1. Tell us more about your experience as an educator.
I have enjoyed educating MBA classes. It is always a pleasure to interact with bright young minds. Young students like interactive sessions and not a one-way monologue. I have learned to assess my own effectiveness by making attendance optional.
A crowded classroom means that students are eager to interact with you. A focus on concepts works way better than following fixed curricula. India needs quality education and it is the quality that we must build.
2. What is your opinion of the Indian education system and how would you like to change that?
In India, education has evolved by way of small investments made by the private sector. The ability of institutes to hire quality educators is constrained. And then, that becomes a culture. We need to be able to attract quality educators into the fold.
Respect for all, resources to hire the best talent, and a culture of excellence while allowing educators to pursue their own interests, such as research would greatly help Indian Education. The need for excessive profiteering must go.
Thus educational institutes may be owned by the private sector, but not by politicians because then the pressure to generate higher profits as funds for elections sets in, and excellence takes a backseat. The cost of education in India is unduly high.
3. What changes in the teaching methodologies have you seen in recent times?
As a teacher of MBA students, the preferred pedagogy was to discuss cases in class. I have been teaching Strategy and Game Theory in recent times and what I have done is to do away with cases, and replace them with recent news items, with which students are familiar, and ask my students to analyze which player is doing what and why.
What strategy do such actions pursue and help the actor to implement? How will it help in achieving strategic goals? What is the likely move that the players are going to make next? How does this fit into the logic of the Game Theory? What mistakes would you avoid if you were the actor? And so on.
4. How does education help one do well in their career?
Firstly, Education builds pedigree. More importantly, students interacting with each other while discussing a topic in class helps build confidence and familiarises the student with what he or she can expect to encounter in the working environment.
Strategy discussions at work closely resemble classroom discussions, if conducted well. The way a graduate thinks needs to be enhanced slightly to obtain the way a business or social or government leader needs to think. This ability to think is brought about by education.
While it is said that these skills are better developed on the job, I don’t think that there is any substitute for formal education.
5. Do you think teaching as a profession is viewed at par with corporate jobs?
The best institutes in the country hire the best professors. They are respected as much as, if not more than, corporate executives. But the rest of the teaching profession lags behind and understandably so. To bring it to par, quality of educators has to be worked upon seriously.
Also, quality students attract quality educators. We have to build the country’s education system bottom-up – from kindergarten to universities. In India, unfortunately, there is a belief that knowledge is static, unchanging, and permanent. We keep looking for this magical knowledge in ancient scriptures.
The culture of research and development of new knowledge has to be brought in. Only then can our students be empowered to think freely. Freedom of thought is very important to quality education. Education cannot be bound by right or wrong ways of answering questions.
6. How can we adopt technology to make teaching more effective?
I take it that your question refers to information technology. I am not for online classes (except during the pandemic). I believe that technology enables students and professors alike, to access information in a jiffy. Libraries are changing. Every part of life is impacted by technology.
Technology is increasingly used at the workplace in newer and more innovative ways. Education has to take all of this into account and train our students to be able to cope in a fast-changing world. To come to your question, the selection and distribution of teaching materials, exams, analysis, and submission of assignments are all impacted by technology.
7. Why does India need more educators like you?
An Educator needs to do more than just a job. The whole pedagogy of teaching needs to change. The mantra, if there were one, is “latest wisdom”. Educators need to keep up with the times and the latest in their fields. Regression in thinking needs to be stopped.
A progressive mindset and a free environment to enable thinking with exams designed to test, not the words in the textbook, but an understanding of the concepts is imperative. Only educators can bring about this change.
Closing Remarks:
Many educational institutes are essentially real estate businesses. The focus on real estate and making a fast buck must go out and a true focus on education needs to come. Our UGC, AICTE, and other institutions have constrained Indian education rather than build it.
The government needs to step out of private education and focus only on the government-run institutes. AICTE, UGC, etc. need a complete overhaul. Wherever the government is absent, Indians have flourished. A good example is how IT flourished in India because the government did not understand it and therefore could not extract rent.
Of course, it requires some policy level thought as to how degrees would be awarded in case of education unhindered by Government. Though we cannot forget that some of the best educational institutes of our country, renowned worldwide, have been envisioned and nurtured at the highest level of Government.
It appears that when educational institutes have autonomy and are sponsored at the highest levels of Government, they do better, and when lower levels of Government start monitoring the functioning of these institutes, the latter is constrained from a better performance.
Tapan Singhal
Interview By - Sandeep Virothu
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