the corporate entertainment firehosed through the media.

If he is lucky, he falls dead while still on the job, engrossed in his meaningless work. The unlucky ones are finally ejected by the corporate system and at a late stage in life find themselves face-to-face with Life's Ultimate Questions: questions they ought to have tried to answer early in their lives, but which they deferred to a phase in their lives when they can could do little about their situation. And preoccupied with that sad thought, they fall over and die.

The tragedy, again, is that the average person believes that the purpose of education is to provide him with skills that will enable him to become a 'successful' cog in the corporate wheel. Any real education that might help him confront the reality of his existence and enable him to ask questions about his role in life is dismissed as so much fluff. The stranglehold of the corporation on formal education is almost complete. Sadder yet are the institutions and educational frameworks that neither educate nor prepare the student for becoming a productive cog in the wheel. In fact, this category of institutions dominate the 'educational' landscape. They are worse than useless. Not only do they not educate, they 'uneducate' their students using the worst possible methods. Talk about a perfect storm.

What we need today are major revolutions both in curricula as well as pedagogies and androgogies; both are badly broken, and this brokenness is reflected in the nature of our world, best expressed by the Hopi Indian word, koyaanisqatsi -- life out of balance.

Singularity: The end of all formal education?

No self-respecting blog -- and this is one, trust me -- purporting to be about education in the 21st century (and beyond) could be complete without at least some discussion about Singularity. After I planned to write this post, I realized I had actually mentioned it once before, but that doesn't really count because it merited no more than a mention in that post. So, let's talk about Singularity.

Well, there's a whole lot to talk about, and there are several books on the subject. Unfortunately, the word has several connotations that are only loosely-related; and besides, being a buzzword, it's now cool to pepper conversations and blogs (like this one) with the term. [Try it yourself: slowly, and in a hushed voice, like in those previews for sci-fi movies, say the word 'singularity', letting each syllable roll off you tongue and vanish into the abyss like the astronaut in the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now didn't that feel so cool?]

So let me narrow down this discussion to just one type of singularity, the one to which Ray Kurzweil has devoted his book on the subject and also a website. The one of interest to us is technological singularity. Kurzweil extrapolates Moore's Law which models the exponentially accelerating pace of technological progress in the field of semiconductors to all advanced technologies, and projects the curve forward and backward in time.The singularity postulate predicts that technological breakthroughs and paradigm shifts will occur at an increasing rate and a point will be reached when it will outstrip the ability of human beings to comprehend it. From that point on, machines will emerge that exceed human intelligence and will be capable of evolving on their own. Combining these artificial intelligences with human beings will give rise to what Kurzweil calls transhumans. The book's blurb on Kurzweil's Singularity website says:

The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity.

And it will happen in 2045. Note that down in your Google Calendar and set it up with an email or pop-up alert.

Just in time for the party to begin comes the New York Times with an article, grandiosely titled --- in the fashion of the Breathless Journalism fraternity -- "The Coming Superbrain". Let's see what John Markoff has to say.

Artificial intelligence is already used to automate and replace some human functions with computer-driven machines. These machines can see and hear, respond to questions, learn, draw inferences and solve problems. But for the Singulatarians, A.I. refers to machines that will be both self-aware and superhuman in their intelligence, and capable of designing better computers and robots faster than humans can today. Such a shift, they say, would lead to a vast acceleration in technological improvements of all kinds.

According to Kurzweil, things will be even more fun:

Not content with the development of superhuman machines, Dr. Kurzweil envisions “uploading,” or the idea that the contents of our brain and thought processes can somehow be translated into a computing environment, making a form of immortality possible — within his lifetime.

Now, how cool is that? While the above may seem far-fetched, Wired Magazine editor Kevin Kelley paints a somewhat more believable scenario:

He is at work on his own book, “The Technium,” forecasting the emergence of a global brain — the idea that the planet’s interconnected computers might someday act in a coordinated fashion and perhaps exhibit intelligence. He just isn’t certain about how soon an intelligent global brain will arrive.

I'll leave out the article's discussion of B-movie type doomsday scenarios meant to bring out of their caves the same folks who raised a hue-and-cry about the Large Hadron Collider letting Black Hole-lets escape and swallow the universe; the New York Times has to cater to all of their constituencies, especially at a time when circulation is plummeting.

