Factories of Futility

As the monsoon rains swept across India, dousing the furnace heat of early summer, 35 million young Indians jammed back into the nation's schools for another year, nearly a million of them under the academic umbrellas of India's-38 huge, state-supported universities. And louder than ever rose the cries of frustration from thousands of rejected university applicants and their anxious parents.

Without a college degree, educated Indians face a life of unemployment or menial work. Even those who make it through college face a bleak and restricted future in the new India; the number of unemployed graduates tops half a million. This paradox of unprecedented numbers demanding university training, when the country's backward economy cannot even absorb all those now being graduated, has created what Indians call their crisis in higher education. It will be a top item for debate at this week's meeting of Indian state ministers of education in New Delhi.

Empire's Clerks. In part, independent India's university problem is the product of its British heritage. The system that the British colonial rulers inaugurated 125 years ago gave them plenty of English-schooled clerks and civil servants--and gave the aspiring Indian the prestige of a post in which he would never again have to do manual labor. But long after it became apparent that India's crying need was not academic intellectuals but builders, engineers, doctors, technicians and social workers, Indian universities have been dishing out classical education along the old British lines.

Most young Indians are well aware that science and technical graduates now have the best chances for getting reasonably good jobs with a future. But even though India's handful of polytechnic institutes and the science faculties have expanded facilities to admit five times as many students, there are still too few openings. Under terrific pressure, universities have admitted some 800,000 more students this year than in 1949. But the "student indiscipline" that Nehru keeps inveighing against has grown more widespread.

Though students still rush out to do political battle as in British times (antiCommunist university demonstrators led the street scuffling in Kerala last week--see FOREIGN NEWS), much of their agitation is for petty, personal aims (easier exams, special movie admission rates), and seems basically a frustrated reaction to the soulless character of their studies and the futility of their future.

Calcutta University, the world's largest (enrollment: 90,000), is so completely a factory that it runs classes in three shifts a day. Its urban colleges are ill-lighted and have no recreational facilities. The only gathering places are coffee shops and tea shops, where Marx-hipped hotheads often dominate the conversation. Classes are so perfunctory and lectures so mechanical that many students leave after roll call; a friend can always supply notes and, more important, provide names and pages of books the professor referred to.

Grace Marks. With no opportunity to get a rounded education, with no academic atmosphere around him, and with his whole future hanging on the results of periodical tests, the average student works only to pass his exams. To supplement their incomes, badly trained professors assist crammers by writing and selling notebooks and "Made Easies." At that, so many students fail exams--partly because they arrive ill-prepared in the English that remains the medium of instruction--that colleges sometimes add a "grace mark" to the exam results to raise the percentage of passed candidates.

This week's New Delhi conference will examine new government proposals requiring India's universities to take "rigorous and effective measures" for raising academic standards and ensuring discipline, but officials are not hopeful. Says an officer of the government's University Grants Commission, with a shrug: "After all, we are a very poor country."

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