Liberal Education and Its Discontents

The Crisis in the Indian University

Shashikala Srinivasan

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138213593
• eBook ISBN: 9780429835308
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What explains the peculiar trajectory of the university and liberal education in India? Can we understand the crisis in the university in terms of the idea of education underlying it?

This book explores these vital questions and traces the intellectual history of the idea of education and the cluster of concepts associated with it. It probes into the cultural roots of liberal education and seeks to understand its scope, effects and limits when transplanted into the Indian context. With an extensive analysis of the philosophical writing on the idea of university and education in the West and colonial documents on education in India, the book reconstructs the ideas of Gandhi and Tagore on education and learning as a radical alternative to the inherited, European model. The author further reflects upon how we can successfully deepen liberal education in India as well as construct alternative models that will help us diversify higher learning for future generations.

Lucid, extensive and of immediate interest, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers interested in the history and philosophy of education and culture, social epistemology, ethics, postcolonial studies, cultural studies and public policy.

1
Introduction

Framing the ‘crisis’ debate

In recent years there has been widespread talk of a ‘crisis’ in the field of higher education¹ in India. The National Knowledge Commission (NKC) claimed in 2006 that such a crisis ‘runs deep’ and ‘is not yet discernible simply because there are pockets of excellence, an enormous reservoir of talented young people and an intense competition in the admissions process’ (NKC Note 2006: 1). Declaring that universities would be crucial in developing India into a ‘knowledge society’, it struck a note of despair: ‘It is difficult enough to provide a complete diagnosis of what ails our universities. It is even more difficult, if not impossible, to outline a set of prescriptions’ (2). In 2007, Arjun Singh, the then Union Human Resource Development Minister, termed higher education in India as a ‘sick child’ and called on the vice-chancellors of universities to provide a way out of the predicament (The Hindu, 11 October 2007). In 2008, Pratap Bhanu Mehta referred to the Eleventh Five Year Plan of the Government of India (hailed as the ‘Education Plan’) derisively as ‘“plans for university buildings, not for building universities”’ (P. B. Mehta 2008). The tone of pessimism has continued unabated both in popular and academic literature, showing itself in innumerable words such as ‘decline’, ‘disarray’ or ‘decay’. Universities are said to be in need of ‘reform’, ‘rejuvenation’ and ‘transformation’ (A. Singh 2003; Shah 2005; Kapur and Mehta 2007; Altbach 2012).² Despite attempts to redress the situation for over a decade now, little seems to have changed.

We can identify two sets of concerns in the debate: one pertains to the external and another to the internal relations of the institution of the university.

The first set is about the relation of universities to the larger society of which they are a part. The anxiety is that our universities do not serve the needs of the society, addressing neither the demands of the labour market nor enhancing the intellectual life of the people. They have instead erected ‘invisible walls’, alienating themselves from ‘the local knowledge base of the worker, the artisan and the peasant’ (Pal et al. 2009: 13). The universities are often found to be antithetical to traditional forms of knowledge that help people go about their world, helping neither to understand nor refine them (Visvanathan 1987, 2000; Nandy 2000).

The second set, pertaining to the institution of university internally, is the observation that our universities lack vitality in comparison to their Western counterparts. This is expressed in various ways: our universities are failing to generate enabling structures for learning; they are unable to create and transmit knowledge effectively; they do not cultivate intellectual virtues in students, making them learn by rote rather than understand an issue; the brightest among them go abroad to study; those continuing here opt for engineering and management which promise them lucrative careers rather than pursue basic, theoretical sciences; there is little by way of research in our universities and they do not figure anywhere in the global ranking lists (Kapur and Mehta 2007; Pal et al. 2009; Agarwal 2009; Altbach 2012).

Should we comprehend this complaint as saying that our institutions reflected a certain kind of vitality in the past but are in a state of decline today? We find, however, similar complaints expressed at various points in history in the past century. In fact, the decade immediately after independence, when the newly emerged nation imbued institutions of higher learning and research with a sense of purpose, is an exception. Otherwise, the historical context of the complaint differs but not the content.³ In the 1990s, the crisis in the institutions of higher learning was placed alongside a similar articulation in other ‘alien institutions of modernity’ such as the nation-state, political parties and bureaucracy. Today, the discourse of crisis appears to have receded around other institutions, but has intensified with regard to the institutions of higher learning.

Perhaps, one explanation for the increased concern is the emergence of an idiom of knowledge economy in discussing economic development in the last two decades. Education gets especially foregrounded because knowledge is increasingly being used as a parameter to measure a nation’s development. One consequence of this is to view the goals of education in terms of how it serves the state’s developmental agenda. This is evident, for instance, in the proposal of the NKC which emphasises the importance of creating exemplary institutions which ‘would not only develop the skills and capabilities we need for the economy but would also help transform India into a knowledge economy and society’ (NKC Note 2006: 2). Thus, in a key educational policy document, knowledge is understood merely as an external good to be acquired to fulfill a socio-economic goal of the nation, without any reference to the intrinsic value of learning to the subject pursuing education.

