What is good education?

An econometrician, academician and politician turned Yoginder K Alagh writes what is good education? Though he did not do much when he was in charge of some university in India!

• “The interesting part of the current debate is that there is no discussion of what good education is all about. The focus is on the needs of parents who very legitimately want to send their children abroad. Senior civil servants, high profile politicians who left teaching decades ago and entrepreneurs and geeks who know everything also want foreign education. This is good because it is the purchasing power that matters. And those who don’t know their customers suffer.
• There are two characteristics of good education. It is a long haul business, so if I start today, I may have to wait for five to ten years before the product comes out. Second, it is not a standard assembly line product like a sausage. You can’t sit on a teacher when he reads, writes or lectures, so you may judge him or her only by outcomes.
• The only real way we can make the best in the world bond with us is to make Indian academia professionally exciting to them. That means reform at home. It means encouraging the best and the brightest. It means giving autonomy to institutions of higher learning at home and making them achieve mutually accepted goals. It means letting the best here pair up with the best abroad in research and teaching. It means rewarding them if they perform and punishing them when they don’t.
• Nobody is talking of this. A university teacher of arts is suspended without due process, his student is arrested and not allowed to complete his exam and his results are still not declared after three years. A defeated politician is made chancellor of a university for a lifetime. We will have to build firewalls to stop all this before we can use the best elsewhere.”