In these politically charged times, this may be an incendiary statement to make. I’m going to put my neck on the line and say this aloud: When my girls come of age, the missus and I—even if it breaks our hearts—would much rather they study at a university in the West. Unless they manage to make their way to one of our seriously premier institutes such as the IITs, IIMs, BITs, AIIMS, JIPMER or NIMHANS.

The reasons for this are apparent to anyone who has experienced the Indian education system in all its glory. Sometime last week, I silently renewed this pledge after a friend of my wife came home seeking advice.

This friend holds a master’s degree in the social sciences. In an earlier avatar, she taught these sciences at her alma mater. A little after she got married and had children, and much in line with current social norms, she took a call to step out of the workforce. After 15 years of caring for the kids, she was now ready to get back to work.

Unfortunately, when she went back to her former workplace, they didn’t have any openings. Contemporaries who taught management at a rather well-known business school in Mumbai came to her consolation. We have been in the system, and the institution, long enough to find an opening, they assured her.

True to their word, a few days after their reassurances, the business school authorities called her in. Without even the flimsiest attempt at a critical evaluation, they offered her a part-time assignment. She was to teach first-year management students Organizational Behaviour three days a week. She was to start immediately.

Egged on by her friends and personal compulsions, she accepted the assignment. There was just one problem: She had never been to a business school and, making things even more awkward, knew nothing whatsoever about Organizational Behaviour. So, how in the good lord’s name was she to teach?

Once again her friends came to her succour. They thrust an OB textbook into her hands. Just read it and wing it, they said. She showed me the book when she came home. When I flipped through it, I thought it a good one. There was only one problem. It was first published about 15 years ago and mildly updated six years ago. To that extent, all of the examples it contains were hopelessly dated.

To cite but just one instance, in a chapter on how external political factors that can potentially influence the working of an organization, it cites the unification of Germany as a case in point. Nothing wrong here. Just that it would take a nincompoop to not know East Germany and West Germany were reunited in 1990. Much water has flowed under that, and indeed much newer, bridges.

The quality of the book notwithstanding, she wanted assistance to help understand a subject she had to learn enough to teach in two days. For whatever godforsaken reason, I agreed. She took copious notes, made a presentation out of our conversation, and subsequently delivered her first lecture on the subject. For which the institute, one of Mumbai’s finest purveyors of business education, paid her the princely amount of Rs450.

To put that number into perspective, a driver from a temping agency bills Rs700 for eight hours of work. There is an additional Rs50 per hour overtime, with the rate tripling after dinner time.

To complete her humiliation, the students had no questions to ask and refused to take notes. Instead, they had the gall to insist she share her slides so that they could commit it to memory before the inevitable exam.

My limited, but vehement, point: As a nation that ostensibly worships Saraswati, the goddess of learning, what kind of a premium do we really place on quality education? Not that much. At least not in terms of a premium associated with didactic outcomes.

My mind goes back to the mid-1990s when I was looking for a job. A degree in the biosciences meant that the best job open to me was that of a medical representative. I didn’t think it appealing enough. One thing led to another and I ended in the deep end of the pool at a business daily. A two-day crash course in business by the editor later, I was designated financial analyst and pushed to write on a theme I knew nothing about. That I was amused and horrified at once is an understatement.

Terribly out of sync and desperate to catch up, I later enrolled for a part-time MBA course. The initial euphoria of having gotten into a B-school later, I realised the folks who come to teach were just as hopelessly out of sync with the real world.

To give you but one instance, teachers at the school argued high operating profit margins (OPM) are good. Some experience at a financial daily, poring over balance sheets, and a friendly editor taught me that in the real world excessively high OPMs potentially means a company that operated in a monopoly and vulnerable to challengers. When I brought this up, my teachers didn’t have cogent answers. I was disappointed but I hung on in there because an MBA in finance, at least on paper, could make a difference to my career.

Some time later, still bothered by the gaps in my professional education, I thought I lucked out because the Internet had taken off and kind people across the world were thinking up ways to make life easier for the curious. They were thinking up ideas like Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). What it meant was that the best universities in the world, including our very own IITs, were putting their courses up for anybody interested. Mostly for free.

MOOC is a theme I have touched upon in an earlier instalment in this series. Back then, I must confess, I wrote with a feeling of euphoria. I lapped up as many courses as I possibly could to get on top of things. But as this chart below articulates so well, after the initial euphoria, the impact of MOOCs plateau out.

On the back of personal experience, I can thoroughly endorse the Peak of Inflated Expectations, Trough of Disillusionment and the Plateau of Productivity.

That is why I am completely in alignment with the government’s plan to make it mandatory that students taking distance-learning courses be compelled to spend at least 40% of their time in classrooms. Mint reported about it on Friday.

Let me explain my new enthusiasm for the classroom with the example of two of my favourite MOOC experiences.

The first was on Game Theory, a subject that continues to fascinate me no end. Much research later, I zeroed in on one offered by Ben Polack of Yale University. It is free, Polak is brilliant, and his lectures make for compelling viewing. The transcripts of his lectures are available to download.

There is only one problem with it: His series of 75-minute lectures are intended for a classroom audience. To that extent, interactivity for an online audience is impossible. But something good is better than nothing at all and I owe much to Yale for their magnanimity. I learnt much and understood the theme. That said, it took extensive effort on my part to search for answers to questions that cropped up in my mind while watching the course. What it did though was give me a pretty damn good sense of how quality education at a premier institution is like.

I often wistfully wondered what it would be like to be in Polak’s classroom.

So, I went looking for even better courses. And landed at The Great Courses. Fascinated by western Classical music, and Beethoven in particular, I jumped at the course How to Listen to and Understand Great Music by Robert Greenberg. Priced at $143, I paid up without missing a beat. The course was well worth the money spent. Unlike Polak’s MOOC, It was intended for an online audience, came with copious notes, and worth much more than the money spent.

Again, I couldn’t help but wonder, what if I had been in his classroom?

In hindsight, I ought to have worked harder in my youth. I should have laboured my backside off to earn a scholarship at a premier institution in India or elsewhere. Compromises simply aren’t worth it. Young people, especially my daughters, will do well to keep in mind what Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard University famously said: If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

Charles Assisi is co-founder and director at Founding Fuel Publishing. He tweets on @c_assisi

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