The professional or tutorial discourse, popularly known today as the 'lecture' was a medieval invention designed for the serious students who were too poor to buy extensive books and who had not access to a library. This made it necessary for them to listen to a person who was familiar with books. We are no longer in that situation. Education, in the modern world, has come to mean - what has been called - 'guided reading'. The essential job of the teacher, particularly at the University level, is to direct students to do the work themselves and solve their problems in an informal manner. Not only the protagonists of non-formal education but progressive educationists all over the world hold the view that the lecture method of instruction might have been useful in the past, but in the modern context it tires the teacher and leaves the student uninterested and often hostile. They argue that the students may admire the eloquence of their college teachers, but in the process they relapse into a state of intellectual passivity. Again, the lecture method is such that the lecturer's prime concern in his subject rather than his audience. The average college teacher cares little whether his listeners actually benefit from his exposition. He is only concerned with the accurate exposition of his subject. It is indeed a fact that in the context of 'essay type' questions which are invariably set in the question papers at the end of a term, students turn to other sources of study 'primarily to cram and in this invidious process forget' or even 'un-learn', what their teachers had been talking throughout the year.

Teachers as pedagogues have to deliver classroom lectures. Their work quantum is measured in terms of 'hours'. In all universities in India, unless there are exceptions, a period runs into an hour. In colleges, however, a period is usually of 40 or 45 minutes' duration. While at the university level, a teacher is supposed to meet his classes every day at the same hour, the compactness of the time-table at the under graduate college level makes it necessary for a teacher to have his periods with different classes scattered over a span of 3 to 5 hours. In both cases, however, the entire course is supposed to be covered in a fixed number of lectures during a whole session. Where more than one teacher is assigned to a single class for teaching the same course, the work is divided in such a way that the students get their course of study 'finished' at least twenty days before the commencement of the examination.

The quantum of work for teachers at the undergraduate level is fixed, at 24 periods or 16 hours a week. The week consists of seven days. In the universities, however, it is the hierarchical order of seniority that determines the quanta of work for various categories of teachers. While a professor who is also the Head of the Department is required to teach 8 periods a week, (many of them do not teach more than 4 periods, and consider 'research guidance' to be their sole prerogative), a Reader is supposed to teach 8 periods and a Lecturer 12 periods a week. Of this, roughly one half of the periods is devoted to classroom lectures, while the rest constitute - what has been called - 'seminars' or 'tutorials'. Any one who has seen university teacher at work should know that while students attend their lectures on pain of penalty and for the fear of accumulated shortage of lectures at the term-end, they rarely turn up for their seminars or tutorials. Even when one or two zealous ones do come for the purpose, the teachers prefer to ask them to leave their written assignments for correction and go away.

In the classroom there is hardly any scope for discussion. It is a one-way traffic, and the teacher has no time for entertaining a doubt or two from a vocal student. "Discussion is also inhibited by the fact that many students are genuinely not interested in their course. Most of them enrol at colleges only for the certificate to be obtained at the end of the course."

As things stand at present, there is hardly any interaction between teachers and students either at the undergraduate or at the postgraduate level. The student goes to the classroom without any inkling of what a particular teacher is going to teach in a particular period. The English teacher decides for himself whether he would take up a poem from the anthology of poetry or a prose piece from a similar anthology prescribed for an undergraduate course. The same is true of a teacher social sciences. The choice of a subject or a topic is made by him without prior notification to his students. Similarly, at the postgraduate level it is the teacher who has the advantage of entering the classroom, ill-equipped or well-equipped, without fear of the students knowing before hand what exactly is in store for them on a particular day. Again, since lectures are supposed to be delivered in the medium of English and a majority of undergraduate students are not well-versed in that language, most of the lecture goes over the head of the students.

Again, in States and the regional language where a three-language formula governs the medium of instruction (English, Hindi), it is mixed class of students opting for one of the three media, the teacher has to alternate between English, Hindi and the mother-tongue in the same breath. His lecture is a curious mixture of terms and phrases which alternate, change their meaning and sense, and occasionally border on confusion. However, since the job is to be done, it is done. Since courses of study presuppose books prescribed for study and this is done by respective Boards of study in different subjects, extra-academic considerations are often made for continuation of books written by favourites over periods as long as seven years. This, indeed, is a boom for the classroom lecturer because they can articulate themselves without much preparation, term after term, and year after year. "The teachers' own admissions in this respect strengthen the viewpoint that the level of undergraduate education and the manner in which instruction is organised make for stagnation of teachers. Seventy-two per cent out of 171 teachers interviewed for this study said it was not necessary to read much in order to teach at the first year. Forty-eight per cent thought it was not necessary to read even for teaching at the senior B.A. or B.Sc. level."

