In 1838, William Adam, a Scottish missionary, published a detailed and scholarly report on the indigenous education systems of Bengal and Bihar. He described the extraordinarily economical manner in which Sanskritic learning was distributed throughout the countryside, with each teacher having only a few students, but those students roaming through the countryside from village to village, over many months and years, to study with experts in different disciplines. This arrangement allowed each village to support only one teacher, working without a campus, school buildings, hostels or any other complex architectural-spatial arrangements. It is unknown whether the system Adam described was unique to Bengal and Bihar or was more widely available throughout pre-modern and pre-Islamic India. Yet its image remains powerfully fixed in my mind as I think of the challenges we have with higher education in India as well as the wider world.
In the years since 1838 there have been many changes in the Indian educational system, for which we ritually blame Thomas Macaulay, the putative architect of English-language education in colonial India. Come independent India, the Indian government made use of its five-year planning cycles to establish the Indian Institutes of Technology, the National Institute of Design and the Indian Institutes of Management. Some of these institutions have achieved distinction as centres of excellence within India. Many are known to house students with far greater potential than they are ever able to fulfil within their campuses, but having acquired a primary degree at the institution, the student then travels outside India to fulfil that potential.
This middling, muddling quality of Indian higher education has been the norm for very long. It is now difficult to even imagine an Indian university of such vibrancy and intellectual foment that it should attract students from other diverse cultures and regions to it. If we could bring even one such campus into being in India, would we not see a tremendous upsurge in the complexity and sophistication of the Indian economy?
There have been some efforts in this direction: The Indian School of Business is a famous and recent counterpoint to the general malaise in Indian higher education. Ashoka University is attempting to engineer a new specifically Indian version of the American liberal arts degree. Nalanda University has been located adjacent to the ancient Buddhist institution with a view to revive and revitalise the old historic centre of learning. These efforts are laudable, but we now face new challenges with regards to the very character of higher education that require us to ask whether this kind of learning should be housed and contained within campuses at all.
Up until the dawn of the internet the university campus was a special place where books and scholars lived in comparative density. In this age of mobile social media we now longer live in a world of knowledge scarcity. Rather, knowledge permeates the internet and is downloadable for free, if only one knew how to access, organise and use knowledge. The role and purpose of the university has evolved so that it is not about access to books, labs, technologies and intellectual resources, but more about building relationships between specialists and a new generation, and between the members of that new generational cohort. There is still a need for some kind of space for people to gather and thereby build and nurture those productive intellectual and personal relationships, but the requirements of that space have changed dramatically. Rather than enclosing knowledge within an architectural space, the institution must enable the translation of knowledge into action, the movement of students out of the campus and into centres of practice, the building of new partnerships and co-founding relationships, thinking and making and innovation. Knowledge can no longer be allowed to remain pure, but must always be crossed with technology and finance. In the best of cases, the practical and synthetic energies that result from these interactions result in the founding of new ventures and new plans to reshape the world.
How well do contemporary Indian campuses achieve this cross-disciplinary interaction? Not very well, unfortunately. The reason for this is that many Indian campuses have actually been set up to create an academic monoculture: engineering, design, business. And so there is precious opportunity for the students following these diverse strands to meet, recombine and knot into something more complex. In fact, many engineering students I have met feel that their undergraduate education has robbed them of the ability to see the world in more complex ways, and they therefore need some remedial work bring their other intellectual and cognitive abilities into sync with the technical expertise they have acquired. In some ways, this is what we try to do at the Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation. But our efforts alone will never be enough for Indian society as a whole.
We no longer need multiple acres of green campus on the outskirts of cities, furnished with hostels and libraries and lecture halls teaching only one kind of knowledge. This kind of campus represents an older industrial idea about how knowledge works. What we now need resembles far more that network of expertise described by William Adam in 1830s Bihar and Bengal. Indeed, we need a way of organising every Café Coffee Day, every Barista and Starbucks outlet into an impromptu seminar space, discussion room, and space for learning, thinking and sharing. The possibility of this kind of networked approach to higher education has emerged thanks to the new technologies of the internet and mobile social media. It remains to be seen how quickly we can raise this possibility to our imaginations and thereby bring it to realisation.
By Aditya Dev Sood
The author is the founder of the Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation and the Startup Tunnel.
He tweets from @adityadevsood
