By far, the most modern and impressive buildings along the main roads here in northern India are not the tire, farm machinery and electrical equipment factories, they are the schools. Education is big here and it is serious business. Between Delhi and Agra, interspersed between farms and giant plants, we saw at least a dozen for-profit universities, each offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in, you guessed it, business, engineering and computer science. The students come from the grimy, bustling towns nearby and after graduation, many must feed directly into the factories right along the way, but I imagine many also move on to other sections of the country and beyond. The other morning I watched students, all of them young men by the way, sitting on the back of motorized rickshaws careening down the road in near-freezing weather with text books open. As we passed by them in our van, I could see them looking over math and engineering problems.
Take the Sri Venkateswara Group of Educational Institutions. Its motto, which I read in one of the regional business magazines routinely supplied in our hotel rooms, is "Come, Learn, Flourish." (I wonder what that is in Latin.) Like all of those I've seen, the school boasts accreditations by various state and national boards that mean nothing to me but must mean something to them and the school's students. And like all the factories here, Sri Venkateswara also advertises that it strictly adheres to international quality standards, including those famously administered by the International Standards Organization, headquartered in Norway. "ISO 9000 certification" is supposed to confirm that an organization, after many labors, has perfected its processes and zealously reviews them to weed out quality problems on an ongoing basis. In the educational context here, it is surely intended to connote pedagogical perfection -- though almost certainly through devotion to rote learning. This is not all bad, as many education reformers in the US, concerned about curriculum consistency and teacher training, will tell you. But, as you know from reading Susan's entries, most things here in India are rough not only on the surface but also below it; to wit: the magazine ad for Sri Venkatewara proudly announces that the university is ISO 9000 "ceretified." Oops! (Note: click on "Previous" below for earlier posts.) Comments are closed.
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