Challenging Changes for Higher Learning.
This year will mark the
70th anniversary of our independence. After the euphoria of the
first decade when IITs and IIMs were opened and higher education was truly of
high quality, there has been a steady decline in the next six decades.
Successive governments have attempted to address this issue without addressing
the core question: “what constitutes
quality?” Increase of working hours in colleges and universities has been recommended
frequently as a panacea for all problems undermining the quality of education.
This is a cure-all solution as per the prescriptive diktats of the bureaucrats
in the Ministry of HRD. Somehow the perception (no doubt, contributed by a few unprincipled
university and college teachers) that academic job is lucrative and sinecure has
been an irritant with the senior bureaucrats ever since university teachers’
pay was revised to be on par with civil service officers up to the grade of
Joint Secretary barring the Vice Chancellor whose pay was equated with that of
the Additional Secretary. The Civil service officers resent the fact that while they are at their desk
for at least eight hours(no one dares to question how many of those eight hours are
productive hours), the academics enjoy the luxury of 3-4 hours work and yet
getting almost the same scale of pay. It is this long standing grouse against
academics that make the bureaucrats transfer all the blame on the teaching
faculty for the steady decline of quality in higher education. Hence from time
to time new guidelines have been framed for the service conditions of the university
and college teachers. Has anyone asked this pertinent question as to where do
we find service hours quantified in this way as is being done with teachers?
The fact that the UGC under instructions from the ministry seeks to change the
present workload of 18 hours to 24 hours is on its suo motu presumption that
teachers are not working and have to be treated like school children and
mandated to put in the number of hours as laid down by the officials whose
perception about a good academic’s work
is to say the least, warped. It is a
fact that in any profession about 20% are work shirkers and this is true of
administrators, teachers, office staff, bank employees etc. It stands to
rational discernment that when working hours are framed, the focus should be on
the 80% of the genuine workers and not on the 20% of work shirkers. Sadly in
our country, our policymakers work on the reserve focus for teachers in
colleges and universities.
For framing higher
education policies to improve our present education system, it is axiomatic to
understand what is meant by quality in higher education. The quality of education
is not constrained. It is a higher attribute of the mind both of the teacher
and the taught. It blesses him that gives and him that receives. If higher
education is to change qualitatively, it requires quality of input from the
teacher and quality of output from the student. It also hinges upon quality in
the content and curriculum. In mathematical equation, it is a linear flow from
course curriculum to course content through the teacher to the student. Quality
of higher education is a sum total of teacher’s knowledge and ability to
instruct with the quality of the student’s ability to absorb. Unless we ensure
ways and means to maintain quality at all these four levels, all talk about
quality education will be empty rhetoric.
I had been a teacher
who had taught both in the college and the University. Hence I know the daily
drill for a teacher. To prepare for an hour’s lecture one needs many hours of study. Lecturing in today’s age of internet and
Google is different from what it was in those days. Today it is not giving facts and figures that
are readily available to a student at the press of a key on his/her laptop. A
good lecture involves analysis, interpretation and elucidation of facts, making
them relevant to contemporary times. This is the age of cross disciplinary
studies where every subject under discussion is recognized as a small strand in
the web of knowledge. No teacher can
stay in isolation and call himself/herself as belonging exclusively to his/her
chosen discipline. As a student I had
the benefit of listening to weekly lectures by great professors who would marshal
resources from different disciplines to bear on the subject of their lectures.
For example, when my English professor taught us Eliot’s The Wasteland, he used to
conjure a vast and dissonant range of cultures and civilizations to highlight
the theme of disillusionment and despair and the need to restore fertility to a
sterile land. He was able to make the
cross references by virtue of his wide reading of different literature and
cultures across many millennia and bring them to bear on the central
consciousness of the poem that ends with the Sanskrit lines “Datta .Dayadhvam.Damyata/Shantih,
Shantih, Shantih.”
Today more than at any other time lectures in
colleges and at universities demand condensing varied strands of disciplines to
provide a capsule understanding and interpretation of the text under discussion.
The same teaching-learning method, I had enjoyed in UK where I had gone as a student
for research. What in essence this means
is minimum lectures, maximum learning.
I followed this method of giving the essence compiled from different sources, when
I was assigned one weekly lecture for post graduate students. At the college
level it has to be a little more expansive as the undergraduate students for
the first time encounter great minds and advanced knowledge. The authorities
who make the policy guidelines (it will merit another discussion as to why they
wield such power over academicians) must understand that college teaching is
not an extension of school learning. It is not spoon feeding; it is to
stimulate the curiosity in the learner. The teacher acts as a catalyst to perk the
curiosity of the students and convert them to be intellectually stimulated,
well informed, and motivated to learn. It is not the number of lectures that
count but the quality of those lectures. Ideally speaking, at the undergraduate
class, there should be four lectures per week for each paper, each for an hour and this should be
complemented by two tutorials each for
two groups of students where assignments are discussed, class tests are given
and doubts cleared. There should be two seminars every week for each paper for
students to present papers and be evaluated on their presentation skill,
intervention and participation. This effectively translates into eight classes
per week for one paper of 100 marks- 4L+2T+2S (for a 50 marks paper, this
number gets halved) . For three papers per semester, the student has 24 classes
per week comprising six days which works out to four per day. The student gets
more time for self study, for library work and for participation in extra-
curricular activities.
