The article below represents the full, expanded text of a piece that just appeared in EPW here. I am posting the full version here in its entirety both because I hope it will begin a distinct discussion that allows us to reflect on what can be done in the current moment within DU as well as to give voice to the expanded argument.

Some texts are wonderful to teach with. In one, Ravi Kanbur writes about the “nature of disagreement” about poverty reduction. He asks: “how can people with seemingly the same ends disagree so much about means? How can seemingly the same objective reality be interpreted so differently?”[1] As a teacher, his questions allow one to teach skills – reason, logic, argument and critique— as well as demonstrate an ethical imperative that should guide not just our intellectual lives but our everyday lives as citizens: how do we understand and engage with a dissenting perspective?

Kanbur’s question is an excellent example of the kind of critical and analytical skills a liberal education offers. Today, Delhi University [DU] is seeking to create a core curriculum – a Foundation of eleven required courses – that repeatedly refers to this idea of a liberal, core education as part of a new Four Year Undergraduate Programme [FYUP]. These eleven courses are required for all students in DU regardless of their degree subject. Further, should they take a two-year diploma option, they would represent the lion’s share of what some students will learn in their entire time at university. These courses have a clear aim: “multi-disciplinary” education that will “strengthen the educational base of the students in relation to the grand challenges facing India” and ensure that students “acquire both key knowledge and ability.” [2] Core to this restructuring effort is an emphasis on “skills and employability.” In a recent interview, Vice-Chancellor Dinesh Singh lays his cards out on the table: “Absolutely. That’s one of the games here. To get our students to be employable.” This is particularly important, he goes onto argue, for the students taking the two-year diploma: “In two years’ time, we also give them some knowledge-based skills, at least their employability goes up.”[3]

How do we assess the proposed foundation courses? In this essay, I do so using one of the skills quoted above: the critique. I use “critique” here in its Foucaultian sense. To use Judith Butler’s apt description: [4] “the primary task of critique [is] not be to evaluate whether its objects —social conditions, practices, forms of knowledge, power, and discourse—are good or bad, valued highly or demeaned, but to bring into relief the very framework of evaluation itself.” Put simply, a critique exposes the plumbing of an object being analyzed so it can be understood from within on its own terms and against its own assumptions. Let us, in other words, take the Vice-Chancellor at his word.

 

There has rightly been a diverse and sustained outrage at the [lack of] process for the proposed FYUP as currently designed and implemented. This essay stands alongside these protests but adds a different focus: a critique that juxtaposes what a liberal education for a public university in contemporary India could look like against what the proposed Foundation Courses currently seem to offer. It explicitly addresses the administration’s two central aims: (a) of increased skills and employability; and (b) of giving “knowledge and ability” to students to address “India’s grand challenges.”  In doing so, it draws upon the author’s own experiences as a student trained in a liberal curriculum as well as his experiences as a teacher in a new school of urban practice.[5]

The What and Why of a Liberal Education

Martha Nussbaum describes a liberal education through one of the most famous letters of the philosopher Seneca. She paraphrases him thus:

“A liberal education is one that liberates students’ minds from bondage to mere habit and tradition, so that students can increasingly take responsibility for their own thought and speech… it is only this sort of education that will develop each person’s capacity to be fully human, by which [Seneca] means self-aware, self-governing, and capable of respecting the humanity of all our fellow human beings, no matter where they are born, no matter what social class they inhabit, no matter what their gender or ethnic origin.”[6]

This imagination relates a liberal education not just to particular ends such as employability and skills but also to a project of building and sustaining the quality of human personhood, democratic societies and everyday life. Tagore argued similarly that, “we may become powerful by knowledge, but we attain fullness by sympathy.”[7] Nussbaum herself goes on to describe three capacities at the core of her conception of a liberal education: (a) critical self-examination about one’s own culture and traditions; (b) seeing oneself as a human being bound to all humans with ties of concern; and (c) narrative imagination and the ability to empathize.

These capacities are skills – critical, analytical and human. Moreover, they are skills that are deeply necessary and relevant in today’s world. If our students are able to assess, analyse, critique, question, argue and reason, there can be no greater foundation for them to innovate and develop be it in the arts, in science and technology, or in entrepreneurship and business. A liberal education is, for those who wish to see it that way, a modern form of knowledge that is most suited for a rapidly changing world. It creates students that can adapt, update and evolve for their ability to think is not limited to a particular object, a set of information or the current state of knowledge in any field.

