Sunday
(1)One of the better ways to learn about policy trends, in any policy area, in any country, is to read something by someone who disapproves.
This article, about what its author thinks is wrong with all the various directions which Indian education is heading in, reads to me like a catalogue of all that is right about it.
Two trends in particular struck me as especially encouraging. First this:
A self reliant India needs very different intellectual support from the kind of intellectual labour envisaged by a government that in its enthusiasm for selling out to multinationals could only dream of bringing some outsourced functions of these multinationals into our country. …
"Self reliant" reads to me like "futureless backwater". So, what I take this to mean is that Indian education is now turning out people who are very employable indeed, and on the world market where the real money is to be made and where so much of India's economic future will be created.
And second, there is this:
A self reliant and democratic India also needs its citizens prepared for the globalised world not as cogs in the wheel, fulfilling some technical function, but as thinking beings able to defend and safeguard democracy. …
... which the guy put in italics of his own, meaning that this was his biggest point. "Preparing for the globalised world not as cogs in the wheel" sounds to me like preparing them against the globalised world. So what this all says like to me is: "The education system isn't turning out enough political mischief-makers."
There is also much complaint in this article about "para-education", which sounds to me like free enterprise education, rather than the state-provided shambles which most Indians were stuck with until recently.
So, then: India doing really well. This has been one of the decade's great Global Stories. Long may the story continue.
India is the nation to watch in the 21st Century. A billion members of the Anglosphere are moving towards free enterprise. They already have democracy, a free press and the rule of law. What remains to be achieved is better governance and a releasing of pent up capitalist potential.
I suspect India will surpass China economically in my lifetime. Those who think that a fast moving pro-business dictatorship is better able to raise living standards than a market-orientated democracy may be in for a shock.
Posted by paul d s at June 6, 2004 10:17 PM
In the interests of fairness, it's probably worth noting that the CPI(M)'s point about the BJP's desecularisation of education is relevant.
Not so much from the 'communal strife' point of view, although there is some danger there, but from the BJP's halfwitted policy of teaching Hindi rather than English as a second language in non-Hindi speaking states.
Posted by john b at June 7, 2004 11:56 AM
