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India has 11,443 colleges and 789 universities. Yet the education they impart to its lakhs of students are inc­o­mparably lower than accepted glo­bal norms. Of the tens of thousands of graduates of ‘English liter­a­ture’, for example, a majority can’t exp­ress themselves clearly in the language, nor would they be persuaded to learn. Most gra­duates, mor­eover, of science and humanities courses are unemployable. How is it that over a cent­ury of ‘modern’ education has yielded so little dividend? Saikat Majumdar’s College: Pathways of Possibility picks out our diseased system and charts an ambitious path for undergraduate education.

The fact that Indian undergraduate arts-­science education—as different from professional courses—is considered a cesspit of mediocrity is spelt out at the beginning, after a recounting of engineering students cramming in Kota’s coaching dungeons: As Majumdar notes in comparison, the pre­stige of a degree from MIT or Caltech does in no way overshadow that from Yale or Princeton. His goal here is to “find some new avenues for art-science education in India today”. What ails such education is an ingrained prejudice against original thinking, a system that rewards expert swotters. The roots of this are well-known. In the words of Andre Beteille, who is quoted: “The first universities that came into being in 1857 in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were set up primarily for conducting examinations and awarding degrees, and not for undertaking research or even teaching”. Known for ignoring scientific education, it was a gateway to clerkdom. Independent India did little to change this structure, and with the set­­ting up of specialised centres for res­­earch in the pure and social sciences, art-science colleges are pushed further into making their drab journey through “India’s examination-centred pedagogy”.

Majumdar talks about how the Depa­r­tment of Computer Science at Stanford initiated two dual majors—Computer Sci­­ence and English, and Computer Sci­­ence and music, bemoaning the pop­ularly assumed divorce between the ‘liberal arts’ (originally containing the sciences, now erroneously equated with the ‘humanities’) and science, leaving both streams impoverished. As in medieval varsities, where philosophy and nascent physics/maths sat on the same desk, nourishing each other’s growth, it’s time again, says Majumdar, for such happy commingling. While supporting the demand for education to be more profession-oriented, he rejects the old opposition between ‘fusty humanities’ and ‘progressive sciences’, saying they have no relation to the needs of the contemporary global economy.

In his quest to chart a path for an ideal inter-disciplinary liberal artscience edu­­cation, Majumdar takes the help of developmental psychologist Howard Gar­dner’s multiple intelligence theory, which helps obtain a glimpse into the “soul of disciplines”, bypassing the obs­ession with monochromatic canonical content in und­ergraduate disciplines, and into answering ‘big think’, epistem­ological questions that form its foundations. For example, in English literature pedagogy, we are obsessed with an exhaustive study of its evolution from Old English to Modernism and after, but neglect epistemic questions about the shifting nature of the worldview about literature itself, and about authorship, text, readership and consumption of literary works. The major flaw here, says Majumdar, is the project to equip every undergrad for post-grad education—a handicap for the current global marketplace for jobs, which only rewards an agglomeration of skills.

Majumdar argues this can only be through a happy interplay of the var­­ious intelligences—linguistic and log­­­­ical-­­mathematical, as well as spatial, body-kinaesthetic, naturalist, spiritual, moral and existential—that help in und­erstanding contrasting epistemic forms. This contra-disciplinary approach, where a qualitative discipline is paired with a quantitative one (like philosophy with physics), can be the only model for next generation student to keep him or her primed for the widest variety of careers. To achieve this, he repeatedly insists, current undergraduate courses have to relinquish some of their rigorous specialisation.

Education like this ignites a passion for learning into those who decide to go further into the disciplines. To trigger the latter, production of new knowledge, or res­earch, is essential, in addition to tea­­ching and acquiring of established kno­­­wledge. Undergrad research is cru­­­­­­­c­­ially important as exercises in the deployment of received knowledge. In India, where generations pore over the same syllabi, this seems to be a brave new world. Majumdar’s lucidly advanced and convincingly argued ideas on college education are radical and might take dec­ades for it to spread evenly across the moth-­­eaten landscape, but a tentative start somewhere should be a cause for hope.