×
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

STEM education and ‘citizenship skilling’

The National Education Policy 2020’s recommendations envision Indian higher education in a broader international sphere, while aiming for local inflections in learning
Last Updated 25 March 2023, 22:43 IST

The National Education Policy 2020’s recommendations envision Indian higher education in a broader international sphere, while aiming for local inflections in learning. In particular, NEP 2020 aims to enable a university education where Indian graduates become more sensitive and humane ‘global’ citizens while retaining their Indianness. While doing so, they also attain the skills needed to flourish in the 21st century. It’s a three-pronged pathway, where each student, notwithstanding subject specialisation, undertakes college courses facilitating the temperaments and skills needed for “global citizenship”. These are lofty aims given the unpromising conditions that exist in most higher education institutions (HEIs). One wonders, too, how HEIs in the science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) fields, which are typically distant from the arts and humanities, would make these happen in their programmes. It needs a different but related discussion.

Something akin transpired in the sphere of legal education in India. A generation ago, bodies like the Bar Council of India recommended foresightful steps to make Indian law education speak further to the Indian setting. Law colleges and universities, certainly the most notable of them, commenced curricular changes, infusing the 5-year law programme with foundational courses in the social sciences and humanities, thus helping students see the social and philosophical underpinnings of the law. The processes of curricular change benefited deeply from Indian and global law scholarship working at the crossroads of law and sociology, economics, history, political studies, international relations, philosophy, literature, science and technology, management studies, and the like.

In the last 20 years or so, a number of State-funded public universities as well as private universities imparting law education arose. Without the sheer dynamism and versatility of cross-disciplinary legal scholarship, this spurt would have been hard to witness.

Fundamentally, the big message that law education sent out was that you couldn’t make sense of the law if you didn’t see its many dimensions as part of society, as a social construct even. Understanding crucial spheres of the law, like jurisprudence, now behove some grounding in philosophy before a student gets to study the former. Indeed, the infusion of the social sciences and the humanities may have helped in attaining some of the “global citizenship” imperatives that the NEP 2020 recommends. Even more important, the social sciences and humanities’ vigour help law students to become critically-minded citizens who are a bit more self-aware of the worlds they inhabit and their position(s) in them.

Such a transformation for STEM HEIs looks likely to be a struggle. Over the last many decades, many webs of forces, pulls and pressures have hyper-commercialised STEM education. It’s such an irony that a money-spinner in Indian higher education like STEM almost completely refuses to see itself as a social construct. The NEP 2020’s ideas of citizenship must sit quite oddly at the tables of STEM institutions, generally blissfully distant from most things that hark of the arts, the humanities, or the social sciences. Of course, this is a gross exaggeration as there are quality STEM institutions with strong humanities departments, such as some of the older IITs. However, those are crème-de-la-crème exceptions.

Most meaningful education is emotionally and psychologically unpredictable, messy even. The intellectual and emotional mayhem that pedagogical materials and texts can cause in the hands of a passionate teacher in an intellectually hungry classroom creates the magic of learning and sustained curiosity. Aiding “global citizenship”, in the way the NEP 2020 envisages it, appears somewhat technical, like an app that can be downloaded. Unfortunately, learning and unlearning about citizenship are uneven, perhaps even unsettling, experiences through which the student journeys. Most STEM folks seem unlikely to get it.

ADVERTISEMENT
(Published 25 March 2023, 18:45 IST)

Follow us on

ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT