Fluff Heads Versus Nerds? – The Annual Debate

 

Fluff Heads Versus Nerds? – The Annual Debate

As college girls in the late 1970s, we were wont to think we had it all figured out at eighteen. 

So pardon the broad brushing: humanities had the better-looking boys, the better conversationalists and the more interesting lives. STEM had the ones who would eventually make the money. What they actually did, or how they did it, we saw little sign of. But yes, if they managed to “escape” to the US…

By our third year, our taxonomy had become a little more nuanced.

As a former student of the humanities, I can say there was a prescribed canon, a prescribed reading list and, very often, a prescribed interpretation. What mattered was knowing the answer; much less often were students asked to question the premise.

Deep, nuanced discussion was surprisingly rare. 

Books remained on syllabi for decades. There seemed to be an instinctive fear of introducing something new: another school of thought, a contemporary text, an uncomfortable argument. 

A professor could regard too many questions as insubordination, or worse, an opinion as impertinence.

In my time, professors were also known to advise students not to be too “high-falutin”, lest it irritate the examiner. To clear the exam was what mattered.

Even today, education in India remains, by and large, remarkably bookish - whether in humanities, liberal arts or STEM.

At graduate level, how often are students asked to take what they have learnt and actually do something with it? To formulate a problem, investigate it, argue a position, test an idea and defend the outcome.

And this criticism extends well beyond the humanities.

Take STEM. Take engineering. Architecture is a field I have been associated with professionally for decades, and I have often wondered: where is the culture of audacious, original design in post-Independence India? Even methods of civil engineering remain remarkably archaic, with occasional and notable exceptions.

It would be unfair to suggest there have been none. 

Shakuntala Bhagat developed a patented modular bridge system; Mahendra Raj helped push the boundaries between structural engineering and architecture; Mahesh Tandon made significant contributions to bridge and structural engineering.

But these examples are precisely the point. They are memorable because they are exceptions.

Look at our built environment after 1947. How many buildings, bridges or pieces of civil infrastructure would you genuinely describe as architectural or engineering marvels, rather than merely large, bulky or technically competent?

The PWD, MES and DDA still produce what I would call Soviet-style architecture: institutional, standardised and heavily engineered, with too little premium placed on architectural imagination.

Design confidence has too often been compensated for by engineering overkill with more steel, more concrete, more structure.

And then there is the copy-and-paste syndrome, which some will argue also requires a degree of talent. Drive around any Indian city and you could be forgiven for thinking builders send their architects overseas to copy whatever they have seen within a twenty-mile radius of a foreign airport. From the looks of it, civil engineers don't take that trip.

Little consideration is given to local weather, local materials, local context, or the way Indians actually live. We borrow the vocabulary but rarely the thinking behind it.

The same tendency is visible in infrastructure.

I admire the Delhi Metro enormously. Not just for what it has built, but for its work ethic, systems, standard operating procedures and ability to execute at scale.

But look at the stations. Because so much of our metro infrastructure is elevated rather than underground, we have an extraordinary opportunity to make these structures part of the city rather than simply put a viaduct through it.

How many stations have really asked: "What could this become?" 

And that, to me, is the larger educational problem.

We are exceptionally good at learning a system; we are getting better at executing a system but we are still learning to question the system. And even more slow, to invent one.

If I want to be fair, yes, STEM deserves a half-step ahead of the humanities. Its very nature demands a degree of application, problem-solving and experimentation. But even there, innovation and original thinking remain too often the exception rather than the institutional expectation.

So I would not single out the humanities. The deeper problem is educational.

Whether it is a humanities student interpreting a text, an engineer designing a bridge or an architect designing a building, we need to move from: “Tell me what the book says.”

to:

“Show me what you can do with what the book taught you.”

And ultimately to the much harder question: “What can you imagine that isn’t in the book?”

By Year Three, our rather simplistic college-girl taxonomy had also begun to break down. History, Political Science and Psychology, interesting as they were, did not necessarily prepare you for what came after university, unless you were individually bright, curious and sufficiently motivated to go beyond the syllabus.

And then there was the wild card in the pack: Commerce.

The Commerce student wasn’t necessarily better prepared academically, but seemed, rather inconveniently, better prepared for the world outside the campus gates. Commerce appeared to have a destination attached to the degree.

You studied accounts or finance and there were recognisable next steps: CA, banking, finance, business, professional qualifications. The connection between what you were studying and the world you were about to enter was much more obvious.

For many humanities students, the route could be more education followed by more education. For much of STEM too, particularly in the traditional university system, the degree could lead to another degree, another specialisation or another qualification before the student finally entered the workplace.

Commerce seemed to ask a more practical question rather earlier: “What are you going to do with this?”

My husband was a Commerce student, but he had a decidedly scientific bent of mind. He had been inclined towards mechanical engineering, but was realistic enough to recognise that the dedication the course demanded was not his cup of tea.

So, besides his day job of importing aluminium, he could construct drones and remote-controlled cars, fix almost anything at home - from a wood plainer to an electric sawing machine in my workshop - and, long before his generation had much idea what a computer actually did, seemed to know instinctively how it worked.

He planned the electrical circuit system of our home with the electrical team and for a few of our friends. The one that made him chuckle was the circuit he designed for a friend who had graduated from IIT.

When our son was ten, he gave him an old office computer and a Lego Robotics set. The boy was hooked.

Years later, when it came time to choose a university, he had no interest in appearing for the IITs. It would mean giving up sport, music and hiking for a year or two of relentless preparation, with no guarantee of admission.

Instead, he looked at a cousin’s Computer Science sandwich-course syllabus in the UK and decided that was what he wanted to pursue.

Not for one day did we regret working the long hours to pay his tuition fees. 

He was the only student in his class to have a job during his sandwich year and it was also waiting for him when he graduated. Twenty years later, he is back in India with a successful company.

Perhaps that, too, was a lesson in choosing an education for what it enables you to do, rather than simply for the label attached to the degree.

And perhaps that is the lesson we are slowly stumbling upon. Education isn’t only about what you know. It is also about what you can do with what you know once the university gates close behind you.

Whenever an Indian achieves something extraordinary, my instinct is not simply to celebrate the achievement. It is to wonder what might have been possible if the ecosystem around that individual had helped rather than hindered them.

Because Indians who succeed often do so while negotiating the education system, bureaucracy, infrastructure and institutional limitations around them.

We clearly have the talent. 

We produce people who learn to navigate obstacles, improvise when systems fail, persist when institutions obstruct and find a way when there appears to be no way.

There is an extraordinary resilience in the Indian individual. But resilience should not become our excuse for bad systems.

And before we decide whether one kind of student is cleverer than another, perhaps we should look at the people teaching them: the teachers, professors, mentors and guides.

What do they reward - curiosity or compliance? 

Do they welcome questions, or merely the right answers? Because students learn from more than a syllabus. They learn from the adults in the room.

So perhaps the real question is not whether humanities, STEM or Commerce produces the cleverer student. It is whether we are teaching young people merely to know the answer, to apply it, to question it and ultimately to imagine something that wasn't there before.

That is where education stops being about passing the exam. And starts becoming innovation.