We have an interesting situation emerging in India. Lets take school education first. Hundreds of thousands of people take college entrance exams each year. This mad rush to get into good colleges has created tremendous amounts of pressure on middle and high schoolers. Cashing in on this demand is a whole industry of alternative teaching centres, tutorial classes and the like, all aimed at preparing students for these entrance exams. All in all, parents, teachers and society are conspiring to overengineer entire generations into exam-writers (and ironically, not into engineers, doctors, scientists as intended). The casualty in this entire process is creativity and loss of the bigger picture. Coming out of this factory, one doesn’t think of building aeroplanes, curing illnesses, or growing more food. One thinks of how to get marks in an exam.
What can we do to give the children who go through the assembly lines of this factory a view of the bigger picture, to inspire them to be creative, and to solve real problems. I am not suggesting that they work less hard , but merely that they devote their energies to something more real, more useful in the long run, and more fun. Before we take a stab at this, let’s look at college education and the picture that it paints. I am looking specifically at engineering colleges here, but I am sure a lot of this holds for other types of colleges as well.
Thousands of engineering colleges have sprung up in India in the recent past, catering to 400,000 or so students. most of these are in the private sector and charge substantial tuition fees. In a way these colleges do a great service, provide roof, walls, infrastructure and an environment for learning. they also ought to reduce the mad rush for colleges by providing more seats, thus alleviating pressure on schoolers. maybe this has happened but not to a very significant extent. Why? There are several indications that the quality of students coming out of all but a handful of colleges is poor (so the mad rush for that handful of colleges continues). For instance, based on campus interviews I have participated in, I can vouch for the fact that a very large fraction of the IT/CS graduates cannot write correct code for something as fundamental as sorting. Nasscom says that only a quarter of the graduates are employable. IT majors have to invest very heavily in training and talk of finishing schools etc to makeup for deficiencies in college education. Why is the quality so poor? Most colleges do not have the vision to invest in quality teachers in sufficient numbers (and interestingly this includes the premier iits and iisc as well where for the last 10 years, department sizes have increased by not more than an average of 1 person or so per year, if not actually decreased, while the overall engineering student strength in the country has more than doubled or tripled); the iits and iisc do have quality but not the bandwidth or the inclination to reach out to the 400,000 students out there. Given the economics in play, it is safe to assume that most engineering students in India are not going to be able to interact with quality faculty for several several years to come.
How do a relatively small number of quality researchers, industry practitioners and passionate educators reach out to 400,000 engineering students and possibly many more BSc, BA etc etc students? Conventional models (walled campuses) clearly won’t work. Correspondence courses and the likes that are available, too staid, not in pace with the times, not cool, not fun. We need new paradigms. Two recent developments put the Indian education system at crossroads.
The first key development is the large scale availability of jobs. The 4 IT majors between them will take on 70-100,000 employees this year. Every software company is looking for people. All indications are that this job growth will continue. Just look at Infosys’s revenue, the first billion took 15 years or more, and subsequent billions a couple of years or less. The second key development is the dramatic growth of the web in India. At the rate at which mobile phones have penetrated the Indian market, it is a matter of time before internet access becomes commonplace in smaller towns and villages.
Can one tap the growing economy and the pervasive growth of the web to reach out to the 200m or so Indians of school/college age. The House of Algorithms is born out of this vision. Hopefully, one day, any person seeking to learn how to build a plane or a search engine will not spend his time practicing how to integrate obscure functions in the slim hope of clearing a gruelling exam, but just log in into the House of Algorithms and get started. No entrance exams, no need for reservations, access to all, anytime, from anywhere.