There has been no fundamental change in the structure of teaching and research at universities all over the world since the first university of the western world was set up at Bologna around the year 1155 (CE). Our universities today are all based on the western pattern, since these institutions were installed during the period of imperialism and therefore not chosen by us. In a country like India, despite a long history of learning, the modern university has certainly not evolved from its ancient precursors like Nalanda or Taxila.

For this reason, the principal component of most universities today remains a basket of disciplines inherited as “academic pursuits” or “studies” naturally almost all imported from Western countries. These are classified as hard sciences or social sciences. Those which do not pretend to be “science” are labelled “humanities”. None of these academic disciplines including modern academic studies like sociology, psychology, political science, anthropology or economics has either any grounding in some unshakeable foundations or are they found linked with any of the intellectual traditions that came up after taking roots in this country. They are not only foreign, they are alien to us and to our ways of thinking. For this reason, while those who teach these studies may suspend their own beliefs about the relevance of these academic studies, the students do not find any use for them, except for their association with certification of some kind which is vaguely linked to the job market.

Just like the government of India was transferred as a “going concern” from the British colonial masters to Indian rulers in 1947, most of the subjects that pass for university academics today were eagerly consumed and digested by university professors and lecturers when the administration of universities in India passed on to them. No one asked any questions about the “truth value” of these disciplines and whether they were or could be of any use to post-colonial studies. If someone were to ask questions now, as some of us have been doing, there are few answers forthcoming. In fact, it is considered impolite in today’s universities to ask any questions. Students are advised to stick to curricula and ensure familiarity with them.

Present pedagogical methods associated with colonial education

The following established assumptions, practices and norms imported from the European university system have been swallowed by us without question:

1. Universities are designed to disseminate information, not generate new knowledge. Students cannot generate new knowledge.

All universities now restrict themselves to the business and practice of knowledge dissemination. Most research work, if carried out, is of dreadful quality and often repeats work done elsewhere. The idea that universities must create knowledge and are in fact capable of doing so has been steadily buried, as commerce linked to certification and jobs has taken the upper hand. Without creative work, a university cannot be distinguished from an industrial unit. It will be forever condemned to mediocrity. It will in fact excel in mediocrity. The tragedy is millions of young men and women get ground senselessly in these so-called institutions of higher learning and they emerge more incompetent and confused than when they went in.

Since universities have now reduced their primary objectives to certification (i.e., product), the evolution of the knowledge production system has closely followed the factory system. As Dzulkifli Razak described it at the 2010 Multiversity Conference, the university today has become very much in form like a factory system. ‘I can draw a good parallel between the two,’ he said. ‘The university is almost like an assembly line, where the student moves from classroom to classroom, lecturers are like operators in charge, examinations are another label for quality control. You pass the examination and move to the next conveyor belt. At the end of the day, you are ready for the market. You are successful if you can be absorbed or not successful if employers cannot find a use for you.’

2. Knowledge is text book knowledge.

For those in the undergraduate social sciences and humanities, the primary source of information is the text book. The lecturer/professor is a middle-man for the transfer of knowledge from the text book to the student. The main repository of knowledge in this system was once the university’s library. Modern day mass text book production, however, has eliminated the need for students to visit the library since textbooks (and guides) condense the required information and put it into a predigested form so that it can be easily regurgigated by the student. Text book writing is usually done by lecturers as a source of extra income. If we eliminate the text book from today’s university, the entire structure of higher education would flounder and collapse. Most lecturers themselves would be incapacitated.

Text books, in fact, tend to homogenise perceptions and approaches to solutions since they are given to students as a matter of uniform nutrition and identified with ‘knowledge that matters.’ There is no pretense whatsoever that any knowledge outside the text book is desirable or necessary or that the purpose of joining university is to create anything new. Thus, the knowledge provided is ‘dead.’ It is vicarious, second-hand, sometimes, third-hand. With today’s trends of download and paste, the exercise is in fact now mostly mindless.

3. Memorisation is the most appreciated method of learning

The primary method of learning is memorisation of information and facts for the purpose of reproduction. The most brilliant students, the front rankers, are invariably those who can reproduce text book knowledge without error. The method ensures that even in the case of mathematics and language teaching, most lessons are ‘by-hearted’ (cram and vomit) by most students. The implication of this is that those who diverge from the path of set knowledge, who write things differently from the text book, are considered failures.

4. Examinations can evaluate ‘knowledge acquisition’ successfully

The assessment of learning, of knowledge acquired and retained, is carried out on the basis of examinations, mostly written, a few oral, of the information provided in the text book through the lecturer. Successful regurgitation leads to success in certification. What this means is that learning is assumed to have occurred if the student is able to reproduce the contents in the desired form which is laid out as a challenge ostensibly made available equally for all. In recent times, these examinations have taken on more and more abbreviated forms. Essays and prose – which disclose personality – have been eliminated and replaced by fill-in-the-blanks and other standardized, de-personalised objective forms of eliciting information. An automaton, a cipher, not a person, is being examined. Personality is irrelevant to the evaluation process. Since all effective learning is always personal, it stands to reason that what is being evaluated is the performance of a parrot or a tape recorder, not a human being.

Everything that human beings have ever learnt is by trial-and-error. But trial and error is eliminated completely in the evaluation/examination process. Errors and mistakes, answers that are not in conformity with what has been taught in class, words different from those used by the teacher – are all invariably used to mark the examination answer sheet in red and are all seen as signs of inadequate or inefficient or incompetent learning. The student is therefore failed. The failures are marked always as personal deficiencies and are seen as a blot on the character and capacity of the student when they are actually an essential part of the human learning process. (The system is very happy if the answers are correct even if there is no proof of understanding or if the correct answer is provided even when the steps taken are wrong.)

One does not learn if one does not make mistakes. Conversely, those who do not make mistakes, never learn. This is the second major principle of pedagogy to be violated in educational institutions: marking mistakes as failure, refusing to allow the student to answer truthfully, whether he understands or doesn’t. The end of the creative process comes when departures from the norm are seen as ‘error.’

5. Lecturers should not be interrupted by questions

The conduct of the person (lecturer/professor) engaged in the transmission of knowledge is dull in most cases and there is no effort to assess whether the transmission has been successful except by the instrument of examinations. The structure of teaching does not allow for much interaction since it is assumed that one is in the business of speaking to the ignorant. Lecturers are forced to repeat annually the same transmission having given up all pretense to creative learning. University administrators, in fact, frown upon departures from conventional teaching practices, like lecturing. They resist any effort to take students out of classrooms. Even fairly good lecturers therefore face difficult learning environments.

6. Quality learning can only take place in classrooms. Learning need never take place outside classrooms.

It is assumed that all meaningful research or learning can take place only within the walls of the institution – and the covers of text books – and that norms like compulsory attendance, registration, fees, etc., are mandatory for the learning process. Few universities would dare to give up the requirement of compulsory attendance as they fear there would be no students turning up in the class rooms. This experiment should be tried by all universities to assess their inherent worth. (Will also apply to schools.) The idea that learning flourishes with rules, time-tables, in neatly divided periods over several years, is completely abnormal, abhorrent and unnatural. It is monumental stupidity to imagine that a person who remains crouched on a wooden desk or chair for 20 years of her life, being talked down to by several people one after another standing above her, will come out with anything creative. Inmates in prison in fact have greater freedom, comparatively speaking. In their case, only their time is regulated, not their mind or what goes into it or goes on in it. This is frowned upon in classrooms.

7. Learning need never follow natural principles.

None of the features of modern university teaching is consistent with elementary principles of natural learning. For example, the reduction of the learning adventure to text books forces the students to consider second-hand or vicarious knowledge as more valuable and important than primary sources of knowledge, especially experience. She might even begin to devalue her own experience in favour of text books, then media, TV, experts. Outside the university walls, there are endless opportunities for learning what text books claim to provide. Universities actively plan to ensure that students don’t get access to such opportunities or situations. Learning outside the text book is discouraged, since it is not considered possible to assess. In any case, it is not mediated knowledge.