Just for fun, let's pretend Singularity is going to happen, okay? Now let's just talk about the consequences of Singularity for education. Imagine that we will be able to UPLOAD the contents of our brains to a computer's storage device. Even better, what if the reverse is also possible -- DOWNLOADING information, and just maybe, knowledge, to one's brain? Will this result in instant learning? No more sitting in a classroom listening to lectures, or reading books, or logging on and taking tests, working on assignments and so on. After all, the entire edifice of education is constructed on the premise that acquiring information -- and knowledge -- is a long, painstaking process which requires a variety of means in which information is attempted to be transferred to an individual and varied methods of testing whether learning actually has occurred.

But what, exactly, is learning? Is learning merely the transfer of information in a manner that it persists in memory? Is there more to learning than this? What is needed to insure that an individual is able to associate those fragments of information with relevant situations and questions? What sort of processing occurs in the brain to transform information received by our senses into knowledge that we can both experience within and which we can employ in appropriate contexts?

Or maybe Singularity implies that we don't need to learn anything at all, since there are intelligent machines who do all the learning for us and act as needed on the world around. So, does that mean that all we need to do is live a life of leisure, the Holy Grail of so many science fiction novels and particularly the sort of future envisioned by many so-called Futurists? From observing my own behavior and that of many others in this world, it is quite clear that these 'futurists' were hallucinating when they wrote of an era of Endless Leisure. A significant fraction of humanity is not comfortable with leisure for very long. They get bored and want to go and do something. Being engaged in activity -- not just leisure activity -- appears to be wired into our DNA. The majority of people would like to engage in at least some activity they feel to be productive rather than recreational as a means of providing their lives with a sense of purpose.

The need for purpose is a very strong force motivating human action. Most people, it appears, might go insane if their lives were devoid of perceived purpose. Having machines doing all one's thinking and acting doesn't seem to be a scenario that most would prefer for a period any longer than a vacation.

So, even if the Singularity does arrive -- and I wouldn't count it out -- it likely would only lead us to another significant paradigm shift where we search for new frontiers of thinking, knowing and acting: perhaps beyond the bounds of this planet.

I don't think the Singularity will end formal education, although it very likely will transform it.

I hope the Singularity arrives in my lifetime -- I'm a geek and I love fancy stuff like this. I love excitement, newness, technology, and change -- and a chance to explore other corners of the universe.

Traditional universities clueless about online ed

Delivering education online has been the Holy Grail of the New Academia -- Holy Grail, because, nobody seems to have found the right formula yet. The Chronicle of Higher Education, a US publication avidly followed by universities brings two troubling reports: two major university systems -- the University of Illinois and the University of Texas are scaling back their once ambitious online ed plans. Illinois originally had planned to enroll 70,000 students as part of its Global Campus initiative. Nowhere near as many students have signed up, and the recession too has played a heavy hand. Why has student response been weak when, as one commenter states:

I don’t live anywhere near UI so what am I supposed to do now? Has anyone thought about the students that are in the GC programs? We aren’t all 20 yr.olds living off our parents and taking classes in the basement. We’re adult professionals that prefer the flexibility of online learning and the curriculum and programs offered through Global Campus.

It doesn't take a wild imagination to extend the above sentiment to a significantly large population. The same commenter adds:

Online education is growing at a faster rate than higher education as a whole. Online education fills a great need for those wishing to pursue an education and can’t or don’t want to attend face-to-face classes.

A part of the problem seems to be that traditional faculty are not accustomed to the very different androgogies that are appropriate for online and other 'distance' education formats. There exists a perception -- frequently matched by reality -- that distance education is a poor cousin of 'real' classroom style education. A big part of this perception is that the majority of the brightest students as well as those who show early promise follow the route of traditional education. Online education is largely the preserve of those who couldn't make it through the traditional route, either because they could not compete or because of financial and other constraints. There is certainly a discriminatory aspect to traditional education vis-a-vis distance education. On average, those who follow the traditional route have better access to financial resources during the period when students typical attend college than those who are compelled by circumstances to pursue distance education instead. A significant fraction, perhaps the majority, of distance education students are also working full-time, earning incomes to support a family.

