An inverse snobbery is afoot. We are lectured every other day: “What is needed is universal, free, primary education.” From this comes the unstated inference: “Institutes of higher learning - the IITs, IIMs - are institutions of, and for the elite. They must be bent to serve the poor, suffering, excluded backwards.”

No one can deny that we must spread primary education at the fastest pace possible. That China has achieved near universal literacy and just about 60 per cent of us are literate - and that too only on our definition of “literacy”, that is that a person is able to sign his name - must account for some of the difference between China and India today. Nor does one need much argumentation to see that we must wholly reorient our school education: it consists almost entirely of imparting information, and then trapping the student in the exams into revealing what he does not know; when she can get the information at the click of a mouse, of what significance is it that she has or hasn’t memorised the date of the Battle of Plassey? Contrast what our NCERT textbooks’ controversies, with the report in the International Herald Tribune the other day [1 September, 2006] about the textbook that has been put out in China’s Shanghai region: Bill Gates and JP Morgan get prominence while Mao is mentioned in just one sentence - it explains that when flags are flown at half-mast when a person like Mao dies. That’s it.

... contd.