This is not to deny the importance of also teaching a more immediate and tangible set of skills including tools, techniques and information that represent the current state of the knowledge in and across disciplines. The challenge of an effective core curriculum is to a balance these two kinds of skills and to recognize that compromising on either inhibits precisely the near- and long-term employability of students that the Vice-Chancellor claims to care about. Teaching techniques at the cost of analytical skills may answer an immediate market demand but creates a generation of university graduates unable to evolve as the techniques they know change.

Yet Nussbaum’s capacities are also at the core of creating students that can “face India’s grand challenges.” This is a welcome imagination that must not be set aside for narrow discussions on skills and employability. It suggests a different way to value an education at the nation’s largest public university, reminding us once again of the balance that a core curriculum must strike. The contemporary moment in India is marked by a deeply contested trajectory of growth and development; a growing trend of intolerant and un-democratic impulses; as well as persistent social, political and economic inequality. Any newly imagined core curriculum must face this moment and prepare its graduates to live and work within it. If a public university is not concerned with the quality of citizens it produces in addition to the students it graduates, then what hope our democracy hold?

The Proposed Foundation Courses

So do the proposed foundation courses address their own stated aims, or manage a semblance of this balance? There are eleven courses: Language, literature and creativity I and II;[8] Information Technology; Science and Life; Applied language course (a) and (b);[9] Building Mathematical Ability; Indian History and Culture; Business, Entrepreneurship and Management; Governance and Citizenship; Philosophy, Psychology, Communication and Life Skills; Geographic and Socio-economic diversity; and Environment and Public Health.[10] I offer three critiques of them below – one on structure and two on content and approach. Within each, I again assess the two stated aims of creating citizens as well as imparting skills and employability.

First, it remains unexplained why the Foundation consists of a rigid structure of a particular set of courses rather including coursesacross different departments. Imagine instead if “Business, Entrepreneurship and Management” (BEM) – key to the V-C’s imagination of skills and employability[11] – was not a course but a category of a kind of knowledge the administration wishes to be part of the core curriculum. Could such a category not be equally and perhaps more fruitfully fulfilled by a course on caste, work and enterprise in sociology; or one on labour and consumer markets in economics; or on institutions in markets and society within political science; or indeed simply one called “entrepreneurship” in business studies? If structured so, then different students – with their own histories, personalities, tastes, choices, beliefs, and indeed very different notions of “employability” or the lives they want to lead after DU – could choose which of the many ways in which to study “business, entrepreneurship and management” suits them. Instead, the meaning of BEM becomes fixed, singular and narrow when confined to one required course. If it seeks to make students more “employable,” it does so in a very particular way that it imagines as legitimate and desirable employability. Allowing students to choose a range of accredited courses from across departments for a Foundation could, on the other hand, increase employability from a different viewpoint. It would allow students to know their particular weaknesses and address them, to build certain specialisations or choose not to, all the while opening them up to multiple disciplinary approaches and skill sets.

Second, the ethos and pedagogical imagination of the proposed courses is hard to understand. Even an empathetic reading cannot help but conclude that they are simply narrow transfers of fact and information without even a semblance of the debates, concepts, and histories of thought in these rich and diverse fields. In many cases, even the information on offer is out-dated, instrumental, simplistic and uni-dimensional; the skills rudimentary. Put bluntly: the courses infantilize the students. Neither do they impart immediately relevant skills-as-techniques nor do they build skills-as-analytical-capacities.

A course on “Science and Life” has neither anything on scientific reason or on its long and enduring tussle with faith to organize and structure human life nor a survey of recent scientific innovation, research findings, methods and techniques. Instead, themes called “Nutrients and Household Chemicals” teach students about baking soda and table salt. The students learn about the “solar system and origin of the earth” and the “importance of carbon.” Other themes are called “Physical Parameters and Household Appliances” that include, as sub-themes, “refrigerators, pumps, and heaters; fuses, tolerance and rating of gadgets.” I do not mean to say that these are not worthy of learning. The question is what is being taught here and how does it relate to the claims of “India’s grand challenges” and of employability? From here, how is a student meant to reach this particular courses’ stated aim of “engaging scientific issues from multiple perspectives and making better informed decisions of societal relevance?”

Each of the courses is open to this critique. In “Governance and Citizenship,” there is only one set of concepts on offer: participation, accountability and transparency to be read against one definition of “good governance.” Nowhere does the fundamental conceptual distinction between “government” and “governance” find its feet. Nowhere does a debate even begin on the meaning and ends of governance, about the rule of law itself, or the meaning of belonging that underlies the formal system of citizenship, or other ways in which we could govern ourselves and our relationships with each other. In “Geography and Socio-Economic Diversity,” students are not taught to think spatially but instead the thematics recreate geography as a narrowly physical and topographical subject while socio-economic diversity returns us to a nearly colonial accounting of social groups. There is then the course on “Philosophy, Psychology, Communication and Life Skills” which is fated, by the fact that one believes such a course can exist, to be as meaningless as it indeed turns out to be.