Despite the persistence of the ‘crisis’ narrative, the university has not generated the kind of scholarly enquiry that other liberal institutions like the state and institutions of the civil society have. This lack of research and reflection in a key area which is of importance to the health of any society is puzzling. While we have had innumerable reports and books complaining about the poor quality of our institutions of higher learning, suggesting countless regulative reforms at various points in history (A. Singh 2003; Altbach and Selvaratnam 1989; Agarwal 2006), there have been few sustained efforts to obtain a conceptual grasp on the issue.

Perhaps, one may contend that the narrative of crisis is not peculiar to India; it is rather a reflection of a larger uncertainty the world over with regard to the role of the university. However, there are some noticeable differences. Firstly, the articulation of the crisis in the West⁴ is accompanied by reflections on what sort of institution the university is and the conception of education it embodies. In fact, writing on the idea of the university and liberal (arts) education has developed into a flourishing genre of doing philosophy in the West.⁵ Although other institutions have at times been examined for their ‘underlying idea’ and foundations, none of them have inspired a literature that constantly builds on itself and is an integral part of the institution that it refers to.⁶ In India on the other hand, the absence of this genre is conspicuous. Instead, the problem gets formulated in administrative and social terms such as structural deficit, inadequacy of infrastructural, financial and managerial inputs, the ‘irrational’ traditions of the land and issues of social justice.

Secondly, despite the heavy criticism voiced in the last few decades by currents such as neo-Marxism, feminism and postcolonialism, the notion of liberal education continues to find passionate advocates in the Western academia. For instance, we find an American philosopher, Robert Pippin, making a case for liberal education in an inaugural address to an incoming class in the University of Chicago (2000). Preferring the old-fashioned term ‘liberal arts education’⁷ where ‘arts’ refers to skills or a way of thinking about objects ‘according to which biology and economics, just as much as literature and philosophy can be studied as a liberal art if studied in a certain way’ (ibid., italics mine), he highlights the specific form of self-development that such a pursuit makes possible. For Pippin, the ideal of liberal arts education is a realisation of freedom gained by the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. By pursuing ‘the objects of study worthy of a free person’, one emerges a freer person by learning to think for oneself, by being able to reflect critically on what we have taken for granted, and we ‘learn to do this by an acquaintance with the best that has been thought and written by human beings’ (ibid.). The criticism of liberal education – that it has been in the service of certain class, gender or imperial interests rather than foster the realisation of a kind of freedom as it was originally envisaged – Pippin observes, can be seen as an attempt to uphold the ideal even more ‘purely’.⁸ There are also other scholars who have suggested that the debates on the canon in the 1980s must not be seen as a challenge to the idea of the canon or of liberal education itself,⁹ but rather as an attempt to include texts and viewpoints from the marginalised groups. Still others have argued that liberal arts education is an ideal in need of reassertion in the wake of increasing utilitarianism, for the loss of such a conception of education would be disastrous to the continuity of a culture.¹⁰

In other words, the crisis of the university is articulated in the West in terms of the decline of liberal education, i.e., in terms of a loss of the concept of education. The perception is that something worthy of preserving is now facing disintegration. Accordingly, the typical response to the crisis has taken the form of attempts at recovering those original arguments buried in the tradition and rendering them visible in a new context. In India, on the other hand, the crisis is expressed in the form of a lament that liberal education and the corresponding notions of learning and self-hood have failed to strike roots. It is often articulated in terms of the ‘inadequacy of a borrowed structure’, or a ‘failure’ on the part of Indians to acquire certain critical normative goals, or in terms of the ‘alienness’ of liberal institutions and concepts (Altbach and Selvaratnam 1989; Nandy 2000; Seth 2007). In fact, the use of the term ‘liberal education’ by Indian scholars is rather confusing and often contradictory: some refer to the institution of the university, some to liberal arts and science colleges specifically, some to English education and some to being exposed to a broad range of courses.¹¹ It is simultaneously identified as a cause for the crisis due to its minimal linkages to the professional world and its excessive presence for the last two centuries (Agarwal 2006: 47–8; Kapur and Crowley 2008: 66–9); while for others, liberal education has yet to take root in India in the substantial sense of the term and is considered to be part of the solution (Pal et al. 2009; Bhushan 2011). Often, there occurs an announcement of a new liberal arts institution, but we are at a loss to understand how this new institution differs from those older ones which have been with us for the last two centuries.

