Higher Education And Social Awareness

Higher Education And Social Awareness INTRODUCTION India’s higher education is the third largest one after the U.S.A. and China. For years India has made an impact in the world economy by providing intellectuals to the world. But that alone will not serve the purpose. The expectation from higher education is more than that. University Grants Commission proclaims the objectives of Indian higher education in its 12th five year plan â€Å" Higher education is about promoting excellence in more ways than one: at individual level, it is an instrument of upward mobility through cultivation of excellence; for national economy, excellence of work force is a pre-requisite of sustained growth; and for humankind, excellence is a must for extending the frontiers of knowledge and cultivation of values† Higher education should bring intelligence, workforce and Values. While analyzing the above objectives India has brought intelligence and workforce for the country but the question is whether the higher education system brings values or social concern among the students. Education should not stop with just acquiring the intelligence to earn more income and leading a sophisticated life. It should create social awareness and self-awareness. Today the social life is eroding in India. The educated persons are ignorant of not only the long accepted social values but also the modern values of secularism, socialism, democracy and professional ethics. A recent news paper reveals that a husband and wife, both who are in Indian Administration Service have amazed lot of wealth through corruption. This brings us the question that why these highly placed people engage in corruption. Also another recent report on newspaper shows that most of the criminals today are the educated people. Now we have to think that what is wrong in the education which they acquired. It is the lack of social concern in the education. In this regard it is important to analyse whether higher education is providing the right platform for social thinking. AUTONOMY IN HIGHER EDUCATION One of the radical changes in higher education is the introduction of autonomy. Autonomy and accountability goes hand in hand. This provides the college freedom to design their curriculum. Unfortunately most of the colleges use this status as a means for fund raising. Also while designing the curriculum they give prime importance to employability and least importance to ethical and social values. This will pave way for a self-centered attitude among the educated elite. Transparency of curriculum to the common man is crucial in making autonomy by bringing social values in it. The government should monitor the autonomous colleges through universities so that autonomy is not misused by the colleges. But the sad aspects of the universities are that their focus and objectives are far away from developing the higher education. CHOICE-BASED CREDIT SYSTEM Today most of the colleges are following the CBCS system in providing education. This system, which was imposed by the government, also provides only a minimum scope for imparting social values. The important feature of CBCS is that it concentrates more on skill based electives and non-major electives. Even the system adopted by the government is not providing a platform for socially relevant higher education in India. PRIVATISATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION Today the government allows the private parties to compete in higher education. The role of private parties in higher education is inevitable. But private education mostly concentrates on technical education rather than Arts and Science. Social values are not a part in the technical education. Also an extension activity was not a part in its curriculum. Again these private institutions compete each other to admit students. So they spent crores of rupees for advertisement and campus interview but they do not concentrate on the wholistic development of the students. Finally the students become intellectuals without social awareness. A strict control on private higher education institutions are the requisite for creating social ethics among the students. FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES Today the much debated topic on higher education is allowing the foreign universities to provide higher education in India. The argument kept by the current UPA II government is that it creates a healthy competition which in turn will increase efficiency and efficiency will bring quality in higher education. This argument is correct partly. But the main question unanswered is whether these institutions can provide a platform for our students to learn our