The lecture classroom can never replace – due to its homogeneity and uniformity – the surrounding rich contexts for natural and social learning. Only a few teachers have ventured outside building walls and ensured exciting learning environments for their students.

8. The illness associated with ‘disciplinary’ knowledge

The most debilitating disease affecting the administration of learning within universities is the so-called professionalisation of the disciplines. Each discipline is now insulated from the other and like the proverbial eight blind men of Hindustan and their discovery of the elephant, we have only more and more tunnel visions, most ending in pointless new adventures with concepts and words, each more and further divorced from reality. There is a complete absence of either holistic or lateral learning. It is now quite well known that the sociologist does not read psychology and vice versa; the economist will disdain both sociology and psychology; the anthropologist will sit alone. This illness is in the nature of a cancer: it has nearly killed the learning patient. Unless some drastic reconnection of knowledge disciplines with each other is encouraged, tunnel vision will rule the day, making all knowledge, howsoever plentiful, lethal, since it reports only on some aspects, not others, providing inherently deformed knowledge which will be a rich source of dysfunction.

Some innovations proposed in University academics for a post-colonial society

Over the years, several innovations have been proposed within the existing university set up and I shall now introduce these since it is about time that we depart, with some courage, from the predominant lecture and text book system which (as I stated earlier) has not changed in form for nearly a thousand years.

The methodologies proposed in this paper would produce better and more effective learning for post-colonial societies and energise the learning environment provided by the university; they would lead to better knowledge, better science. The ultimate criterion of success should be whether the students attend university eagerly or feel they are doing so under duress. They should also feel convinced that they are part of a creative process in which new knowledge is created by them that is useful to society and thereby justifies society’s investment in their education — compared to the present, where they are considered empty receptacles fit for info dumping and retention.

1. Redefining the textbook and its role

There should be a conscious policy to reduce reliance on textbooks. Instead, the university should enhance the component of direct learning encounters outside the classroom / university walls. Text books, if required for any reason, should emerge at the end of the course, not at the beginning.

Since textbooks and creative learning cancel each other out, it stands to reason that if the university desires to promote creative work, then the wholesale reliance on text books may have to be considerably reduced in favour of open-ended learning in several areas. In any event, books are legitimized because they ostensibly record the efforts of human thinking and human experience. If the student is enabled to learn the same things from direct human experience, then obviously the predominant importance given to books can safely be dispensed with, since we are only giving up secondary (and tertiary) sources of knowledge for the primary.

Knowledge that is desirable or knowledge associated with life is always living knowledge and by nature experiential. Therefore it can by definition rarely be found within the covers of a text book or within the walls of the university. What principle of pedagogy is this that takes the learner out of her learning environment (natural, social) and puts her in a box deprived of the stimulus of direct encounters and living context? The form and content of course work is more important in the university today than the process of learning. There is little emphasis on the learning process in itself, on developing capacity for capable self-learning and self-skilling. For example, a lecturer would do well to experience for himself (before introducing) the debating form of learning in Buddhist Tibetan monasteries which comprises exposition, rhetoric and argument in addition to drama, none of which is even remotely known to present day universities.

Universities should therefore have a conscious policy of going beyond the textbook in terms of physical space. This means literally that the classroom as classroom also gets downgraded; it has now only a limited role in the scheme of learning. This situation liberates both lecturer and student from the ancient regime of a thousand years and provides for daily unpredictable learning opportunities. Such an approach is also more suited to the age of the Internet.

In fact, universities should consider the possibilities of students and teachers manufacturing a ‘text book’ at the end of the course based on their understanding of the situations they have experienced, the books they have read, the persons they have interviewed, the places they have visited and so on. Such a ‘textbook’ would in itself generate a fairly comprehensive picture of the students’ understanding of a discipline, of its core concepts and methods. Learning in such a context would have to be a collaborative project as well, and those who teach and those who come to be taught would become co-learners. Nowadays with Xerox machines and spiral binding, it is possible to create text books at any stage of the learning process. ‘Temporary’ text books would also reflect far better the fact that knowledge is dynamic and constantly changing and that what is required is not the digestion of huge amounts of dead secondary information – which can always be accessed or retrieved when required with adequate training in such skills — but the development of a stable and sound capacity for critical understanding and self-learning.