Traditional faculty are typically not sympathetic to and prepared to accommodate and adapt to the very different sort of challenges faced by those who pursue distance education. The educational experience suffers and only the most motivated among distance education students who take full personal responsibility for their education are able to make the best of the available resources. The vast majority indeed acquire an inferior education -- or what passes for one. Faculty who understand both the medium and the audience cause some students to exult asin the comment below:

One of the main differences is EVERY Global Campus student participates each week in class discussions and we work in groups to promote the social cognition of learning. Does every student participate in each face-to-face class? No. Do we only look at Power Point presentations created by our instructor and listen to a lecture and take notes? No. We get to experience a multitude of media-enhanced technologies in addition to the required readings and writing assignments each week. We use technology as a vehicle to enhance our learning experience. The Global Campus courses engage students in the learning process and I applaud the professors that have taken the leap and veered away from the “sage on the stage” environment because that is NOT a learning experience for students.

Another telling comment:

Whatever you think of on-line and distance education, pro or con, remember that the medium always affects and sometimes shapes the content (yes, nod to McLuhan). Every technology has virtues and drawbacks, and the more complex the activity into which it’s drawn, the more unpredictable these are. The default position of faculty concerned about the integrity of education has to be first what might be lost, and only second what might be gained (this is not to ignore possible gains, but to recall the responsibility of faculty).

I just finished teaching a seminar for junior philosophy majors on Kant. Student presentations with discussion would simply not work online (though they would have greater successl with advanced graduate students). Rather than give a lengthy explanation, I’ll say just this: these juniors are often not confident enough to write what they think, but in the rapidfire give-and-take of classroom discussion they are willing to speak their minds. I also used a mix of on-line and on-paper commenting on successive drafts of their papers. If I really want them to take account of my remarks there is nothing like red-pen markings scrawled all over the page, as opposed to the neat “Track Changes” and “Comments” of MS Word. When they are far enough along in the project to be solidly oriented, however, it is easier and faster for me to use the on-line methods, and in fact, it seems to encourage the impression that I am taking their arguments seriously.

To be at least as effective as traditional education distance education needs to be carefully thought through. From reading the article, and more importantly, the comments, I come away with the impression that the University's attempt was a combination of ham-handedness and half-heartedness. An initiative of this kind requires committed efforts over a long period of time, imaginative leaders, a sizable budget, an acceptance of risk and failure and ongoing efforts at learning and evolution of the whole system. The University perhaps didn't have the stomach for that. Another comment from a different article about this issue:

The real problem is its time this entire campus, online and off, started thinking about LEARNING and the best way to facilitate it. Recording video of talking head lectures isn’t going to cut it for either the real or virtual campuses. We do need non-faculty learning facilitators (come up with your own titles). I think it would be great of the faulty got together, chose a new paradigm (or a small number of new paradigms) and get behind them for EVERYTHING we do. We are saddled with a huge physical campus – that can only seat so many students.

I especially like the term 'learning facilitator' because that's how I view teaching, in general, and especially teaching mature adults in 'distant' configuration. Once this sort of thing becomes established, the whole approach of professors and lecturers and educators will change -- I hope.

We see University of Texas pulling out of the marathon too, after having blown $22 million over a decade.

So why are online-education efforts suffering? First, a reality check: Pure-play for-profit online-education ventures like the so-called University of Phoenix have turned a profit for decades, else they would have shut down long ago. On the other hand, large, successful traditional universities have been struggling to make a mark with online education. What do Phoenix and their ilk know that traditonal universities don't?

• For-profit education outfits focus on the bottom-line -- they run mainly those programs that attract enrollments and therefore turn a profit. They don't have any social agenda to satisfy, even if there is no return on their investment. Pretty soon, low-profit programs are weeded out and high-profit ones enhanced.
• Traditional universities --especially the large ones that actually have the means to explore online education, such as Illinois and Texas -- hire traditional faculty who are recruited and rewarded principally on their capacity for research, rather than their talent for teaching or ability to experiment with alternative instruction methods. At such institutions, there is usually a disconnect between the staff that develop the distance education infrastructure (and often are not well-versed in either the subject or in androgogy and pedagogy) and the faculty that deliver courses (who frequently are all at sea with technology).
• For-profit organizations live or die by the success of their online programs -- they have no alternative to fall back on -- and are compelled by circumstances to constantly innovate and evolve their systems and methodologies to meet the needs of their client base
• Traditional universities tend not to view their students as 'clients' to be served -- indeed, such a term (and the mindset associated with it) is typically considered distasteful in the groves of academe: professors are scholars engaged in research and imparting knowledge and education the old-fashioned way in order to build thinking citizenry rather rather than equipping trainee-customers with skills which they could immediately apply to earning a living.
• The core competency of traditional universities -- representing the collective competencies of its faculty -- lies in imparting education the traditional way; online education is usually an afterthought, an irritant, a requirement usually thrust by them by politicians who would like to be seen as implementing a social agenda.
• Traditional universities are excel at educating the traditional student in the traditional manner; do a passable job of educating the non-traditional student; and know little or nothing about educating the non-traditional student in a non-traditional manner.