traditional values and customs. The qualities of such universities are doubtful because only the third ranked foreign universities are coming to India and their motive is to make profit only. So they do not provide the socially relevant higher education. Again even if they provide the social values in education that will be the westernized values which does not suit our country. The social values will erode and finally a chaos will prevail in our country. Another danger of allowing foreign universities in India is that the Indian institutions, mostly private has to compete with foreign universities in admitting the students. So in order to encounter the competitions of these foreign universities, our universities also have to engage in concentrating on providing only employable skills and not the social values. So this move is also going to endanger the minimum social values provided in India today. So the government has to be cautious in bringing foreign universities to India. GOVERNMENT AND HIGHER EDUCATION The role of government is crucial in bringing higher education with social concern. The government of India in its action plan report of 12th plan has emphasised that higher education should be taken out from the non-profit zone and a nominal profit should be implemented. Thus the main stake holder of higher education is trying to bring higher education towards profit earning sector. So social values will take the second seat. The government considers higher education as a liability. There is also lack of co-ordination among the institution like HRD, UGC, AIT etc. which monitors the higher education in India. MARKET ECONOMY AND HIGHER EDUCATION Today all aspects are determined by the market economy. It has also touched the higher education. The market economy always imparts a pressure on the students from the school education. It wants people to acquire employable skills to work in the private concern. On the one hand the employment in organized sector is diminishing and on the other hand the job opportunities are only available in private concerns. So survival of the fittest is the order of the day and this makes the students to concentrate more on acquiring knowledge rather than participating in social agitation or discussions in social aspects. The education providers are also not providing the room for the students to discuss the social evils. The joy of learning is missing today. Thus the market economy provides the students with lop sided development. A capitalistic attitude is prevailing among the educated students. The market also fixes the wage for the teachers in private higher education institution. As the supply exceeds the demand, the market wage is low. So these teachers do not have the urge to provide a socially relevant education. They are not ready to discuss things which are outside the curriculum (i.e) social issues and the management also does not permit them. Only good salary and job security can motivate the teachers to discuss social issues. It is also disheartening to note that 80 percent of the graduates of Metropolitan cities prefer to work in foreign countries. This shows that our education was not able to inspire the young generation to a moral commitment of working in India for the well being of common man. CONCLUSION The above analysis highlights that the present higher education provides a lop-sided development. It provides only intelligence, but not the emotional intelligence and social concern. This is a dangerous sign as most of these students may be intelligent criminals. There is difference between education with social concern and education without social concern. A best example is the terrorists who demolished the twin buildings of U.S.A. He is very intelligent in hijacking a flight and entering into the territory of U.S.A. But he does not have the social concern and compassion to the persons in towers and their relatives. So there is an urgent need for a radical change in the higher education through which we have to include social concern, which will in turn will bring peaceful co-existence of the people of India. References Bhattacharya,J. (2012), ‘Higher Education in India: Issues, Concern and Remedies, University News, Vol.50, No.17. Government of India (2013) Twelfth Five Year Plan 2012-2017,New Delhi: Planning Commission. Jitendra Gandhi (2013), ‘Life Skill Education: An Urgent Need in Higher Education’, University News, December 09-15, Vol. 51., No. 49. Kumaran,D. Hemalatha Kalaimathi,D (2006), ‘Development and Validation of Social Skills Rating Scale’, Journal of Edutracks, 2006, Vol.5, No.8. Manish Lathe (2009), ‘Emotional Intelligence of Teacher Trainess’, Edutracks, May 2009, Vol.8, No.9.