2. Redefining the role of lecturers and professors within the university system

Due to the present structure of the university system which compels it to concentrate on dissemination, the role of lecturers and professors has degenerated into that of dispensable middlemen. It has always been part of public policy to eliminate middlemen. In the present set of circumstances, it seems more likely that it is the middleman who will get eliminated on his own because the parallel learning track that has developed through the internet has overtaken the middleman, in terms of content, access and access with speed. No professor or lecturer today can provide in terms of availability and speed, the information that is available on the internet. Such lecturers who have seen themselves as middlemen and middlewomen are gradually becoming redundant since the student is able to access knowledge more quickly and more efficiently than through the slow process of dissemination taking place in the class rooms. In fact it is quite clear that fast learning has moved out of university which still plods on with its ancient methods and that going to university actually slows down learning.

The role of lecturers should be that of guides, assisting students when required on how to learn rather than what to learn; how to exploit a situation / topic to the fullest; how to make links with other aspects on the subject. How to gain skills on interviewing knowledgeable persons. How to prepare for an interview – by reading up on the work done by the interviewee, framing questions, learning about the subject before asking the questions, etc. This is where the teacher’s role would be of immense value to the novice student.

3. Turning the world around into a classroom

The social, political and natural world that the student inhabits must become the classroom.

The ideal way to do social science is to turn the outside social world itself into a class room. Every social science, from psychology to economics, can be moved out of the door of the classroom in which it is presently trapped. Sociology, for example, is best oriented to a study of the society in which one lives and its problems and not some idealist structures which do not exist anywhere in practice except in some people’s heads. Societies are so many and so diverse that students can study these for centuries. Each study can be creative, new, and unique and therefore generate new and useful knowledge. Today’s students are presumably associated with so-called new knowledge only when they do research. However, students can generate new knowledge even during the time when they are registered for undergraduate studies. An intelligent and brainy university administrator can thus turn sociology, political science, anthropology, economics, history and psychology, etc., into active learning canvases and frameworks outside university walls, generate new knowledge and contribute significantly to human welfare.

The philosophy course designed by Multiversity, for example, begins with visits to slaughter-houses and riot-torn areas, so that the student gets immersed directly in problems of violence and begins to look closely at her responses: should she intervene directly and stop the violence? Is the violence justified because she likes meat? Do animals have fundamental rights? Is there a hierarchy of creation? Is violence good in some circumstances? If all gods are the manifestation of the same principle, why do their different followers insist on killing each other? The student of philosophy only incidentally learns about philosophy from text books or learns he can never learn philosophy from text books. To break the crippling and debilitating hold of the textbook on the knowledge system, Multiversity recommends changing the media altogether: to film, to active encounters with gurus like Ramdev, Sri Sri, to music and dance, drama. The idea is that philosophy is about ‘darshanas’, vision, obtained or given, not an intellectual or rational insight that can be reduced to words. Finally, the student, after her period of study, may want to demonstrate her understanding of philosophical issues through selection of any one of several means: a viva voce before a group of citizens, or philosophy masters, or gurus. Or she might review philosophical films from around the world. The possibilities are simply endless. If she ends up by writing a play or film, there are far better chances of it being examined than the option of a written thesis which may never get off the library shelf.

So why can’t history be done similarly? The education system has over the years displaced the development of a historical understanding with knowledge of various histories and historical facts. That is why there is the general lament among children about the rajas and the dates of wars they must memorise because it is ‘history.’ Universities, however, must develop historical understanding. In cultures like India, they can encourage a serious encounter with mythological knowledge.

This may be available through books. However, it is far better through other exercises. Every family, every ward, every village, every town, every city, every ecosystem, every forest, everything has its history, so why restrict the ideas of history to kings and war dates and thereby kill all fascination for this discipline? Why can’t a lecture introducing history to students begin with oral history from a 90-year old, or from meeting the Samudri Raja of Calicut, or the ruins of monuments from the Mughal period? There are literally thousands of situations and environments rich in history – oral, textual, achaelogical – that can become the canvas for experiencing the idea of historicity.