Little wonder, then, that traditional universities such as Texas and Illinois are struggling to justify their online efforts -- despite strong demand for such education -- even while private, for-profit outfits are laughing all the way to the bank.

A free, online university from Israel

My friend Pavan Soni who, like me, is into innovation in a big way, is an Innovation Evangelist at Wipro. Pavan is an enthusiastic and gung-ho soul and sends out interesting snippets about innovative initiatives around the world. I just received this one about University of the People -- a new online university that intends to provide tuition-free education to less fortunate and indigent people around the world. Currently, 150 students have enrolled and the founder, Israeli entrepreneur Shai Reshef, has the ambitious goal of signing on 15,000 students in four years.

On the face of it, this is a wonderful development. The intent to provide educational materials -- if not an education -- and that too, for free, deserves fulsome praise. I'm still not clear about how this system of online education will work. Will they handle it like traditional universities -- and flub it (like Texas and Illinois) or will they succeed, like the University of Phoenix?

Having done online (and satellite TV) education myself at a traditional mid-sized university, I am not too excited by how they do it. But for those who, for various reasons, cannot make it to a physical classroom of a university, the opportunity seems like a godsend -- but only if it is structured properly. Now, there are many -- almost always, adult learners -- who have benefited from receiving a diploma (and possibly an education, in the process) via correspondence (by mail) or over the internet. And then there is the price: free.

I would like UoP to succeed and large numbers of persons around the world to benefit. If UoP succeeds, then they may help define a model for providing education to billions of people who might otherwise never be able to afford it, and thereby make for a better world.

Podcasts creep into my life

I've taken to podcasts in a big way, but only for one reason. Back in the US, I never felt any need to get into podcasts because whatever I wanted to listen to, I heard directly from people, the radio, or on TV (on the few occasions I chose to turn it on). The only time I listened to the radio was when I when I was in my car, or when I wanted to listen to a favorite program of mine aired on National Public Radio. Well, I might as well tell you my favorites: This American Life, hosted by Ira Glass; Le Show, hosted by Harry Shearer; and Car Talk, hosted by the pair of brothers, Tom and Ray Magliozzi; and Fresh Air, hosted by Terry Gross.

When I moved to India, I did not miss them - at least initially. After a while, withdrawal symptoms began to set in, and so I proceeded to subscribe to the podcasts of my shows through Apple's iTunes program -- using this program makes podcast downloading (and playback) a no-brainer. I tried listening to the programs on my laptop, but that's not the most convenient of things to do. Mostly because I am not used to sitting down and listening to the radio -- not since the 1970s when I used to listen to cricket commentaries or the Binaca Geetmala radio program.

So those podcasts sat accumulating on my laptop until it came time to give our Maruti 800 car of 20 years a decent funeral and get a new one. This time, I had the dealers install a stereo with a USB port. And then life as I knew it changed forever.

Driving in Bangalore is perhaps not the most unpleasant undertaking in the world -- I imagine life would be lot harder cleaning the city's sewers. Nevertheless, it's tough to get used to, and moreover, gets worse everyday with the rapidly rising population of vehicles. The noise, the pollution, and most of all the never-a-dull-minute weaving around leave me drained at the end of even a typical 10 km drive -- which could take anything up to an hour, or even more, depending on the time of the day. I need something to take my mind off of this.

USB port to the rescue! Now I download a mix of my podcasts onto a flash drive and I am on my way. So now, there is very little that happens on the streets of Bangalore that can stress me out. I am instantly transported to the streets of Boise, Idaho and am entertained, informed, and often even educated along the way. When I step out of the car, I am smiling. In fact, on many an occasion, I sit in the car waiting for a particularly interesting podcast segment to be over before I get out.

