OFF THE BEATEN TRACK | The Meaning Of Education: Full Bellies, Empty Minds? | Shashi Warrier

My ex-professor friend Raghavan turned up the other day, looking hungover. Turned out he wasn’t: he was merely depressed, so I brought out some good Scotch to try to get him at least to talk about whatever troubled him. He had just started on his first when Murthy’s infallible nose led him to my house, and I settled him down, too, while my wife Prita went off to make samosas to cheer him up.

The samosas didn’t cheer him up but they did get him talking. “The institute where I teach part-time,” he explained, finishing a samosa in two large mouthfuls, “has been taken over by a new university that’s very close by!”

That didn’t seem too much of a disaster, and I said so. “Little do you know,” he moaned. “The old university was too far away to interfere with what I taught: I had to keep them informed. All that’s gone now. We have standards for my course now, and external examiners and a bureaucratic procedure for question papers for the end-semester exams.”

It still didn’t seem to be so bad, and I began to say so. Prita shushed me, whispering, “Let him finish, poor guy!”

Murthy asked the question that was bothering me. “What’s wrong with standards?” he asked.

“Nothing,” replied Raghavan, sadly, “if they support learning.”

“What’s that mean?” asked Prita.

“The university lets me do what I want to do with the course,” replied Raghavan. “So, I define the course objectives, design the course, set up the assignments and so on, and give it to the university… You know, modern communication is quite complicated. You can write, or make a presentation, or a video, or whatever. I'm sure technology will bring even more change. Students have to learn to adapt. So I try to teach them one simple principle: If you learn to think clearly, your words will take care of themselves. So when they come across some new tech, they'll be able to take it in their stride. That's at the core of my teaching: thinking clearly.”

“Sounds good,” said Murthy.

“That’s what I thought,” said Raghavan. “Trouble is the external examiners don’t bother to find out what I’m trying to do, so they assess students any way they think fit. So I might give someone good marks although they’ve misspelt a few words but thought matters through. They deduct marks for spelling or bad grammar. You see the difference?"

“Yes,” said Prita, “but so what?”

“Well,” said Raghavan, “if the difference between my marks and the external examiner’s marks is more than 15 per cent, the paper goes to a third examiner… And that’s a person who has no idea what either I or the regular external examiner is trying to do. So a student who happens to suffer this fate ends up in the hands of a complete stranger.”

Murthy interjected here. “But don't all teachers face this problem?” he asked.

“In principle, yes,” said Raghavan, “but not in practice. You have so much material in other courses that reading material is standard, techniques are standard, tests are standard.”

“Don’t you have similar standards in communication?” asked Murthy.

“Yes,” said Raghavan. “They tell you how to make a good presentation, how to dress for an interview, how to be ‘positive’, what your body language says about you, and things like that. I don’t want to teach that. I want to teach students how to think. I want them to take a position, anticipate objections, understand an audience, and present an idea with clarity and force.”

“So?” asked Prita.

“One way to do this,” Raghavan said, “is to teach students to look at the same thing from different points of view. Let them think up the positives and negatives on all sides. I like to check how well they’ve brought up their points and put them together in an argument. That’s what matters, after all.”

“So why can’t you do that?” asked Murthy.

“Because the university doesn’t allow it!” said Raghavan. “This semester, when the university asked me to set the end-semester question-paper, the most important question asked students to compare the pros and cons of two alternatives. There was no clear answer: Students had to argue which was better. Since the university insists that the paper setter give a sort of model answer, I gave them two model answers, one for each alternative.

“They cut it out,” continued Raghavan. “They replaced it with some stupid thing about how to use fonts in a PowerPoint presentation.” He seemed on the verge of tears.

“What!” said Prita, sitting up straight in outrage. “Don’t they want students to think?”

“Of course not!” said Murthy. “It’s only the good universities that they do that. The average university is an extension of school. You sit in the class, absorb what the teacher tells you, and read the textbooks. When exams come around, you prove that you’ve done that.”

“But the students will be in trouble the first time they come across different opinions and have to choose!” said Prita.

“Exactly!” said Raghavan. “Thinking clearly helps them make good decisions, too! I always thought business schools, and therefore universities, intended to show them that!”

“That’s not the idea,” said Murthy.

“What do you mean?” asked Prita.

“The average university doesn’t teach what it can’t test,” said Murthy.

“So?" asked Prita.

“So students learn not to have thoughts that can't be graded easily,” said Murthy. “Universities make thinking irrelevant, and certify the result as education!”

“Ah!” said Prita, “Taoist universities!”

“What!” said Raghavan.

“The Tao tells you how to govern people,” she replied, an edge to her voice. “Empty their minds and fill their bellies…”

Shashi Warrier is an author and a columnist