3 to 4, now back to 3-year course.
By Siddharth Theodore
NEW DELHI: Â It was time sanity prevailed upon the Indian education system.
The previous government introduced the four-year course for graduation certificates, running rough-shod over the existing three-year course. This had sent shock–waves amongst the (nearly) entire teaching community and the informed students in the higher education levels who had thrown their hands in exasperation but could hardly protest as the program was hurriedly implemented according to the diktats of that government.
And now fast forward a year and a month later, today the four-year-course program is on its way out, and back to the three-year course, much to the relief of the academic fraternity.
The University Grants Commission (UGC) which regulates and controls the higher academia has given the Delhi University barely a day (as this article is being written) to revert back to the earlier system.
The central government has stepped off the turf for the time being, while tacitly backing the UGC, and said the matter has to be resolved as per the diktats of the Commission. The fate is sealed for the four-year course which was ushered in by promising lofty claims and that was uncannily similar to the graduate courses in the United States.
The previous Human Resources Development minister, Kapil Sibal, who had pushed this course into the Delhi University’s 77 colleges and had features like the students could just leave at the end of two years and will not be called a drop-out but a very respectable ‘Associate Baccalaureate’. On studying up to the end of three years, a student would be a Baccalaureate and after four years a Baccalaureate with honors in whichever subject he or she chooses, like History, Psychology or Physics but without a cohesive stream degree like B.A. or B.Sc. But, this was surely a pretty complex system.
Indian students as such do not want to linger on to chase a degree. With an ever shrinking job market, time is at a premium. Pursuing courses and that too for another extra year would always have a negative spin off effect on the student’s future. The time taken would also mean extra effort on commuting or extra rent, if lodging. The city is not very cheap, especially for students and given its poor infrastructure, longer time attending college is a huge strain both physically and monetarily.
Even before the student enters the world of higher education he or she is already straddled and burdened with irrelevant information that has to be ingested from books and more books without keeping sight of any perceived goal. Again, so irrelevant is the Indian system that students are judged only through the marks obtained which he or she scores by swallowing irrelevant materials produced by irrelevant publishers (sometimes with grave errors and many so called school teachers are oblivious of it too).
If you are good at reproducing the text books then it is an automatic route to success, a college degree and a job, the Indian system in short.
And when the new extended course for obtaining a graduate course came in, (many students and even teachers could not even grasp the complexity of the new course), it was nothing but a case of using the Delhi University as a guinea pig by the whims and fancies of the mandarins responsible.
What India needs is a short, swift, practical and simple courses with lot of accent on hands-on learning. The student has got to get the feel of what he would do in future life; the course should have some semblance of practicality in real life and the future. In other words, there should be some continuity in the courses and relevance for the jobs one undertakes in life.
The more the courses linger on, the lesser the interest of the student; it is likely to be fretted away into oblivion. Also, more than educating the students is the need for giving counseling and advice to the scores of teachers who mould the minds and aspirations of the students.
Many of them are of course the product of the system incapable of thinking from out of the box. In many cases it is a sad state when it comes to the standard of the teachers. This has to be rectified too. When Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi founded the Tolstoy Farm in 1910, he was far ahead of his times in his vision on education. There was this clear demarcation between learning from the written word and the practical learning which in fact was given equal importance. Such an accent on practical learning is still missing in the land of the Mahatma, despite lofty and high-sounding jargons that are in use for formulating educational policies for today’s children by a skewed, unimaginative system.
Today, about 60,000 students are studying under the new four-year course. The university is also gearing up for the fresh annual admission session for approximately 55,000 seats. Some colleges like the St Stephen’s College has already deferred admissions till a final decision is made.
(Siddharth Theodore is currently pursuing a course majoring in History from St Stephen’s College, Delhi University.)