The Hindu Business Line : Opening up education

Education for all, like food for all and health or work for all, has been a catchy slogan for decades. It is largely interpreted as having institutions for primary, secondary and higher education in sufficient number providing full coverage of all those who are eligible. The emphasis is on number in terms of population and availability of class rooms, teachers and support services, rather than on content of courses, process of acquisition of knowledge, quality of teaching and exploitation of the power of technology.

The somewhat attenuated approach to education has created imbalances relating to both geographical regions and attention to standards. There are institutions, say, of the Ivy League variety, which are totally unaffordable in terms of cost and rigour of selection procedures and there are those, say, of the genre of community schools and colleges, low in snob or prestige value. Job market too is unconsciously influenced more by perceptions of the standing in public estimation of institutions than by the intrinsic merits of the products of the institutions.

The playing field in education is thus rendered uneven right from the primary stage. For instance, India has its own top brands against which are pitted the schools and colleges run by local bodies and Governments. The universities also function as islands unto themselves, holding on to their own practices as it were, and differing vastly in resources, facilities and performance. A number of education commissions, culminating in the National Knowledge Commission, have wrestled with the inequities and disparities in the educational sphere, but their preoccupation has been mostly with structures, hierarchies, curricula and syllabi, teacher training and capacity building. Whereas what is needed is nothing short of a radically new blueprint, enabling it to reach the unreached in all strata of society. For this to happen, education should be rescued from being a cloistered activity.

University of the world

Opening up education has already assumed the dimensions of a movement in the West. Nearly 200 institutions have put online full details of all their courses and programmes making them the common property of all without any legal or functional impediment. Thus, any institution in the educational field is free to incorporate whatever is best suited to its own needs and circumstances from the strategies and course content of any other institution, and take advantage of the advances in information and communication technologies to enrich the experience of the students. In short, the aim of the movement is to make every university not just a world class university, but a world university, or a university of and for the world, based on the following five concepts:

All resources, facilities and faculties will be shared by all educational institutions on the principle of ‘each for all, and all for each’. Courses and programmes, curricula and syllabi, will be totally de-compartmentalised and designed for the total development of the individual human being in tune with the anticipated demands for skills, talents and attainments in the emerging knowledge age. Those interested in the full range of implications of opening up education are invited to visit the Massachusetts Institute of Technology website http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11309&mode=toc

B. S. RAGHAVAN