Later I attended a lecture at the engineering school. The lecture went like this, translated into English: “Two bodies . . . are considered equivalent . . . if equal torques . . . will produce . . . equal acceleration. Two bodies, are considered equivalent, if equal torques, will produce equal acceleration.” The students were all sitting there taking dictation, and when the professor repeated the sentence, they checked it to make sure they wrote it down all right. Then they wrote down the next sentence, and on and on. I was the only one who knew the professor was talking about objects with the same moment of inertia, and it was hard to figure out. I didn’t see how they were going to learn anything from that. Here he was talking about moments of inertia, but there was no discussion about how hard it is to push a door open when you put heavy weights on the outside, compared to when you put them near the hinge–nothing! After the lecture, I talked to a student: “You take all those notes–what do you do with them?” “Oh, we study them,” he says. “We’ll have an exam.” “What will the exam be like?” “Very easy. I can tell you now one of the questions.” He looks at his notebook and says, “‘When are two bodies equivalent?’ And the answer is, ‘Two bodies are considered equivalent if equal torques will produce equal acceleration.’ So, you see, they could pass the examinations, and “learn” all this stuff, and not know anything at all, except what they had memorized.

Its hard to make a general statement regarding the quality of teaching at the engineering level, given the wide disparities. But the school level system, while perhaps not as bad as this, does come close. IMO this is more a fault of the teachers, and the way the exams are set. The NCERT books, are in fact, quite well-written, readable, and teach by example. But given the brutal competition in India, even at the school level, there is a constant temptation to give in and just prepare for the exam(to hell with learning). This is specially true at the various coaching institutes, where the focus is all on the last year’s paper ‘pattern’, and not on clearing basic ideas or concepts.

I’ve found a significant difference between humanities/social sciences majors and science majors in terms of critical and creative thinking skills among my students, and I think that’s not an insignificant skill to have in any kind of job.

As Amardeep talked of private sector being involved, the study was undertaken by Educational Initiatives and Wipro.

I was simply pointing out the engineering degree as the minimum prerequisite. Yes, I’d agree other skills are important too.

It is okay for all those in better colleges getting that opportunity. What about those who aren’t in those colleges? They need the chance and if they get it, some make most of the opportunity and others don’t.

Honestly, I don’t think there are many engineering colleges that have been completely left in the cold by the IT boom. As Ponniyin Selvan pointed out in #60, its not hard to get a job in an IT firm, so long as your degree has ‘engineering’ printed on it somewhere. Why does the NYTimes article restrict its discussion to non-vocational streams? I’d wager its because they had trouble finding an engineering college whose graduates were looking a future selling credit cards.

I believe the real risk facing Indian IT is not that it will not find people to fill in the regular 9-5 IT jobs. These jobs are quite simply not that hard, and India with its large population has sufficient talent depth to be able to fill in these jobs, though some recruits might require more training than their US counterparts. What worries me is that India may never become a source of technological innovation, that is, the future Microsofts and googles will continue being born in the US, simply because there is not the same level of rigorous practical training and hands-on approach, right at the top.

The strength of the IITs, I think, is not in what happens inside the classrooms but what happens outside them. Bringing reasonably intelligent kids (the genius types were always limited in number) from different parts of India (mimics different countries in a “flat world”), in small class sizes (a real luxury I now realize, having sat through lectures that have had as many as 100 students, here in the US), giving them superior facilities (dorms, libraries, labs etc) which enables them to interact, and bounce off each other at a fairly high intellectual level was (and perhaps still is) the best part of an IIT education – not the academics, not the professors with American PhDs. I, for one, survived my term mainly because the library was truly world class, and had a serious kick-ass literature collection.

This really gives me hope. It also makes me think that frequently, the ones who do it right (whatever “it” might be) have a distorted idea of why it’s all working. So there’s sometimes an almost superstitious reluctance to change what is seen as a winning formula.

What you say here resonates with me and reflects my own highschool and college experience here in America. The greatest influences in my own life were (for the most part) not my teachers, but rather fellow students. I learned far far more about intellectual curiousity, about how to learn, about how to take tests, about how to share knowledge, about critical thinking, etc from the kids I went to my classes with. My teachers taught from the front of the room, and I either liked them, or respected them, or was indifferent to them, or despised them. But the kids were my peers, and therefore powerful in a way that the teachers could never even imagine.

I wish my parents had been more aware of this back when I was in school!