Today’s NYT had two stories that I thought provide interesting viewpoints to the challenges and problems of education in India, and more generally the developing world.

The first one highlights a knowledge gap between the skills that an average Indian college education equips students with and the employable skills that the back office of the world requires of them. Some of these gaps such as the shortcomings in English and communication skills (the language handicap, which I have seen keep cousins out of software job market for years), college curricula that emphasize rote learning etc are quite obvious who has gotten an Indian college education. Others such as inability to take initiative and think independently are less so. It is these, I submit, that are potentially more dangerous to the continued growth of the Indian knowledge economy, mainly because these have no quick fixes, and need deeper cultural surgery.

Indian education, reflecting the larger socio-economic culture in which it operates in, places an inordinate amount of emphasis on mastery of skills – mathematics and science topping the cake - that are useful to take students to the job market. As someone who has had the benefit of such an education, I can attest that, when it comes to such hard skills Indian students are the best of class worldwide. But when it comes to more subtle and softer skills – how to formulate and synthesize new ideas that might span multiple domains, make plans to transform these ideas into workable plans, how to communicate this stuff to others etc – I think the hidebound Indian education system (and more generally culture) falls far behind the Western education system. Until this is fixed, however much trumpeting one may hear of Indian firms moving up the knowledge chain, it is very unlikely that Indian economy would see anything equivalent to the Silicon Valley anytime soon.

The second one is on Nicholas Negroponte’s hack – the $100 laptop, with its price now jacked up to $150. I am glad the Indian government, after toying with the idea of buying one million of these toys for $100 million, had wisely turned the offer down. This is one of those ideas where a hammer is out transforming everything it sees into a nail so that it can prove what a useful too it can be. While I am not against providing access to the information or letting Indian kids loose on the internet, for this to have any substantial educational value at all, Indian schooling will have to first to equip the potential beneficiaries of Prof. Negroponte’s scheme with working English skills. If I was Negroponte, I would spend all that crusading energy into equipping all those ‘third world’ villages with cheaper pulp based information systems (libraries), and lobbying for a decent wage to reasonably qualified teachers.