It is in this context that the Report of the Education Commission (1946-66) spoke of the deplorable state in the realm of formal education in this country. It said that the existing situation in higher education during the academic year broadly alternates between slackness and strain-slackness during the session, strain at the time of examinations. In many of the weaker colleges and universities, a majority of teachers teach mechanically and listlessly. The subjects in which they lecture do not often involve their intellectual passion. They do not usually have a part in the formulation of the syllabus which they are required to teach, nor do they make - with a few exceptions - experiments in methods of teaching. There is little enthusiasm for learning or discovery of new truths because research is not considered an integral part of their duties, and whatever research is done is usually of unconvincing quality. In the absence of a 'research impregnated' atmosphere, even the intellectually ambitious younger members of the staff are soon caught up in the general atmosphere of indifference or cynicism. A large proportion of teachers find physical conditions unbearable.

In some of the institutions there are additional factors which are uncongenial for development of intellectual vitality. The hierarchical concentration of authority within the departments and colleges, the atmosphere of distrust between senior teachers and junior teachers, the cynicism, about administrative authorities, the unseemly conflicts about offices and positions and the attitude of envy towards persons of superior attainments - all have contributed to the deadening of the spirit of intellectual curiosity and adventure. Some of the members are diverted from intellectual concerns into intrigue and conflict over small administrative or financial prizes afforded by the Indian academic life. On top of all this, the bureaucratic structure within which teaching and research have to go hand in hand, the dependence on the approval of indifferent superiors, the elaborate procedure through which things have to go to become available to the aspirant for research or writing, have had a depressing effect on the morale of teachers and on the quality and quantity of their creative and meaningful academic work.

What is true of teachers is equally true of students. Not that they do not want to work. There are among those who do work in spite of the constraints and handicaps on account of indifferent and bad teachers. But many students come from comparatively or entirely uneducated homes and are ill-prepared at the secondary level to undertake genuine university work; they have little experience of independent study; their curiosity is unquickened and learning for them is mainly a matter of mechanical memorization. There is, as a rule, little discussion of intellectual matters with their teachers or fellow students; their main duty is considered to be able to attend dull lectures usually given in a language which they understand inadequately. When the medium is an Indian language, there is dearth of suitable textbooks and supplementary literature necessary to achieve competence in their subjects. Many of them cannot be expected to read textbooks in English because it has not become for them the language of the library. The capacities of better students are not fully stretched by curricular offering or the stimulus which inspiring teachers could provide. In addition, a large majority of students are beset with financial worries which make concentration on academic work difficult.

The governance of most Indian universities is reverely out of date and in need of revision. Yet, practically nothing has been done to modernize the ways in which universities are administered. Simple matters of bureaucratic inefficiency and rather rigid hierarchical structure add to student frustrations as well as hinder improvement in higher education.

The failure of the formal system of education is again apparent when one looks at the examination results. In spite of large scale use of unfair means, the average percentage of 'pass' students remains negligibly low. There have been cases of this percentage remaining as low as 12 in some university examinations. Of the use of unfair means, suffice it to say that a university in the North put on 'trial' as many as 9,421 students (both belonging to the campus and to the affiliated colleges) and 'convicted' 35 per cent of them by debarring them from any university examination for two to three years !

This may seem an exaggerated picture of a situation which is indeed dismal, but to the optimists it still seems capable of salvation. However, those of us who have known college and university situation at first hand can say it with some amount of responsibility that picture is true. Taken all in all, the ideal of academic excellence is confined to a microscopic minority of teachers and students in the formal system of higher education in India who have to keep it alive against the downward pressure of discouraging circumstances. This situation has been in existence for a long time. In fact, for the past fifty years situation has deteriorated progressively. The problem indeed is old. What is new is the magnitude of the problem and its accentuation as a result of extraordinarily rapid expansion of higher education and the development of new expectations in the post-independence era. In the past the need for a better, more effective education was not felt so keenly because, so long as India did not supply the higher cadres of its own ruling class - or did so to a limited extent - the efficiency and effectiveness of its intelligentsia was of secondary importance from the point of view of the tasks it was expected to perform. Now that the responsibility for the progress of the country squarely rests on us, we cannot afford to plead any alibis.

The traditional method has failed - and has failed miserably. The system has suffered from an incapacity to generate a compelling tradition of intellectual work of its own. In a certain sense, every university system is to some extent alien to the culture in which it operates - it is more differentiated, more critical, more innovative than its environing culture. But what has come to stay in India as the traditional system of education in colleges and universities has failed not only in differentiating itself from the environing cultural traditions and in generating its own traditions - institutional, professional and disciplinary - but also because it has not risen to the other pinnacle, the goal of the service of the community by merging itself with the community's aspirations. So, it has neither served in an egalitarian way nor in the old egalitarian way in which the universities have functioned in the past.

