Not necessarily the best
math education
In response to my last post, which mentioned some high points in Indian education, a comment by fiaorsh offers some perspective on the extensive low points.
Since my reply ended up looking more like a post, I’m making it one:
@ fiaorsh — You make some important points regarding education in India, and I’d like to offer some additional context and perspective.
First, your remarks are a good reminder of the astounding diversity of India, and why one must avoid generalizations about the education system or anything else.
The statement I quoted from an Indian blogger (re. the quality of Indian vs. U.S. math education) very likely applies to the class of people I met at a Moser-Baer plant in Noida during a visit to Delhi, where I got a bunny-suit tour of a clean room where automated machines were churning out part of the company’s ~20% contribution to the world’s supply of optical discs.
It surely did not apply to the class of people I had seen on the morning of the same day along the highway leading to from IIT Kharagpur to Kolkata, where women sat in front of rusted shacks selling items from cloths spread onto the edge of the highway, where men, lacking bicycles, trudged along the road between villages in rags and sandals, where embankments along highways leading into Kolkata were thick with squatters in minimal, temporary shelters.
Also, I have had trouble understanding why child nutrition in India is worsening, and why, at present, for “underweight and stunted growth children, the situation is worse than sub-Saharan countries such as Ethiopia, Angola, Sudan and Congo” (from a recent India Times article). Starving children are unlikely to receive a world-class math education.
That said, the role of India in the world is determined more by its top strata than by its bottom, and a small portion of a large country can be large indeed. I would be interested to see the statistics on the numbers (not percentage) of high-scoring students taking the various Indian university-entrance exams. Despite unspeakable poverty, India is one of the few countries that has detonated a thermonuclear device or placed a spacecraft in lunar orbit.
However, you also remark that
The dysfunctional system has actually lead an alarming decrease in functional literacy and the inability to generate a coherent or articulate thought for most, including the educated elite
I find this surprising, but I’m often prepared to be surprised about India. The facts on this topic are obviously highly relevant to both the present and the future. Can you point to a source?
What I had in mind in my remarks re. the elite IIT and IISC academic communities wasn’t the level of general knowledge that I encountered, but the level of knowledge and interest in nanotechnology, and more specifically, in prospects for high-throughput, atomically precise manufacturing.
However, I may be biased by having read visionary speeches, like this one, referencing my foundational work and the importance of nanotechnology to India’s future, delivered to technical audiences by (now former) President Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam — a man wildly popular among IIT students, and a leading figure in India’s missile, space, and nuclear development programs.
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