A student that emerges from these courses will learn a set of facts that will be outdated nearly as soon as they leave the classroom. But more importantly, they will lack that deepest promise of a liberal education: the ability to seek and assess knowledge independently because one has been given the conceptual tools to do so. They will not know how to engage with debates or other perspectives, draw from global realities or even the incredibly diverse realities of our own contexts. They will be unable to unpack different ideologies and positions, unable to innovate.

A False Promise

Yet the deepest danger of the proposed Foundation is that it holds a false promise to students, namely that the two-year diploma is a coherent body of knowledge that has what the Vice-Chancellor described as “knowledge-based skills” which “increase employability.” Take the course on Information Technology as one example he cites. The course is, quite simply, a course in computer literacy. Its main themes include “document preparation and presentation” with a sub-theme called “use of shortcut keys.” The theme on “Internet, Security and Legal Aspects” gets reduced to “e-ticketing and e-payment” with attention to “virus, malware and spam.” Suggested project work is to “connect an active Wi-Fi network to a computer.”

Let me again be clear: I am in no way suggesting that computer literacy is not critical and needed for many students who come to DU but a 12-week foundation course in Information Technology is not the place for a course in computer literacy. There are other more appropriate locations and forms – workshops, bridge courses or skill labs – for teaching the latter. If the kind of employability that results post such a basic course in computer literacy is Singh’s intention, then he is better off advising such students to go to NIIT whose placement record and relationship with market demand on computer applications is far stronger in these segments.

I say this without a shred of sarcasm. The need for good technical education in our country is tremendous and perhaps an even more important educational challenge than the curriculum at DU. Should DU choose to become part of that educational infrastructure with a two-year technical diploma, I would welcome it but such a diploma would have to have its own rigour. If that is the employability Dinesh Singh imagines for the two-year diploma students, then the proposed Foundation courses are a mockery of what the market wants – even today, let alone in the future – and what it will consider employable.

This need not be so. There are global and Indian examples of community colleges and trade schools that where students can get certifications that are designed in close collaboration with local industry keeping in mind actually existing local employment patterns. Graduates of these programmes can transition into four-year programmes (and many do) but, if they choose not to, they are actually employable in the markets in which they live and work. Alongside, the core curriculum in the four-year programme is not compromised. The current Foundation courses are neither independent nor do they fit into an imagined FYUP for those who want to go through the four years to give a real foundation for long-term learning, employability and growth alongside building their own human capacities. If the FYUP is to reach its own aims of employability and knowledge suited to our “grand challenges,” then it simply cannot do so with these Foundation courses.

 The Road not Taken

The American experience of the four-year liberal arts curriculum has been an implicit and explicit reference point in this debate. I was educated in such schools. I did indeed take courses across the physical, natural and social sciences as well as the humanities. I also declared a major or subject only at the end of two years.  Yet unlike the proposed foundation, I was allowed a range of choice in doing so. Rather than mandated courses, I was free to construct my first two years before using the remaining two to specialize. I was taught how to argue and defend my stances. I read widely often to no particular ends and yet always to multiple ends. I learnt skills along the way but never outside a context of inquiry. If I was taught to count, I was asked why I was counting what I was counting the way I was counting it. “Data is as political an object as opinion,” one of my professors told me. I learnt that and so I never forget it or have to be reminded of it.

Yet I also felt failed by a very privileged education precisely because a certain part of the American academy has committed itself to “protecting” liberal education from the very messiness of “everyday life” that inspires it and that it must answer to. Unlike in DU, my colleges fractured my learning by separating it from my experience of the world in an ivory-tower that made my education feel self-referential, undone, and incomplete. My alma maters could have learnt much from Tagore or any of the great public universities in the world that remain stubbornly open, inclusive, and in the centre of great cities and civilizations that they shape.

This is why one must care and fight passionately for Delhi University. No teacher I have met, even from among the fiercest critics of the FYUP, would not welcome a chance to re-think learning at DU. A process that would have brought together the faculty at DU could have been a renaissance for the university. Instead, the V-C has shown us, through an exercise in unintended irony, that a true liberal curriculum cannot emerge from a privatized, authoritarian process that brushes aside the very public it belongs to. It is still not too late. The question is: can all the stakeholders involved attempt Kanbur’s exercise to pause, reflect and turn dissent into productive engagement?

References and Footnotes:

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