Students are the victims and culprits of India’s broken higher education system

Of all the people I have come across, only two of them finished a session of post-doc in the west, and came back to India. One of them is at IISc, and I forgot where the other one is.

To answer your question: my impression is that Indian academics seldom continue their academics in India. Most Indians who have earned a name in my (secret) field continue as profs in the west, take on Indian and non-Indian students, and teach them all the same way.

Of course, they are. I went to a top-tier school in India for my masters degree and I'm now a graduate student at a well-known private university in the US. I would say there is very little difference in the quality of teaching between my Indian alma mater and my current university. The main advantage here seems to be an army of teaching assistants conducting office hours, "precepts" and such which probably help struggling students. But I think the in-class lectures, homework assignments and exams are of the same quality.

I also went to a second-tier private school for my undergraduate degree and that is where I experienced the sort of teaching the article talks about. I think, like most of India's other problems, it boils down to economics. I paid about about $1200 in total for my four year undergraduate degree. I believe the government supplemented some of this with a grant to private institutions for students who met a merit criterion. But my point is that this is very little money and you can see why it would be quite difficult to recruit and retain high quality teaching talent.

The top-tier institutions - the IITs, IISc, IISERs, ISI and so on - don't have great salaries but they make up for it with prestige, perks (on-campus housing, cheap food, discretionary financial awards) and research grants. But beyond the cream of the crop, unfortunately it isn't a rational economic decision to go into teaching in India. This isn't to say nobody does and I've had a few really great teachers even at my undergraduate school but I also realize that India is a poor country with no social safety net. I'm not going to judge anybody for choosing financial security over social service.

Still, how synonymous is caste with economic status? I would guess "very" but your post makes it seem like there are some interesting nuances. What are India's caste demographics, anyway?

The article is spot on in many respects, except for the reference to finding only one applicant to Brown that he really enthused over. That is his experience, but in mine I can assure you that there were a heck of a lot of students most top universities in the US would compete over. In my time the principal and other staff were far more liberal - there seems to have been a sad regression judging from the position of the present principal.

To be fair, the idea of the university got started in the Middle Ages but they have changed quite a bit since; if you're interested in the subject, take a look at the latest edition of Clark Kerr's book The Uses of the University, which traces changes in American universities from the post-War period to the present. Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas is also very good.

(Disclaimer: I'm writing my dissertation on academic novels.)

I struggled to parse text like, "...the 88 teachers who teach can only be used as Indian samples, if and only if, one is ready to situate them in socio-economic givens" or "... disabling us from looking at the micro-manifestations of issues from a methodologically nuanced, institutionally useful and politically sensitive position"

In many ways we Indians deserve the shit we live in. How many of us actively participate in politics? No one comes forward even if there is incentive to do so. In fact many armchair experts criticize Anna Hazare or Arvind Kejriwal who at least go ahead an walk the talk, trying to garner some support for better Governance. Support them? Nope. Zilch.

We love to be in Americas than to make India better - a short-cut. Consider this: Many of us know who the president of United States is, his wife's name, his daughters name, and yet more than 90% Indian kids of our age (i.e. below 25 yrs, and it is not a researched number) would not know the name of the Indian president, or his wife or even consider the fact that he could have children. :)

[Edited a couple of times.]

The issue isn't "lecturing from a book" vs "teaching from memory" but "literally reading from the book", expecting students to take notes(Why?) and classifying that as teaching.

However, I think it's a waste to spend class time with a professor on rote learning. Rote learning is a mechanical process that students can do on their own time. When they're in class with a professor, they should get the benefit of the professor's skill and knowledge.

I don't see how this can ever be useful. I grew up in the Middle East and attended an Indian School which followed the CBSE syllabus. There was nothing in the syllabus per se that inspired me to ask why. That came from my innate interest and from the occasional teacher who went beyond what was taught.

The focus was on rote memorization. You could be assured of excellent marks if you simply regurgitated what was in the text book. So if you were a moron, but had great memory, you could get 90%+ on an exam, but did you actually know anything?

In high school, I loved math but I never did well in the exams because I didn't really understand what I was applying and why. My high school teachers told me that I would do better in a western system of education that focused more on application than rote memorization. This was borne true a few years later when I started my undegrad in the US and aced my math classes. Although to be fair, my previous exposure to higher math definitely helped. But what I gained most from my education in the US was that I knew why I was doing what I was doing.

> The US system seems to overemphasize understanding.

I fail to see how anyone can overemphasize understanding. Understanding is the point of learning something. I still remember one of my friends memorizing Physics derivations. I once tried to ask her to explain one particular step and she had no clue why it was being done. She had simply memorized it. I sucked at that; I cannot memorize anything if I do not understand it

> That's biased. How can you challenge the intellect and question paradigms if you don't know them in the first place?

He's talking about the paradigm of rote memorization and conformity. In school I was frequently docked points if I restated my answer in any form that was different from the text book. It didn't matter that what I was saying was essentially the same. I didn't use the language of the book and so it was "wrong". How does that teach anyone anything? I still remember being terribly frustrated because I knew that my answer was right but yet I was being penalized because I hadn't regurgitated what was in the book.

Rote memorization may be helpful, but it cannot be the central underpinning of any kind of educational system. The idea of education is to understand what is being taught and apply it. Not just to memorize and regurgitate it without any regard for the meaning. Otherwise you're not better than a parrot that repeats phrases without any idea of the meaning or context.