These differing narratives in the West and in India make it necessary to consider the corresponding debates on education as distinct from each other.

1.1 The crisis in the university: the debate in the West

In the West, the talk of crisis in recent times is due to the increased demand to strengthen the link between university education and employability. In the wake of the Bologna process in the European Union, there has been a shift away from the humanistic ideal of education to that of imbuing a professional and technocratic competence (Wimmer 2003; Siljander, Kivelä, and Sutinen 2012; Reindal 2013). A similar shift has occurred in the US. It is against this background that the Report on Yale College Education (2003) makes its case for the liberal arts:

In many parts of the world, a student’s entry into higher education coincides with the choice of a field or profession, and the function of education is to provide training for this profession. A liberal arts approach differs from that model in at least three ways. First, it regards college as a phase of exploration, a place for the exercise of curiosity and the discovery of new interests and abilities, not the development of interests fully determined in advance. Second, though it permits (even requires) a measure of focus, liberal arts education aims at a significant breadth of preparation, storing the mind with various knowledge and training it in various modes of inquiry rather than building strength in one form alone. Third and most fundamentally, liberal arts education does not aim to train a student in the particulars of a given career. Instead its goal is to develop deep skills that people can bring to bear in whatever work they eventually choose.

(Report on Yale College Education 2003: 9)

Underlying the report there is a notion of higher learning as a process through which the hidden, dormant potential of the student unfolds. This notion of self-development is central in Europe as well. Confronted with changes in their higher education system to make it market friendly, many European scholars have resuscitated the notion of Bildung (a German word for education), emphasising the cultivation of the self, and have formulated questions such as: Is Bildung necessarily linked to education in humanistic disciplines or can it be acquired through natural sciences and technical disciplines too? Can the process of acquiring knowledge be delinked from the internal transformation and self-development of the student? How does one acquire Bildung which is not an acquaintance with facts but a ‘competence?’ (See Reindal 2013: 536.)

In response to this challenge of the tendency to yield to market forces, we can distinguish two strands of formulating educational policy. One strand reasserts and revives the conception of education as envisaged in the classical and Enlightenment tradition that gave rise to the modern university. The other sees a crisis in the very conception of education underlying the idea of the university and therefore strives to construct a viable new conception. I shall discuss Martha Nussbaum as representative of the first strand, and Bill Readings as of the second.

In her famous Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2012), Martha Nussbaum argues that there is a world-wide crisis in education which, unlike the economic crisis of 2008, ‘goes largely unnoticed, … a crisis that is likely to be, in the long run, far more damaging to the future of democratic self-government’ (1–2). Nussbaum’s analysis turns around the distinction she sets up between two contrasting models of education: a model of education for economic growth versus a model of education for democracy. The former model that focusses on skills associated with science and technology and aims at economic growth is increasingly preferred by nations in a globalising world. Since humanities and the arts do not directly address our economic needs, they tend to be neglected, thereby restricting the development of individuals.

Instead, Nussbaum advocates the idea of education for democratic citizenship or what she refers to as the ‘human development paradigm’. The focus is on the complete development of individual human capacities necessary for a democratic society. A healthy democracy requires rational, independent thinkers who do not succumb to the power of authority, hierarchies or tradition. Further, they must possess the capacity to discuss with people from different groups and make informed, reasoned choices on crucial issues. The best mode of producing such individuals is to nurture the Socratic method of dialogue that encourages critical thinking. These abilities, for Nussbaum, are best cultivated not by a narrow, exclusive focus on science, math and technological skills (though she is careful not to exclude these) but by the humanities and the arts which concern themselves with empathetic understanding of lives of others from different class, race, gender, nationality and cultures thereby producing Kosmopolites, or ‘global citizens’. It is precisely these disciplines that are under threat due to a market-driven approach to education.

The tension between critical thinking and its antithetical relationship to tradition is at the heart of liberal education in her earlier work, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997). Nussbaum here makes a distinction between two conceptions of (liberal) education: an older idea of education that is liberalis (fitted for freedom) and aimed at initiating the elite into long-established traditions of their own society while discouraging critical questioning and a ‘new’ education represented by Seneca and Socrates that is liberalis because it produces those ‘fitted for freedom’, not because of their birth or wealth but because they are free citizens who can call ‘their minds their own’. These citizens have cultivated the capacity to think critically about seemingly timeless mora...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: framing the ‘crisis’ debate
• 2 The Humboldtian heritage and the idea of education
• 3 The pedagogic mission: the colonial debate on liberal education in India
• 4 Unexpected departures: liberal education ‘distorted’
• 5 The common pursuit: the nationalist search for alternatives
• 6 Limits of the cognitive framework: indigenous education through European lenses
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index