Is it the university think-tank that is in a huddle and aiming to re-think its strategic intent so far as the introduction of the 4-year under-grad program is concerned? Or is it the students who have just dived into the refreshing pool of awareness and understood the real depth of this decision? Or is it the faculty who need more selling than do the students? Or are there political factions within the university who want to oppose and threat just because that is what they are supposed to do? Or are the detractors simply people who never had the honest intent to launch India into a mature education destination? Or are we all finding the idea difficult because we have got into the lowly habit of not working hard ever or don’t want to adopt a new way without our compulsive stance of protestations?

Yes, I am quite sure the idea is brilliant and deserves to be given a chance to prove its worth in the real world. So I really don’t understand why there are so many protests going on and why so many people are going around as if they have been squashed or beaten to pulp by a mere idea. The idea, in its simplest form, is simply to give an option to move out from a purely academic world after having spent two or three years getting vital college education. I see nothing wrong in it. I see nothing wrong in the very obvious implication that only those who can sustain a long-term interest in going deeper into the intricacies of any subject be the ones who reach the portals of higher education. This 4-year course is poised to become a kind of sorting station where only a select few who have the nerves and the grit to bear the slog of higher education, enter it. Aren’t we all fed up of bumping into post-graduates who know nothing… or people flaunting doctorates that have reached them because they played their cards right?

Moreover, once the tag for having entered a college is attained, those who feel stifles and suffocated by tomes that must be read can move out and get into the environment that their talent seeks. There is nothing demeaning or uncertain about this… such students can then get into appropriate vocational streams of their choice and embrace lovingly a career that is in sync with their inclination or innate skill or potential. Our universities and colleges in their present avatar are simply churning and throwing out uncooked potential that is rapidly degenerating into a sour and restless personality… and don’t we see teeming millions of young talent roaming the streets like a lost generation? These aren’t the graduates or post-graduates rejected from the professional world because they are perceived as young adults who know nothing and have learned nothing… these are people who have been misguided by the current form of higher education that our country has embraced.

These are human forms with loads and loads of potential that needs only a limited quantity of knowledge that comes from text-books and need to get their sustenance from jumping into the pool of practical courses where the focus is on only skill development. Not everyone can be great at blending coffee the right way… just as not everyone can understand the secrets of numerical analysis and be content proving or disproving hypothesis and theories. There is a joy in both these forms of human endeavour… and we need to understand this seemingly small fact and reserve as much respect for a painter of signboards who is proficient in his task as we have for a professor of Physics in a research lab! We need to understand that an administrator in the civil services is as vital to the society as a chef in a restaurant is, if I may say so.

Thus it is important to make a move towards a system that is aiming to change the education system that we have known so far. We need to let our inner fears take a break and we need to feed it enough logic to keep it quiet until the new system proves its worth! But more important is the need to dissolve the attitude that creates boundaries between professions and jobs. It is time that we not only transcended the deafening bellow of the crumbling myths of caste and religion, but also defied the suffocating noose of snootiness that gets attached to certain jobs and positions! Only time will tell if this wish remains a tale that becomes history…