Farcifying education ( part II )

Free lectures were rare and far in between thus far, now to our delight we found ourselves free oftener. Rumor had it that the teachers were busy coping with the sudden demand on their mental faculties.

Departments went into overdrive trying to equip their professors with all sorts of logistical and tactical information about their courses.

Direction sign boards cropped up at the most unexpected of places. Places that we never thought belonged to our college suddenly had “Instrumentation department” and “electronics department” pointing to them.

Folk who hadn’t been seen around the college premises for years suddenly took on the mantle of ‘Head of Department’.

We had a gymkhana. Not much of it, a room full maybe, a gymkhana never the less. One fine day we noticed the faint prospect of computers and electrical equipment in the room from afar.

Approaching the oddity we found a so far unheard of ‘Development Lab’ in its place. Development Lab sounds like a cool thing to have. The only hitch here was; no development had ever taken place in this room. Amongst all that cool looking electrical litter thrown around to give it a worn out feel, probably only the Robocon contraption had ever seen that place before.

The poor gymkhana we found to have been scrapped off totally. So now we were to ‘Share’ with the adjoining Bsc, arts, commerce, BMM etc. etc. their Gymkhana.

D-Day, we could feel the tensions rising to the point of exploding. After all t’was all about how well the masks would stay in place, whether the meticulously planned cosmetic surgeries would be flashy enough to fool them, whether the religiously practiced drama be played to perfection, whether the zealously by hearted lines recited flawlessly.

Black boards all over the place cried out flowery messages of welcome. The latrines got a much needed clean over, huge banners proudly claimed the great vision of the college…” To create a vibrant, knowledge oriented environment with innovative teaching practices and to inculcate a tradition of socially conscious application of Technology “

The halls of knowledge vibrated with the overload of humans and non-existent infrastructure, the environment bustled with the anticipation, as with hollow claims and hopes, and we consciously resigned ourselves to the irreversible stagnation.

At least we hadn’t set the precedents; that had been the good work of some other good men. That was our consolation. We would reap the benefits of the deep rooted deceits, why complain then!

The stage was set…

Farcifying Education (part I )

Accreditation - the act of granting credit or recognition (especially with respect to educational institution that maintains suitable standards);

Okay, so Accreditations are a big thing in Engineering colleges, at least so our college would have us believe. Having noticed that almost every damn course in scandalously random and out worldly colleges seemed to have the tag of being accredited (In the DTE prospectus and website), I naturally had come to form the opinion that accreditation was just a superficial farce and was extremely skeptical about the whole fuss being made about it when the honorable committee came to my college.

It all began quite inconspicuously; the preparations for the impending ‘Quality –Control-check’ that is. Having cramped an entire Engineering college literally into two floors, sharing laboratories with the neighboring Bsc. College or with the Diploma section (equally cramped in the two floors below ours)., word was around that we had no chance.

The college had filed applications for accreditation for four of the offered five courses.

We joked about the impossible optimism of the college authorities, the hope of acknowledgment; that we thought would remain only that-a hope. Little did we know that this was business, and the college was going to play hardball.

A few weeks into the news, everything around slowly but surely began to change.

The effort took no time to shift straight into the 5^th gear before we knew what was happening.

Peons and clerks were all of a sudden working over time, gathering files and readying accounts, the teachers progressively began looking a lot harassed, even more than us.

Cheesy sounding Quotations started cropping up all over the place, in the library, the laboratories, the notice boards, even the damn corridors.

“ Do your best, leave the rest” , “ success is 99% perspiration and 1 %inspiration”, the chart papers shouted out their expert comments at us.

Professors started bugging the unfortunate aesthetically proficient folk in our batches to come up with equally cheesy sounding quotations, formulae charts, schematic diagrams etc. etc. to decorate the laboratories.

The attempt would have been decently inspirational had it not been all so obvious in its overzealousness. The only place that gave us overawed folk some respite from all the philosophy thrown at us was probably in the toilets, which thankfully didn’t tell us to “Pee to your fullest, leave the rest” or “ one man’s dagger is another man’s sword” or “ Success is 99 % masturbation and 1 % ambition” etc. etc.

Why ( Vas ) ???

They give even the toughest cold jitters, the hardiest of the hardy feel a chill up their spine. For all our famed resilience and abilities to weather the cruelest of storms, we Engineering Students have yet to come up with a more optimistic philosophy when it comes to VIVAS.

Engineering studies hardly ever make any sense whether they be in the context of relevance or in making we under grads feel some pride in the overhyped glamour that distressingly engulfs this stream. (May be the 'grass is just greener on the other side')

Now VIVAS hold the terrifying potential of making our worst fears come true.

The mere thought of being expected to ‘understand’ all that bullhsit in those overweight Engineering books makes me week in the knees. Forced into a false complacency and security after an academic life filled with complete dependence on the ‘ Rote’ memory, we have hardly ever been tested for our true understanding of the complex equations and awe inspiring theorems that have rolled before our eyes countless number of times. We have absorbed them retained them and felt infinitely smug about being able to do so efficiently.

Detractors will of course beg to differ on many counts to that allegation of the aforementioned fear of being put to the real test.

“ I cannot mug yaar, this theory subject’s such a pain “ ….an extremely fashionable statement of our times.

The hypocrisy of it all is so overwhelming that it has failed to excite any emotions in me any more.

These same folk (often including me) have ridden waves of jubilant success piggybacking on exactly this ability to ‘learn by rote’ all their lives. Some have enjoyed fame fortune and almost celebrity status thanks to the patronization of exactly this method of education. Even while uttering that ever present excuse they are bound to know somewhere in the deep recesses of their conscience that those very subjects which require nothing other than ‘mugging’ and ‘vomiting’ are their safest and certain avenues of high grades and mind-boggling percentages .

Coming back to the question that begs to be answered in the light of such a culture of education is ‘how fair is then the concept of VIVAS ?’ They aim at testing a student’s grasp of the fundamental concepts of all that they learn.

We are often taught by totally hapless and incompetent professors (whose only claim to fame being a mere ‘bachelor’s degree’, that’s like a 4^th grader teaching the 3^rd grade just because he has passed the 3^rd grade a few months earlier)

Thus forced to trudge along through heat sweat and smoke to ‘ coaching classes ‘ stretched from one end of the city to another, and then weighed down by the mindless copy pasting of assignments and journals we hardly ever have scope to retrospect upon the true significance of the nature and reach of our subjects. We begin and end our lessons completely clueless about ‘why’ we just spent an hour or more racking our brains over seemingly impossible set of theorems and equally confusing bunch of equations to follow.

In such a scenario, to inflict upon us the torture of forcing our intelligence to stretch into thus far com pletely uncharted territories,to insult our sensibilities by exposing our ignorance and immaturity and make us unwilling fodder to feed the pompous egos of certain sociopath professors, is in my view nothing but ‘Criminal’ and could amount to ‘Mental Molestation’.

Having claimed thus an interesting conclusion comes to my mind.

The very mechanisms that have been structured to makes us think beyond written literatures, to force interest (in hopes of eventually making it voluntary) in the real world and the very tangible link between ‘Theory’ and ‘Practice’ , have succeeded in accomplishing the exact opposite.

And the week link probably has been the manner in which we have been introduced to all the concepts in the first place. Very few can actually interest themselves for the sake of the depth of the fundamentals and minute details in the Theory itself. For the rest of us commoners it would be a lot more interesting to have some knowledge about the end towards which we learn a particular concept etc. In knowing such we would, I believe have a sense of equipping ourselves (through such knowledge) to make a meaningful foray into the practical nature of Life around us.
It would give us a sense of following in the footsteps of the Great Minds of our age. To learn about a theorem and know exactly how Edison used it to make the ‘bulb’ or how C.V Raman used another to measure the age of stars, would make us feel in some way on the path to greatness.

The great breakthroughs of our times have loads of residual glory left in them. Were we to taste these while also being exposed to current progresses in the same, and encouraged to dream about how they could still be taken further; numbers, equations, codes, machines and such like would suddenly seem a lot more interesting and worthwhile then they do at this point