IP_ Tagore Issue - Final.indd - high commission of india mauritius

in the curriculum becauseone can acquire sufficientknowledge about society andculture from life itself. Butthe fact is that one does notacquire such knowledge directlyfrom experience; one needsconstructed knowledge tointerpret experience and renderit intelligible and learnable.Then again some maintain thatone does not learn values in auniversity classroom. Whereasthere is some truth in it, it mustbe recognized that university(and university-like institutions),whether general or technical,is the best place to criticallyinterrogate knowledge, beliefsand values, whether traditionalor modern, and develop aproper perspective on the same.However, some technicaleducation planners today areinclined to support broad basedtechnical education. But at thesame time there is a negativeattitude to arts and humansciences. So “broad-based” inmost cases has come to meaninclusion in the curriculumof courses such as Englishlanguage and communicationskills, industrial economics,organizational behaviour, andbusiness management. Theseare supposed to enable thestudent to negotiate with themarket effectively. Such acurriculum is broad based onlyin name; it actually defeatsthe purpose of broad basededucation – it is orientedtowards career and success, notthe development of a wellroundedpersonality. In fact, theultimate goal of broad-basededucation is to inculcate inthe student, recognition ofthe existence of and a healthyconcern for the other, respect forhim, and his beliefs and views,which may be diametricallyopposite to his own.It is extremely importantthat proper structures, atthe formal and non-formallevels both, are created forthe implementation of theTagorean ideas. In the presentsystem of higher education, theundergraduate level is wherebroad-based education canbe most meaningful. Aboutten to twelve percent of thecourses an undergraduate hasto do must be in humanitiesand social sciences, and thesemust be spread over the entireduration of the undergraduateprogramme, not concentrated inthe first two or three semesters.Courses on literature, linguistics,communication (knowledgeand skill oriented both) history,philosophy, art and psychology,sociology, economics, amongother human sciences, andtraditional Indian knowledgesystems, must be available forthe student to make his choice.He must be discouraged fromchoosing courses from just twoor three disciplines.At the level of technologydevelopment, application ofTagore’s ideas would meandeveloping, in our context,people-oriented technologiesfor maximal utilization of waterresource, harnessing naturalenergy resources to meet powerrequirements, road building,communication, disposal ofgarbage including electronicwaste, among others, and alsodeveloping innovative methodsand techniques of teachinglearning,including languagelearning, etc.But curriculum alone cannotserve the goals of broadbased education. Non-formalstructures need to be createdso that free and responsiblediscussion and debate arepossible on questions ofsignificance concerningvarious societal issues, notexcluding those of technologicalknowledge creation anddissemination.The main difficulty for theimplementation of such aTagorean model of technicaleducation is a certainsocietal mindset, formed bythe enormous success oftechnology, its ever increasingmarketability, and to a certaindegree at least to the specializednature of its discourse,which gives its practitioners“knowledge-power”. Such amindset tends to view otherkinds of knowledge as mereintellectual self-indulgence andluxury, therefore, dispensable.This needs to be corrected andtechnology pedagogists have animportant role here. One hopesthat they will not fail the societyin this respect.◆The author taught English and Linguistics atthe Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur,and has been a fellow of the Central Instituteof Indian Languages, Mysore.Gavandes Kollektion im Rabindra-BhavanaINDIA PERSPECTIVES VOL 24 NO. 2/2010 114 INDIA PERSPECTIVES VOL 24 NO. 2/2010 115