However, it would be wrong to assume that all is lost. The system of higher education in India even now has sound and strong legs to stand on. A transplant in India of a model which was once upon a time good enough for Europe, this over-formalised system has outlived its utility in India. There is no doubt that the British Government in India in the nineteenth century needed native support in running its administration, judiciary, communications and for the diffusion of information chiefly for propaganda and dissemination of knowledge about the European way of life. Narrow as the motives were, the results were indeed very fruitful. Within four decades of the founding of first universities in India, not only a small number of outstanding Indian scientists and scholars produced but also, strictly from the British point of view, a class of 'educated Indians' came into being. This class could be looked upon as the stable and strong backbone of the raj. Westernised in its outlook, dress, speech and style of living, this elitist group indeed served the purpose for which, purely for historical and imperialistic reasons, it was helped in its birth.

When we achieved our independence, the need for a new educational system was often and forcefully stated by the national leadership. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, as back as 1948, while opening an educational conference, said : "Whenever conferences were held in the past to form a plan for education in India, the tendency as a rule was to maintain the existing system with slight modifications. This must not happen now. Great changes have taken place in the country and the educational system must keep pace with them. The entire basis of educational system must be revolutionised." Nehru himself was a thinker, not a doer. Nothing indeed happened in the intervening years. J.P. Naik, wrote in 1965 : "What has happened is merely an expansion of the earlier system with a few marginal changes in content and technique." Again : "In short, while we have talked of 'revolutionary changes', we have practised only a 'moderate reformisms'...."

The Report of the Education Commission (1964-66) of which Dr. J.P. Naik was the Member-Secretary, concurred with his appraisal : "Indian education needs a drastic reduction, almost a revolution... Tinkering with the existing situation, and moving forward with faltering steps and lack of faith can make things worse than before." Further : "We must either build a sound, balanced, effective and imaginative educational system to meet our developing needs and respond to our challenging aspirations or be content to be swept aside by the strong currents of history".

In the 52nd year of our freedom it looks rather strange that we are hugging a system which by and large has not only outlived its utility but has become obsolete, if not in its fundamental essentials then at least in its application. Not that we have not experimented with other models in the past. Indeed noisy tinkering and hammer-hitting has been going on all along the line from primary to higher education all the time. But the capacity of our traditional system to resist or contain change has been impressively demonstrated in recent years. What we thought of 'basic education' and what we did with it is ample illustration of our flattery of a cause and our apathy to its application. The way it was accepted as the panacea for all ills was in itself academic dishonesty on the part of those who paid lip service to it, but further along the line the way it was given an indecent burial by state governments which had earlier found in it an 'educational leap' which would take India fifty years ahead, is something of a nauseating story. Even the mild-mannered Dr. Zakir Husain, the chief formulator of the system, had to denounce it as a "fraud" on the government and the students. The quip went round in Delhi that "Basic education is good - for children of other parents !" High-ups even in the field of education who attended seminars and symposia and euloziged Dr. Zakir Husain's enthusiasm and Dr. K.L. Shrimali's dynamism in this Gandhian approach to education sent their own children to public schools and expected poor men's children to give it a trial run in ill-equipped schools. Educational hypocrisy indeed reached such a pass that even the oft-repeated proverb that an oft-repeated lie convinces the lie-teller of its truth could not apply to the case. Now that Basic Education has had an inglorious burial and except some institutions which still invoke the name of Mahatma Gandhi and keep the system going, the rest have been steamrollered into giving it up.

Yet another sad example can be drawn from the chequered history of 'rural institutions'. On the recommendations of a Rural Higher Education Committee appointed in 1954, the Central Government appointed a National Council for Higher Education in Rural Areas in 1956. Its job was to advise the government in matters which concerned the problem of taking higher education to the doorstep of Indian ruralities. Consequently, 14 institutions, one each in the states of West Bengal, Delhi, Rajasthan, Bihar, U.P., Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Mysore and Kerala, and two each in the states of Tamil Nadu (then Madras) and Maharashtra were established. Five of these institutes were affiliated to neighbouring universities without loss of time. The other were likely to be affiliated with universities in their own area. Three more institutions were added in due course of time. Today, a half century later, except for two or three institutes which still keep afloat, others have 'bartered away their autonomy, their distinct identity and mission'. Some of them have just closed down. The Government on its part has chosen to remain a silent spectator and has not cared to find what went wrong with a good idea.

This is what has happened to the two 'pious' experiments which gave a much-needed practical bias to education in India. One was designed to inculcate the spirit of 'swadeshi' and teach the student the love of physical labour by learning local art and crafts, the other was designed to take the benefits of higher education to the countryside. Both flaundered in the straits of implementation mainly because those who swore by them had no ideological commitment and wanted only to please the distinguished authors of the schemes - Dr. Zakir Hussain and Dr. Radhakrishnan. It would indeed be rather naive to take the new enthusiasm for non-formal education as something genuine and inspired by a genuine ideological consideration. The innovative programmes in the past have gone down the drain without any one remaining behind to mourn their loss. Whether or not non-formal education will go the way 'basic education' and 'rural institutions' have gone, only time will show.

It will be good to have a look at what steps should be taken to tackle the present situation and a remedial course of treatment.

The first and the most important step would be to abandon our exclusive reliance on the traditional system of formal education and to move in the direction of providing life-long education for all for creating a learning society. From this point of view