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Indulging in corrupt practices in China has become highly risky. The anti-corruption drive launched by Xi Jinping be it in the education sector, military or the party itself, hasn’t spared anybody What unseated the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from power in Karnataka? The widespread perception, well-grounded in reality, that it was indeed a “40% commission sarkar” in the state. Bribe-taking had permeated every office of government. I say this out of personal experience. Three years ago, I persuaded a philanthropic organisation to make a significant donation to the school my wife and I studied in. Located in Athani in North Karnataka, it bears her grandfather’s name because he had established it a century ago. We were keen to set up a new English-medium school in the same premises named after her late father. The school management agreed. However, for two long years, the agreement couldn’t be implemented because permission for renaming the school didn’t come from the relevant office of the education ministry. Reason: Babus wanted their palms greased. People in Karnataka know of far worse cases of corruption in the education system. Without paying bribes, one cannot set up a medical college or even get permission to increase the number of seats in education institutions. The situation is far worse in government-run universities. Persons without required qualifications and competence are appointed Vice Chancellors on payment of bribes running into crores. “How do they earn this money back in an education institution?” I asked a well-informed editor of a Kannada newspaper. “Simple,” he said. “The VC gets a commission from construction contracts and purchases for the university. Often, contractors and suppliers are asked to jack up prices, so the incremental commission is shared with higher authorities, including ministers. Even lecturers and professors have to pay bribes to be recruited in government colleges.” Other states in India also have a similar problem. Is it any wonder, then, that the standards of education in our public universities, where millions of students from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds study, are rock bottom? How does China fare in this regard? I got to know some broad facts from a friend, an Indian who has been teaching at a technology university in southern China. He said: “After completing my Ph D from another university, I have been teaching here for the past 20 years. I have witnessed a dramatic improvement under every parameter of the university education system in China. They now aspire to be the best in the world.” According to him, corruption had crept into the education sector in China after it opened up its economy to reforms and foreign investment in the early 1980s. As GDP began to grow at double-digit speed, consumerism boomed and people wanted to get rich quickly. There was fierce competition among students to enter good universities and land high-paying jobs. “Bribery manifested itself in the form of students giving expensive gifts to teachers in expectation of high marks in exams. There was also some degree of corruption in…

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NEP 2020 acknowledges that liberal arts education is necessary foundation for applying a humanistic (moral and ethical) lens to all science, commerce and professional education, writes Kathleen Modrowski Somewhat belatedly liberal arts education has experienced a renaissance during the past decade through promotion of several well-funded private universities in India. According to the latest Union education ministry report, a third (32.7 percent) of all undergraduate students are enrolled in liberal arts/humanities and social sciences study programmes. The plain truth is that for over half a century, liberal arts education has been the fall-back option of school leavers who didn’t do sufficiently well in their higher secondary exams to qualify for entry into the country’s top-ranked engineering colleges, especially the globally renowned IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) and the limited number of medical colleges. However, following rising awareness in society that professional education without a foundation of expansive liberal arts learning was churning out engineers and doctors who knew precious little about society, law, history and the Constitution, cutting-edge liberal arts syllabuses and curriculums inspired by the UK’s Oxbridge and America’s Ivy league colleges started to be designed in private and several public universities. Also Recommended:India’s top private liberal arts & humanities universities The most recent All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE 2019-2020) lists 407 universities as privately funded. A substantial and growing number of them have designed strong humanities programmes. This is an overdue and welcome development because the Indian subcontinent has an ancient tradition of holistic and multidisciplinary learning. India’s ancient Nalanda and Taxila universities, founded in the 5th century CE and 7th century BCE, were globally respected and attracted thousands of scholars from around the world. But for various historical and sociological reasons, by the 13th century, Nalanda had disappeared and Taxila became a distant memory. Throughout history education and society have been shaped by the social, economic and political realities of a particular era. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century, fast evolving new technologies have altered the purpose of education. Increasingly education — especially higher education — became specialised and vocational. Ancient wisdom that institutions of higher learning should not only respond to the immediate material needs of the people, but also teach the social sciences, history, culture, good citizenry, literature and the arts, fell out of fashion. Moreover, education became increasingly influenced by government policy. And governments are usually eager to prioritise economic growth to meet the material needs of citizens, whereas the goal of education is — or should be — to teach moral and ethical values and nurture learned graduates steeped in knowledge of history and culture. Educated individuals must be able to practise the highest values of their societies while addressing the material needs of the majority struggling at the base of their social pyramids. However, providing balanced education is not the role of government. It requires foresight of the administration, faculty and students in academic institutions of higher learning. If higher education institutions focus solely on…

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KRISHNA KUMAR Our education institutions will require financial boosting and credible leadership to create and sustain a climate for institutional recovery without false pride over trivial achievements India’s Educational Recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic will require considerable imagination, planning and patience. These resources have been in short supply over the past decade or so. Few state governments have sufficient resources to build the institutional infrastructure and expertise required for dealing with crises. And as for patience, neither the Central nor state governments show any inclination to appreciate initiatives taken by an earlier regime. Typically, when a new political dispensation takes over, it has little interest in sustaining efforts invested by its predecessor. The Covid crisis adds one more layer to old lists of neglected crises. For this reason, a situation of compounded neglect prevails in Indian education across the spectrum. Let’s start with early childhood. Mid-day meals and the nutrition given at anganwadis stopped when the Coronavirus struck India in early 2020. Governments knew that disruption of food distribution programmes in anganwadis and primary schools would cause widespread malnutrition in a highly vulnerable age group. But little effort was made to find a safe way to continue to provide meals to youngest children while regular classes were suspended. When the pandemic relents, compensating in full measure for the loss of nutrition will be difficult, but every effort will have to be made to assess the extent of loss and mitigate its long-term impact. The use of smart phones for online instruction to children who didn’t have access to laptops will also have consequences, particularly for the eyesight of primary school children. Assessment of this impact should be a high priority, so that remedial measures can be taken as quickly as possible. The type of emergency schooling that was prescribed for primary grades is itself questionable, but the time for questioning is perhaps already behind us. How best our teachers can be equipped to resume regular classes in the post-Covid future is the more relevant question. Teacher training has been the weakest link in our education system. Both pre-service teacher education and inservice professional development programmes have remained academically weak all these years. It’s hard to realistically imagine any improvement in this sector unless radical changes take place in the administrative and political climate. For guiding us along the path of improvement in teacher education, the Justice J.S. Verma Commission report is still available as a highly relevant document. Central and state governments, as well as private institutions can profit from close study of this report. The pandemic has forced a vast number of low-fee charging private schools to a halt in many regions of the country. These schools were dependent on the fees that children paid. The loss of parental income on account of the first serious lockdown in the summer of 2020 and subsequent lockdowns of different lengths made it impossible for budget private schools to function. In the post-Covid era, large-scale surveys will have to be conducted to…

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