When one gets up in the morning and grabs the newspaper, he or she is surprised to see that global headlines give way to huge advertisements. What dominates the front page are tutorial college advertisements. They are full-page statements where every teacher is called Sir, and all the performances are announced with a loudness that would be the envy of any town crier. Different groups advertise their wares on different days, virtually declaring a brand war.
For an old-style academic, these rituals are disturbing, but he has to admit that the tutorial college dominates the front page in a way the UGC would not dare. As a folk phenomenon, it has become formidable. One creation myth about tutorial college is fascinating. It goes back to Lord Macaulay’s Minute on Education. Macaulay, with colonial arrogance, said: “A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” We Indians took it literally and reduced Western civilisation to a shelf which the tutorial college summarised brilliantly. This is not just the vision of liberal arts and humanities; IITs would not exist without tutorial colleges. The entire education industry in Kota city in Rajasthan is a consequence of IIT exam fever.
The tutorial college as a phenomenon and a mindset with its double, the quiz, has become almost an epidemic. I remember sitting at a school where a psychologist was delivering a preschool test. She complained about a child who saw an outline of three petals and said it was an electric fan. The psychologist was fuming that the child did not recognise that it was a flower. I pointed out that the child was right, but the psychologist claimed there could be only one right answer to a question.
The tutorial college of India achieved the colonial dream of it being a nation of clerks. As a leftist cynic claims, it is not the dictatorship of the proletariat that dominates India but the dictatorship of “filariat”. India, he claimed, wanted to play a secretariat to the world. He explained that as a nation, we have accepted our secondariness, and now we seek to maximise it. As a leading astronomer confessed, “We Indians have become the best summarisers in the world. Sadly, we have lost our sense of originality.” The era of Jagadish Bose, Raman and Ramanujan is over. The scientist claimed that economically, we had created a comparative advantage out of mediocrity. Ours is not a country of original thought or rebellious dissent at the level of ideas. We are the summarisers of the world. As Sanjay Dutt’s film Munna Bhai demonstrated, even Gandhi can be reduced to a quick quiz. Given this, what chance do others have? The tutorial college packs information as bytes of knowledge or wisdom. It is so rigidly structured that there is little sense of plurality or alternatives.
The tutorial college was a prelude to the idea of Scopus as an index of success. Here, success was narrowed to rankings. I still remember a student at the Delhi University hostel reciting IAS ranks as if it were cricket scores. There is little sense of play or surprise. The ‘Kunji’ (a handbook of quick answers) has become a sacred or official text. As an economist would say, it is a Giffen good, a case where something inferior pretends to be superior. I must admit that there are defenders of the tutorial college. An activist friend of mine, now in the IAS, said, “The tutorial college and the kunji provided quick access to knowledge. Why buy expensive books when they are summarised in a digestible way that is both cheap and accessible?” He added that Indian education is not about quality but access and inclusion. Tutorial colleges enable this process even better than public universities. He said nostalgically that some kunjis are almost legendary.
He added, “I remember a story a friend told me. He went to the Delhi School of Economics when Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati were legends there.” He said his friend went home and boasted about the legends; the uncle looked indifferently and said that the textbook of economics that he read, by Ruddar Dutt and K P M Sundaram, was equally legendary. The uncle said, “They have done more to spread economic ideas than your elite professors.”
One does not deny that access is important, but if it gets restricted to two textbooks, does education really work? What happens to a student who cannot recite Shakespeare but can paraphrase him word for word from a kunji? The joy of language disappears. There is no possibility of alternative interpretations or re-reading a text for a different exegesis. Yet tutorial colleges have acquired respectability as retired IAS officers serve on the board, hoping to reproduce their success and create a generation of mimic mandarins. Even the IT industry appears more and more like an electronic secretariat with the digital and textual in happy complicity. The tutorial college is becoming official without any embarrassment.
The question, however, is not one of success and access alone. The impact of the tutorial college is clearly seen at the level of research, where originality and crafts skills are called for. Copycat knowledge might sustain bits of applied science but destroys the joy of original research. There is a bureaucratisation of research problems as we choose simpler and safer problems. The mediocre acquires a magical quality.
India, like the world, is facing the challenge of the Anthropocene, which demands a critique of science, a new idea of economics, and a different sense of nature. Both our syllabi and Constitution are outdated. As a tutorial college nation, we become carriers of outdated western ideas. The tutorial college, as a cultural gene, suppresses the alternative imagination in all its forms. More than a revolution in politics, India today needs a transformation in education.
We require a new framework of ideas and an explosion of vernaculars, not a fetishisation of the digital. We advocate artificial intelligence but worry little about the surrogate intelligence created by the tutorial college as a mindset. The sense of experiment, play or risk is completely lost as Einstein, Bohr and Gandhi get reduced to 10 predictable questions with equally predictable answers. One hardly confronts such issues while seeking technological fixes to all our problems. A reworking of culture and philosophy has to herald any new form of problem-solving. As poet W H Auden put it in another context, “Thou shalt not answer questionnaires” or its idiot predictability.
Shiv Visvanathan
Social scientist associated with THE COMPOST HEAP, a group researching alternative imaginations