With the opening-up of many new Government Degree Colleges from last few years, access to Higher education has become rather easy than it was previously. I remember, not so long ago, that we had to come down some twenty-five kilometres to join a degree college and continue our education. Not all my friends could afford the daily travelling expenses and with the result, they either discontinued their studies or enrolled through distance education. Now higher education is no longer a luxury that only few could afford. With the expansion of institutions of higher learning, both students feel “much more relaxed” as they find a college, at least an arts college, at a walking distance from their homes. However, does familiarity breed contempt? Contempt on part of both students as well as teachers. This much more relaxed feeling that I referred to above is turning into a veritable problem that may, if left unattended, eat into the very vitals of the higher education system in the Valley. This problem has many aspects attached to it ranging from indifferent administrative approaches to the negligence of student community in general. This leads us to ask ourselves, does easy access to education make it better or worse? Has our education system failed to deliver what was/is expected of it? The answer might well be in an examination of what is the present state of higher education in the Valley. More specifically, how do degree colleges function in the present times?
To begin with the beginning, we have not yet switched to the semester system in the colleges. We follow the age old, time-tested annual system of examination wherein students sit for two-and-half hours writing, rather “pouring” down mugged up knowledge onto their answer scripts. I use the word “pouring” because the question papers are set in such a way that pouring serves the student`s purpose better. Then, it takes us about three months to declare their results. This is followed by revaluation, rechecking, and errors and omissions etc. The colleges take about a month to complete the internal college admission formalities and one more month to start the regular class work- if ever the (contractual) teachers for all the subjects are available. Even this is not synchronous for all the three BG classes, and practically it takes more than six months. We are then actually left with five to six months of regular class work in the colleges! Fair or foul, we follow this pattern every year.
Next, we believe in huge class strength- more than few hundred in a section has become unavoidable. With very less number of classrooms and huge on-roll students in our colleges, what else can we offer? Gone are the days when a teacher would remember each student by his name or recognise him/her by his/her face. Each day the teacher, these days, finds fifty “new” faces in his class. These faces are new in the sense that they keep changing throughout the session as if all the students have entered into an unacknowledged agreement of not coming to the college all at once. If ever, by sheer accident or mere coincidence, they sometimes come into the classroom, we might have to call-off the class for the lack of accommodation. Add to all this, our own infallible forty-minute class duration. Spending forty minutes in the class of say one hundred students is a cakewalk even for the dullest teacher. It takes ten minutes to rule the unruly mass, fifteen minutes to call their names or roll numbers and then we start to preach. Then how much we deliver is between us and our students, no one else should bother.
We also have evolved the distinctive, yet unofficial four-days a week work-culture. Whatever the causes of this shift from the traditional setup, the irony is that even the teachers have accepted this as norm as they don’t seem to do anything about this. Come what may, the students would not turn up on Fridays and Saturdays. Especially on Fridays, student attendance is almost nil. I wonder why don’t we declare Friday as official holiday and begin work on Sundays. Some colleges, I have come to know, impose fine on their students if they do not turn up on Fridays! I am not sure whether they follow this policy for other days as well. If they do, they would surely have a huge budget on this account.
With all these, some self-imposed and some system forced predicaments, what we offer is a mere seventy teaching hours every year in each subject. This offer too is only for those students who would come regularly four days a week. However, how many actually turn up is a million dollar question that needs a scrutinised answer. The University of Kashmir`s attendance norms say that an attendance of less than 75% is unacceptable for writing the final examination. Judged by these standards, our students would never write their exams. However, the reality is that they do write, and even pass quite easily. The fact that this happens is a fair testimony that in colleges we don’t take the official rules seriously. How many teachers record the attendance of their students regularly? A friend of mine told me that teachers prefer to record attendance once a week, some even don`t do that. May be the Principals of the colleges have a better answer to these questions? How many Principals ask their teachers to submit the monthly “attendance report” and the “syllabus-covered” certificates before releasing their salaries? Don`t these highly paid officials realize that it is part of their duty? This obviously indicates that in colleges we don`t have any firm rules for either (not) taking down the attendance of the students seriously. Forget about taking stringent action against defaulting students.
All this leads us to pause a little and raise the fundamental question that pertains to the necessity and functioning of these so-called higher centres of learning. As they are working in the present times, it may not be an over simplified conclusion that even if they are all shut, they will not affect the state of higher education in the Valley. The distance education department of the university may well carry out the function they are performing. All it needs to do is to open study centres working two days a week in distant places of the valley. However, this would certainly save the financially indebted state a lot of money.