Which brings me to the reason why this post appears in this particular blog: man, what a way to disseminate knowledge! Now how might we incorporate podcasting into formal (and even informal) educational programs so that busy commuters may learn while they are on the move? It doesn't have to be only while driving -- one could be riding a bus and listening to a podcast on an MP3 audio player. It would be a useful way to catch up on a missed lecture or review on that was hard to follow the first time.

So, maybe Tegrity is indeed onto something here. In an earlier post I had called Tegrity a 'BandAid for a broken format'. But that was primarily because I don't believe that lectures are a particularly effective means of imparting education. I haven't changed my stand on lectures, but podcasts may be useful for disseminating useful information anyway, even if the efficiency of transmission might be low. I use podcasts mainly to occupy my mind, keep me entertained, and as a source of intellectual stimulation. I often get good ideas that are only tangentially related to the theme of a podcast simply by listening to it while trying to maneuver my car around town.

At any rate, I highly recommend podcasts - at least interesting and at least moderately informative ones - as a supplement to the traditional educational methods.

Crowdsourcing Peer Review in the Age of Blogging

That the internet is causing paradigm shifts in a number of areas, not the least of which is news publishing is beyond dispute. Much less has been said about its effect, if any, on the hallowed and time-worn process of academic peer review.

One of the cornerstones of modern scholarship, whether it be in the sciences, humanities or the arts -- or anywhere else -- is the peer-review process. Peer review is a filtering step in the process of scholarly research generation and dissemination. It is intended to ensure that the work that is finally published meets certain minimum standards and thereby does not take up valuable journal space, waste the reader's time and until and unless refuted appears to contribute to a corpus of research in some specific field. It is also intended to ensure that a researcher gets a fair hearing and is not prevented from disseminating research because of some gatekeeper's idiosyncratic beliefs. Typically, a scholar sends in a manuscript for review to a journal's editor who in turn sends them on to other scholars who are familiar with the specific area of scholarship addressed in the manuscript. The reviewers read the article, write up their reviews, including comments, suggestions and recommendations and send them on to the editor, who in turn passes them on to the manuscript's author. The author then chooses to address the comments and incorporate suggestions and sends them back to the editor. This process may involve several rounds before a submission is accepted or rejected for publication. Of note is the fact that both author and reviewers are anonymous with respect to each other, in the interest of ensuring some degree of neutrality.

Peer review has many critics -- and valid criticisms -- but it has worked reasonably well, and there haven't been any alternatives that can be deployed more conveniently, and so it lives on. One major problem with peer review is the large amount of time that elapses between the time a manuscript is submitted for review and is accepted for publication. Even more time elapses before it actually appears in print -- especially in the most prestigious journals -- given the large number of article submissions and the limited size of each issue. The situation was much worse before the widespread availability of email, but there yet remains much dissatisfaction with the process among researchers; like a bad marriage, it's a nuisance they have felt compelled to live with for all the benefits it offers.

One step in the article publication process is beginning to be sped up by the appearance of electronic or online journals. Online journals have at least three advantages over their 'dead tree' counterparts made from wood pulp: there is no practical limit to the size of each 'issue'; the step involved in typesetting an issue is eliminated; and most importantly, there is no need to wait for each issue 'cycle' -- an article may be 'published' on the internet the day it is accepted and proofed.

None of this has reduced the time taken up by the traditional peer review process or in any way eliminated or reduced its shortcomings.

Now comes an experiment to test the efficacies (and limitations) of having a scholarly book 'peer-reviewed' by anonymous blog comments. Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant professor of communication at the University of California at San Diego, decided to test the efficacy of having a scholarly work 'peer-reviewed' through anonymous blog comments. Wardrip-Fruin was either a fool or a brave man, for leaving a blog wide open to the world is inviting a veritable deluge into your life. Anyway, the experiment is done and the results are out. The results are mixed but interesting. Blog-based review can in fact add in valuable ways to the peer-review process.