The present dispensation of 18+6 for asst. professors
means there is hardly any time for the teachers to prepare compact lectures of
60 minutes duration. 18 lectures, as stipulated in the new guidelines, is
punishing if not killing. It works out to a minimum of 3.36 hours of talking
per day in addition to 6 tutorials per week which will work out to another 1.2
hours per day. The total comes to 4.56
hours per day for the exercise of one’s vocal chords and lung power which is
inhuman and physically draining. Where is the energy left for study, preparation
for next day’s lecture, correction of assignments, writing research papers and
completing administrative work of filling in the attendance, mark sheets, attendance
at department meetings and other administrative work? An hour’s lecture is equivalent to two hours
–if not more at a desk job. As per the suggestion given above of assigning four
lectures per paper per week, the teaching hours work out as below:
If a lecturer teaches two papers, s/he takes
16 classes per week and @60 minutes per class it works out to16x60 = 16 hours
per week. Divided by five working days, it comes to 3.2 hours per day in the
class room. This is just teaching time and does not include the time for
preparing the lectures, evaluating assignments and doing research in quest of
personal intellectual development.
A
teacher’s work does not end with the ringing of the bell at the end of the day.
It signals the beginning of the next phase of work- either in the library or at
his/her desk at home to prepare for the following day’s lecture. There is also
the compelling need to revise courses and curriculum to keep updated in this
age of knowledge explosion. Can the teacher be expected to do ashtavadanam- eight folded concentration to
retain a sharp mind and to access and
possess a wide range of knowledge on his/her subject area after a punishing day’s
lecture in college? To compare office work with teaching is like
comparing oranges and apples. What is needed is the will to ring in challenging
changes in respect of graduate and post graduate teaching and provide teachers more
time to give quality lectures and upgrade and advance their own knowledge. This is a new era- the era of
knowledge explosion where the need to keep abreast with everyday findings and
discovery is pivotal to learning., Regulatory rules like swiping cards to
register time of entry and time of exit and increasing working hours for
teachers cannot serve to improve quality in higher education.
As for the students at the
graduate level, they have to learn self
study. They have to be given adequate
time to work on class lectures, to analyse and interpret different subjects, to
cultivate judgement and above all to deliberate and articulate her/his
findings. If the students are forced to sit from nine to five in the
classrooms, where is the time for self study and self development? There is a constant complaint that today’s graduates have neither the skill nor competence to
think and express themselves to be employable. Quality of education is not the responsibility
of the teacher alone; it needs the student’s power of assimilation as well. And
for that to happen, the student has to be free from the class at least for one
half of the day.
Many of the academics
have had the benefit of foreign education and have seen how the universities function
abroad. Self reliance, self directed
learning, self motivation, autonomous working, independent judgement have been
their major gains while studying in foreign universities besides intellectual
acquisition. Universities and colleges will have to factor in the importance of
freedom and autonomy for intellectual and personality development. Quality in
higher education is to be measured by the wholesome development of the
individual- which in the context of colleges and universities includes the
teacher, the researcher and the student.
A corollary of this increased workload from 18 to 24 means a virtual ban
on fresh recruitment. For example if a three year course of 72 periods is today
shared by four teachers @18 per individual, the same will now need three
teachers @ 24 periods which means one teacher becomes redundant. Thus the new
rules imply no fresh recruitment and the current system of employing ad-hoc
teachers will have to be done away with. Will this encourage young men and
women to take up teaching as a profession? If teachers are made to take on the
bestial burden of 24 periods per week, will not it infringe upon that small
degree of excellence that is still present today? The new policies are not well
thought through policies and have been
guided by fund crunch that is faced by the UGC. The reduced allotment to UGC
stands at 55% of the previous year’s grants.
With more and more students knocking at the portals of colleges, is this
a new measure of the government of abdicating its responsibility and ceding that space
to private universities and private colleges?
I have served Delhi University for forty years and I have had the privilege
to have been associated with it at its hey- day.
This holds true of a number of Central universities in the country. That
bastion of excellence started crumbling during my last years as a result of
slow withdrawal of university autonomy and poor service conditions. The present
promotion system on the basis of API points has made promotions still more
languorous, immethodical and unscientific. It has to be disbanded forthwith because it has
resulted in exaggerated details about one’s academic potential, production of third
and fourth rate papers in journals( whose acquisition of ISBN certification is
no proof of its standard) in order to garner additional points in API and untruthful
accounts of innovative teaching and administrative work. There has to be a
simpler system that is more accurate and objective than the present API system.
Students’ feedback, Pincipal/HOD’s confidential reports, evidence of research
and self development are adequate to assess the suitability of the teacher to
move to the next grade.
There is now a phenomenal increase
in the number of students going abroad for undergraduate studies. Instead of
strengthening the citadels of excellence that had been built over many decades,
we see them slowly getting dismantled. There is still time for us to shore up
the ruins of the citadel and rebuild them on a stronger and lasting foundation
with emphasis on quality and excellence. It is time for the teachers to show
their mastery and expertise to bring back excellence that was the pride and
glory of our universities in the past. The universities should make course
corrections wherever they have veered from high standards and the Ministry
should understand and appreciate that teachers
alone have a sense of belonging to their institutions, and they alone can make India’s
future and instill in the younger generation the virtues of cultivating
excellence without unfairness, aspiration without ambition, and humanity
without discrimination. Are we ready to make the leap and become intellectual
colossus or do we willfully continue to slide down with the closing of our
minds to end up as intellectual pygmies? It is time for authority and academics
to work in tandem to make giant strides in the field of education.
No comments:
Post a Comment