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Higher Education and Information Technology: Defining the RelationshipRajesh Kumar SharmaPage 1 ¦ Page 2 ¦ Printer-friendly version ABSTRACT The excessive discourse that has grown around information technology poses a serious threat to education, particularly higher education. We need to clearly ponder the relationship between the two in order to achieve the right integration. Rajesh Kumar Sharma is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the Punjabi University, Patiala, India. A modest claim that we may advance on behalf of higher education is that the 'higher' in it points us to the ideal of cultivating disengagement from the dominant discourses of the time. Perhaps this has never before been truer than at this moment when a powerful discourse has grown around information technology which makes it look like a universal source of validation for the various activities that fall under the rubric of education. This has resulted in a distortion of perspective, the symptoms of which can be noticed in the deeply fraught relationship that currently prevails between education and information technology. The tendency is to grant autonomous value to information technology, snapping it loose from its anchorage in education. The source of this new valuation lies in the competitive economics of the global marketplace which has found in information technology the capacity to generate quick and sizeable revenues on the one hand and the ability to discipline and disperse the 'human capital' on the other. But particularly in the developing economies such as India, this has turned upside down the vision of education in relation to its subsidiary activities of professional and occupational training. Even as information technology comes increasingly to be seen in these economies as possessing an autonomous value, only a derivative value is conceded to education. Attempts are made to restructure education for the needs of and on the paradigm of information technology, instead of finding an enabling and empowering role for information technology in the larger project of education. [1] Information processing threatens to replace education, with the human subject vaguely fancied as a processor at best and an interface at worst. In all this, education as the defining human project falls by the wayside. The conjunction, under the pressures of a globalizing world economy, of the digital divide and 'the risk society' further complicates the problem. [2] Vertically, societies remain sharply divided in terms of economic as well as information resources; yet they must break into a blind future without any more procrastination. In this situation, information technology continues to generate pathologically high degrees of expectation. It evokes fantasies of salvation at the hands of some techno-economic avatar, especially when there is a profusion of intractable problems all around. Of late, the old debate has been simmering again in higher education – between the proponents of its immediate public (read economic) usefulness and those who advocate the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake (the pursuit beyond, at least, the short and myopic flight of utilitarian reason). [3] The expected favourite target of the polemical assault (sometimes delivered in the polemics of silence) are the humanities which suffer widespread abandonment at the hands of not only students looking to get the best value for their money in a culture of economics but also the corporate funding agencies and the national economy managers. While the West seems, by and large, to be still capable of seriously debating the issue, there is very little attempt in the developing countries to take a balanced view. With little information and poor information management, soft states, and the 'underhand' of international finance capital and lending institutions, the swing for immediate usefulness usually translates – in practice – into private profit and political opportunism. [4] It is unfortunate that the academy the world over has generally remained silent against an essentially hollow discourse of a rather narrowly conceived usefulness. It has failed to deliver a counter-discourse for the sake of even a good public debate. Even the humanities, with their glorious legacy of rhetoric and philosophy, have not shown any inclination to adequately answer the assault. Usefulness is not anything despicable, but usefulness understood only in terms of modes of production, with absolute disregard for the modes of creativity, cannot be the only criterion, nor can it be always a valid criterion. Things not useful may also have their uses. Innovations, for instance, do not necessarily arise from projections of specific future utility. The idea of ‘creative irresponsibility’ – to use a phrase by Charles S. Maier, the Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies at Harvard – cannot be separated from the idea of higher education. [5] In the context of education then, there are broadly two ways of looking at information technology. One is to see it as a tool; the other is to see it as a paradigm. To do the latter is to commit a categorical error. But a categorical error committed rampantly and repeatedly may eventually take the shape of a categorical imperative. This is what seems to have happened. To become a tool of technology and/or a processor of information cannot, by any stretch of reason, be a human being's existential goal. Information, technology, and information technology – these must remain subservient to the greater project of human self-reconstruction and invention which education is essentially all about. In any case, neither information nor technology is anything altogether new insofar as education is concerned. Only the forms and formations are new, and of course the speed, and they too only relatively. Therefore when we contemplate the project of education with reference to information technology, we have to remember that education is more than professional and occupational training and that it cannot be adequately modelled after information technology. Footnotes1. Various state governments in India have introduced computers and information technology as a compulsory subject of study in schools. The central government also liberally funds such programmes of study in colleges, especially through the University Grants Commission. A large number of these programmes lack adequate infrastructure and are taught by part-time teachers. The most significant feature is that space for most of these half-baked programmes has been created by squeezing the curricular and financial share of other programmes, mainly those in the humanities. return 2. Anthony Giddens identifies the modern society as characterized by "the attempt to break away from the past and confront an open future", particularly in terms of risk defined as "the active assessment of future hazards". See Anthony Giddens and Christopher Pierson, Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Pp. 100-101. The term "risk society" comes from Ulrich Beck: Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage, 1992. return 3. For instance, Harvard Magazine published a symposium titled “Whither Harvard?” on the subject in the specific context of the future of Harvard in its issue of January-February 2001 (Vol. 103, No. 3). The Chronicle of Higher Education of February 13, 2004 (Vol. 50, Issue 23, Page B7) carried “A Manifesto for the Humanities in a Technological Age” by Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg. The latest issue of New Literary History (Vol. 36, No. 5, Winter 2005) is devoted to the “crisis” in the humanities precipitated by the technological challenge. return 4. Even as this article goes into press, the government of the state of Punjab (India) is getting ready to hand over to private management groups more than a thousand government schools which primarily meet the needs of the economically underprivileged children. The reason given is the state is short of 28000 teachers and cannot afford to employ them (Ironically, this goes along with the licenced mushrooming --in the last three or so years-- of teachers’ education colleges in the state). At the same time, unproductive expenditure (such as on the bureaucracy) scales new heights. return 5. "Whither Harvard?", op. cit. return | |