I am a little rushed for time right now, so will continue this discussion a bit later. Stay tuned. (to be continued)

CONTINUED:

Here's what Wardrip-Fruin says about blogging:

Blogging had already changed how I worked as a scholar and creator of digital media. Reading blogs started out as a way to keep up with the field between conferences, and I soon realized that blogs also contain raw research, early results, and other useful information that never gets presented at conferences. (emphasis mine)

So one significant gain from using the internet -- blogs, specifically -- for the early dissemination of raw, unreviewed result is a speeding up of research because scientific research is not a solitary pursuit (as is often imagined) but occurs in a social context. Many researchers are comfortable with reading unreviewed research, because as responsible and knowledgeable scientists, they know enough to tell good science from bad. Integrating blogs into research is particularly useful in academic disciplines where significant work is done outside of academia:

Given that ours is a field in which major expertise is located outside the academy (like many other fields, from 1950s cinema to Civil War history) the Grand Text Auto community has been invaluable for my work.

Compared to traditional peer review,

... the blog-based review form not only brings in more voices (which may identify more potential issues), and not only provides some “review of the reviews” (with reviewers weighing in on the issues raised by others), but is also, crucially, a conversation (my proposals for a quick fix to the discussion of one example helped unearth the breadth and seriousness of the larger issues with the section).

In traditional peer review, on reviewer might make a point, but the author may not understand how widely such a view is shared. Blogs, however, allow other reviewers to refute or extend an observation made by one poster, thereby giving weight and adding substance to an opinion. On the down side,

... the flow of blog conversation is mercilessly driven by time. While it is possible to try to pick up threads of conversation after they have been quiet for a few days, the results are generally much less successful than when one responds within a day or, better yet, an hour. I hadn’t anticipated or planned for this.

Turning on a blog-review will have the author on a treadmill that never stops running, a firehouse that ceases to spew forth torrents of commentary, many of which she may never be able to read at all, leave alone respond to. There is another, perhaps more troubling problem with online reviews:

One concern expressed repeatedly about the blog-based review form — by blog commenters, outside observers, and myself — is that its organization around individual sections might contribute to a “forest for the trees” phenomenon. While individual sections and their topics are important to a book, it is really by the wider argument and project that most books are judged.

This is in contrast to traditional anonymous, double-blind review where reviewers tend to provide 'big picture' commentary regarding an entire manuscript rather than mere sections, or chapters. The positive aspect of this 'problem', however, is:

The blog-based reviewers offered almost no remarks comparing chapters to one another — perhaps because they experienced the manuscript more as sections than chapters. Still, as I will discuss below, they also offered much more detailed section-specific commentary, much of it quite useful, than it would be possible to expect from press-solicited anonymous reviews.

The most significant benefit of online-reviews is the diversity of perspectives that it is possible to collect from a wide readership. In the traditional review process, it is not feasible to send out a manuscript for review to more than a few reviewers due to large number of manuscripts that need review.

When only a few reviewers look at each manuscript, each will have some areas of relevant expertise. But for many manuscripts, especially interdisciplinary ones, there will be many topics discussed for which none of the reviewers possess particular expertise. There’s no real way around this.

and,

This happened repeatedly, with humanities and social science scholars, digital media designers, computer science researchers, game players, and others offering helpful thoughts and information about everything from dialogue system interface specifics to statistical AI models.

Crowdsourcing "peer-reviews" through blogs certainly has a future. Work is needed to make the task manageable, and even if a 'lite' version were made possible, then it would make an excellent augmentation to the traditional peer-review process -- not eliminating it, but making it much more useful and usable.

Is this the future of education?

I kinda hope so, for it looks so much fun. Here's Richard Stallman of GNU fame - the fearless and untiring slayer of windmills and champion of FREE (as in freedom, not beer) software, hamming it with a laptop and a bunch of graduate students at MIT.

If learning can be so much fun even as a grown up, heck, who wouldn't want to sign up?

No, learning ought to be fun. For what is fun but the lighting up of one's spirit? Learning -- in my humble opinion -- ought to be a process that in fact lights up one's spirit. Isn't that what the term 'enlightenment' is all about, to the point that it is no longer just a metaphor, it is taken to be literally what the term suggests.

NEJM sets up shop on Facebook

The rush to set up shop on Facebook continues with the New England Journal of Medicine being the latest entrant. Facebook has become a sort of Second Life for many organizations and institutions, the idea being to go where people are. Second Life, Facebook and other such 'social apps' are the beach, the city square, the village commons, and the mall of the World Wide Web; it's where people hang out to engage, explore, build relationships. The terms Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and now, even Web 3.0 are defined quite arbitrarily and idiosyncratically. Nevertheless, Web 1.0 was largely about placing information out there on the web, Web 2.0 about dynamic information and having a two-way conversation with visitors to a website while Web 3.0 seems to be about building communities and having ubiquitous web access from all sorts of mobile and other devices. So while people now wish to be connected to the web -- and hence to each other -- at all times and from all places, organizations now wish to engage them wherever they are and follow them wherever they go.