In such situations knowledge is no longer compartmentalised, but is seen as a whole and thereby attains relevance for the student, for it is now living knowledge and relevant to one’s life. Knowledge gained in such a manner will never be forgotten. It will make examinations a pleasure, since it will be easy to recall what one has learnt since that knowledge has become a part of one’s being.

4. Create learning spaces with experience settings

Even if a university desires to continue the textbook for some period of time, they should consciously reduce the need to prescribe Western authors and Western publishers for student work. Such works are based on experiences of the West and such situations are rarely understood, much less appreciated, by students from other cultures. Thereby knowledge becomes irrelevant, and learning has to be ‘by-hearted’. The reliance on irrelevant authors or quoting authors simply as padding should be penalized. Work done without citations which can be defended should be encouraged.

Resistance to de-europeanising text books produces the standard anxiety that even if we wish to teach our own social sciences, at the moment we do not have the books to replace the texts presently imported from western countries and their expensive publishers. This, for example, is the principal conclusion drawn by the University Grants Commission of India when it surveyed the literature and sources for a new set of 32 courses for undergraduate students in Indian universities in the year 2000. The new pedagogies suggested above provide a ready solution to this problem. Professors or lecturers no longer need continue as middlemen between text books and students if textbooks are discounted as the principal avenue for knowledge. They can now work easier as co-learners and colleagues assisting students with their experience and guiding them to new insights and situations for learning. If there are no text books available for the new courses, one need not worry unduly since one can rely upon direct experience instead and create text books as suggested earlier by the end of the first year itself, that is, if you are still addicted to the need for one.

5. Replace classroom tyranny with collegiality

It is important that collegiality should replace authority – the structure of knowledge dissemination from one to many should be abolished as a matter of routine. The professor or lecturer is only one among equals. University will encourage methods that encourage personality rather than methods that dismiss or downgrade personality. Learning, after all, is always personal. In a collegial situation, the professor or lecturer need not be anxious about being wrong on some fact or issue, a situation that can never be permitted in existing classrooms.

For this to happen there must be greater communication between the lecturers of various disciplines rather than the present compartmentalisation of knowledge. Lecturers will also need to have at least basic knowledge of subjects other than their own to be able to direct the students quest for learning knowledgebly. Such approaches will in practical terms demonstrate in practice the essential principle that one is always a learner and that learning never stops with attaining a degree / title.

6. Ensure learning does not conflict with natural principles

The idea that learning should be carried out in set periods of time controlled precisely by bells and gongs is also profoundly against nature. When true learning is taking place, it should continue especially when it has absorbed all the attention and time of the student. Learning without interest is bad and pointless learning. For this reason, good learning in which there is considerable interest or passion should never be terminated for silly reasons like the end of a period. If lectures are given a fixed period, this is because most lecturers are bores and it is important to bring an end to the torture inflicted by them or the students would go insane. But this does not mean that learning is more efficient in such circumstances. Present university structures disallow continuous learning even when the results are far more efficient and desirous than lectures scheduled through out the day.

Conclusion:

Several universities across the world are abandoning the Western model of the university. There is no set model being evolved to replace it. Different universities are working on arrangements that would meet their own best circumstances and contexts. Academics who have their ears to the ground are predicting the demise of the colonial university, if it does not submit to change. It may be replaced forever by newer agencies like the Internet. In fact, it is already quite apparent that the Internet has already substantially replaced the university as a source of uptodate knowledge. However, the bias of the Internet and knowledge sources like Wikipedia continues to be largely towards Western perceptions and sources. Reliance on them is not healthy, as they could easily replace the present day text book dominance of the west by an internet version of the same.

(Keynote speech at the Seminar on “Post-Colonialism: Theory and Practice” held on 8.2.2017 at UCC, Aluva, Kerala by the Department of Malayalam)