It's funny how things go around only to return to the place they started. Sort of. America Online was known in its early days for setting up a 'walled garden' with content exclusively available to its members in easily digestible form, thereby protecting them from the uncharted and potentially dangerous wilderness of the web. The web proved to be far richer and dynamic in its content, and so the walls finally crumbled and the garden itself was swallowed up by the wilderness. Facebook -- and the land rush to this frontier -- seems like a return to a walled garden; except, the garden offers memberships to all for no fee, although you need to play by the rules of the garden.

The formal entrance of Stanford University and now the NEJM into Facebook heralds a new era for institutional education and learning where they interact with students and scholars (not necessarily paying ones) using alternative methods. It's an acknowledgement that not only is the traditional classroom of limited effectiveness but also that there is much opportunity in discovering the benefits of social applications for providing a suitable ambience for an ongoing, socially-embedded learning process.

Weapons of Class Instruction

My first opportunity to teach came in the fall of 1988 at the University of Texas at Austin. My students were almost entirely undergraduate business majors and I was assigned to teach them an introductory course in Management Information. I was excited to be given this opportunity although this was part and parcel of my Assistantship responsibilities. I had previously spent five years in industry as an MIS professional and was also involved with a software startup, and so I believed I knew a lot about the field. I took it as my responsibility to tell the students everything I knew and interpret for them all the information that was contained in the hefty (and colourful and expensive) textbook prescribed. I was proud that I understood pretty much everything between the covers of the book and a whole lot else too. I was a one-stop teaching shop, at least for the course. Or so I believed.

But I had never taught before in my life. How was I to get through all the material? Well, technology made the task easier. This was a time before Microsoft Powerpoint became the de facto standard for beating massed audiences over the head with information. There was another product out at the time, if I recall, Aldus (later, Adobe) Persuasion which ran on the Mac, my favorite computer. But those machines were not available in our classrooms. In fact, we had no computers in our classrooms then, only in the computer lab. There were whiteboards and we could use overhead transparencies. So I spent days and nights vomiting all my knowledge on to transparencies; I made scores, perhaps hundreds of them, with bullet points, drawings and all, and in color. My students were very pleased, or so I trusted.

When computers began to be available in the classroom, I switched over to using Powerpoint slides and spent long hours building them up. Well, a couple of decades have passed, and I don't rely on overheads or slides very much anymore. I apologize to all my early students for inflicting information on them. I was so utterly mistaken about the goals of education. I understand very well now that education is not about shoving information into people's heads. Unfortunately, academic institutions continue to believe that that is indeed what they are supposed to do. And with each passing year, they increasing quantity of information they seek to funnel into the heads of students, employing the latest technologies to increase -- in their warped perception -- the efficiencies of such transfer. I wonder when the singularity (also here) will occur in education. At that point, students would have reached their limit and technology wouldn't be effective any more in the achievement of this narrow objective.

I have now learned to carefully pick occasions where I believe props such as Powerpoint slides might add something useful to the process. I avoid slides of bulleted lists of points wherever I can.

More often than not technologies and other props are used as crutches by those who cannot teach. Learning certainly involves the transfer of information, but that's like saying life involves the beating of a heart -- yeah, sure, but there's a whole lot more going on, and the beating heart is but only a start.

Latin diplomas: Form over Function

If there were any doubt that prestige and appearance are as much the currency of formal institutional education as the quality of knowledge they dispense to their students, this New York Times article will likely dispel it. The author, a professor of classical studies at a small American liberal arts college, rails against the use of Latin in college diplomas, stating:

Latin is a beautiful language and a relief from the incessant novelty and informality of the modern age. But when it’s used on diplomas, the effect is to obfuscate, not edify; its function is to overawe, not delight. The goal of education is the creation and transmission of knowledge — not the creation and transmission of prestige. Why, then, celebrate that education with a document that prizes grandiosity over communication?

Much time, money and effort has been invested in infusing prestige into the public image of elite academic institutions. The idea, perhaps, is that if it looks prestigious, then it must be prestigious. Thus universities knock on the doors of wealthy potential donors to pay for the construction of swank, impressive buildings and expensive infrastructure. All this is very good as long as it contributes significantly to the institution's primary goal of 'creation and transmission of knowledge'. But we all know that the greatest of ideas -- even scientific ones -- can emerge from amidst the most humble and even chaotic of physical environments, for it is the great minds and their ideas that matter far more than awe-inspiring campuses. Latin diplomas and fancy campuses are designed to persuade graduates, their parents and the rest of the world that the degrees granted were actually worth the money and time spent, and thus the graduates deserve not only respect but also lofty and well-paying positions in business, government and elsewhere. Purpose is often sacrificed for form, because it is so much easier to overwhelm people with visible form than with invisible, if substantial, content.

This is not an argument for creating dingy, cramped and underprovided educational campuses -- that would be an atrocity worse than the one described above. This is a plea for devoting the most attention to the purpose for which academic institutions exist in the first place.

When I was at the University of Texas at Austin I knew of at least one professor -- very popular among students for his commitment to teaching and his excellence at his work -- who was fired for not having a stellar research and publication record. I have observed a similar occurrence first hand at another American university. Research is the benchmark used for the selection and retention of faculty at top institutions in the US and there is no reason to fault such a criterion by itself. But for a public institution which came into existence (and continues to exist) principally to educate students, it is a travesty that it rids itself of an individual who excels at this task. In the United States, a university's prestige is linked to the research record of its faculty far more than the effectiveness with which it educates its students.

Prestige is important for the varied benefits it brings; but it is important not to lose sight of purpose.

Attendance

Here's a public confession I have been waiting for years to make, with a view to cleansing myself: During my final year of undergraduate engineering education, more than three decades ago, I attended less than a week of class. Well, it's worse than that: I attended a sum total of three days of class, and even worse, I was proud of it. Used to be that one wore such feats like a badge of honor to be shown off in the company of one's peers. This is akin to potential gang members committing violent acts in order to be admitted into one's favorite gang.

I am no longer proud of what I did; indeed, I am rather ashamed: I wasted my parents' hard-earned savings for which they made innumerable personal sacrifices. And I wasted the opportunity to improve myself in significant ways. As one who has committed his life to education, I feel personally slighted when students skip my classes -- so I offer my sincerest apologies to all of my undergraduate professors whose faces I never saw that entire year. Perhaps I have atoned for my sins by returning to the scene of the crime so to speak and working to make amends.

That having been said, I had become terribly bored with class. It couldn't be the material itself, since it continues to fascinate me decades after I graduated. It probably is the context and manner in which the putative educational process occurred -- the How, the Where, and the When. For the person I was then, the process held no charm at all; and I wasn't the only one thus disaffected. Except for a few doggedly determined students, the majority had significantly slacked off by the final year. It was not only the backbenchers who stayed away from class -- there were many bright, even brilliant ones who didn't. Some, of course, were not suited for that particular program of education -- engineering -- but went through the motions anyway since the culture and economy offered few options in that era for personal advancement. But many of those who showed little interest in attending classes went on to become successful practicing engineers, even pursuing graduate studies in the subject, with a few obtaining doctorates and becoming distinguished researchers and professors.

The pedagogical process in place then (which is pretty much intact even now) involved placing rows upon rows of students in an enclosed space and inflicting structured information on them, mostly verbally but often with the accompaniment of visuals. Attendance (spotty) was taken, and used as a surrogate for Attention (which frequently drifted); and Attention was treated as a surrogate for Retention of knowledge (which decayed exponentially); and Retention in turn was considered as the key measure of Learning (which was marginal at best). This was further evaluated through examinations, which were mostly founded on Retention and some degree of Application -- although methods of Application were also learned by rote, and so the learning didn't go very deep. The fact that I -- and most other students -- graduated with a first division despite a Lack of Attendance suggests to me that the pedagogical and evaluative process is seriously broken. And most students who got away in this fashion have done fairly well for themselves in life. My conclusion is that their success is far more a consequence of the selection and admission process into the institution which admits students who were going to be quite successful regardless of their circumstances. The educational system itself -- apart from affixing on the graduate the label of a reputed institution -- contributed precious little. Now, it can, and should do better than this. And I believe that the entire existing pedagogical framework needs to be thrown away and entirely new ones constructed.