Music and Racial Formation in Leroi Jones’ Essay

In many ways, music is inseparable from culture. In the context of those cultures that have been dominated and marginalized by others, music takes on a special significance. Leroi Jones’ Blues People fit into the framework of trying to understand the role that music plays in the cultural lives of people who belong to displaced communities. In his book, he identifies the ways in which genres in music culture develop, which may be linked to Omi and Winant’s (1994) conception of racial formation. As Omi and Winant (1994) observed in their seminal theory on racial formation, â€Å"We define racial formation as the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed† (p. 55). The authors debunk the accepted notions that race is either biological or an illusion, suggesting instead that it is a distinctly sociological phenomenon. Race is also identified as based on a power hierarchy, definable in terms of â€Å"the pattern of conflict and accommodation which takes place over time between racially based social movements and the policies and programs of the state† (p.78). This model of racial formation may be applied to Jones’ text, particularly in terms of their assertion that â€Å"racial formation is a process of historically situated projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized† (pp. 55-56). In Blues People, the author examines how the process of being enslaved affects the people of Africa, situating the racial conflict in terms of geographical as well as historical contexts. Jones’ thesis rests on the concept of difference. He outlines the manner in which the slavery of Africans in America was different from other kinds of slavery. An important point that Jones raises is that slavery was prevalent in Africa as well, long before the whites arrived. He likens the process to the way in which the Greeks treated their slaves, showing us that in every other system of slavery, the enslaved people were allowed to retain their sense of cultural identity, but not so in the case of African slaves on the American plantations: Melville Herskovits points out, â€Å"Slavery [had] long existed in the entire region [of West Africa], and in at least one of its kingdoms, Dahomey, a kind of plantation system was found under which an absentee ownership, with the ruler as principal, demanded the utmost return from the estates, and thus created conditions of labor resembling the regime the slaves were to encounter in the New World. † But to be brought to a country, a culture, a society, that was, and is, in terms of purely philosophical correlatives, the complete antithesis of one’s own version of man’s life on earth — that is the cruelest aspect of this particular enslavement. (p. 1) As Jones points out, it was extremely difficult for Africans, who later became â€Å"African-Americans,† to retain a sense of cultural identity in a foreign culture that refused to give any validity to something it did not understand. According to Omi and Winant, racial formation may also be linked to the â€Å"the evolution of hegemony, the way in which society is organized and ruled† (p. 56). In such a hegemonic society driven by concepts of hierarchy and social superiority, the identity of a marginalized class may become problematic. Jones opines that music such as jazz and blues was in some ways the only medium through which Africans could try and retain a sense of who they were. In this context, the integration of music into their existence as slaves allowed Africans to retain a sense of the past, and also come to terms with the effect that the process of being enslaved had had on their psyches. Cultural domination was an insidious process of identity-negation, and music culture was one of the prominent ways through which the enslaved people could enable themselves to survive within a hostile foreign culture. In Blues People, an interesting aspect of performance is brought in when the author shows us a ‘typical’ American reaction to the African native in the form of an excerpt from the actress Frances Anne Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation: The only exception that I have met with yet among our boat voices to the high tenor which they seem all to possess is in the person of an individual named Isaac, a basso profundo of the deepest dye, who nevertheless never attempts to produce with his different register any different effects in the chorus by venturing a second, but sings like the rest in unison, perfect unison, of both time and tune. By-the-by, this individual does speak, and therefore I presume he is not an ape, orangoutang, chimpanzee, or gorilla; but I could not, I confess, have conceived it possible that the presence of articulate sounds, and the absense of an articulate tail, should make, externally at least, so completely the only appreciable difference between a man and a monkey, as they appear to do in this individual ‘black brother. ’ (pp. 2-3). The actress’ biased and judgmental perception of the natives places them in such a position as not to be considered human at all. Interestingly, she examines their tones of voices as indicative of the degree to which they are ‘human,’ or not; they all have voices of a high tenor. She says this is the manner that one might say that all dogs bark, or all lions roar. Language is almost completely redundant in this context. Unable to understand the languages of Africa, Kemble contents herself with ruminating on the tones in which the foreigners speak. The ‘exception’ to the other slaves is determined by Kemble on the basis of the fact that he has a bass voice, while the others use higher tones of voice. Even in this exception she says that it is only the absence of a tail that reluctantly, albeit wonderingly, forces her to accept that he is a human being and not an animal. Even under this extreme racial perspective, it is the musical tones of voice that the actress and performer relies upon to make her judgments.

Technology And Its Effects On Human Anxiety - 1778 Words

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Wiebe Bijker introduced the idea that â€Å"A machine is a Socio-Technical Ensemble† (Bijker,1993) which when broken do wn is a way of saying that all technology consists of social dynamics and practicable technology. An iPhone is a prime example of a socio-technical ensemble. The technical aspect of the iPhone lays within the engineers, how they designed it to be piece of technology which allows people to communicate, perform functions, and be a platform for applications. The social dynamics of the iPhone is created by people communicating using a device and utilizing the apps it offers. The engineers of the iPhone can be seenShow MoreRelatedArgumentative Essay On Social Anxiety1429 Words   |  6 Pagesinterested in why so many people suffer from Social Anxiety. It is significant because social anxiety is a huge problem in today’s society that is often overlooked. 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Blaxploitation As Stereotypical Film, Blaxploitation, A...

Blaxploitation as Stereotypical Film Blaxploitation, a sub-genre of Exploitation, becomes fairly popular with Hollywood Cinema during the 1960’s and 1970’s. These films initially targeted urbanized youth and began to appeal to African Americans as well as White audiences. However, various groups, such as the Coalition Against Blaxploitation, formed to stop production on films of this genre as it typically portrayed Blacks in a negative way. Generally, there are two different interpretations of Blaxploitation films. One being that these films empower blacks and the more accepted idea that these films further stereotype blacks with the inclusion of pimps, sex, drugs, crime and more. Due to the huge protests against the films, the movement died in the late 1970’s(Negative Effects of the Blaxploitation Movement.); however, Boyz N’ the Hood, produced by John Singleton in 1991, represents a resurgence of Blaxploitation, referred to as â€Å"neo-blaxploitation† which reflects the stereotypic al interpretation of a blaxploitation film. (Fancher) Boyz N’ The Hood is the urgent, profane, yet somehow sweetly sentimental story of three friends -- Tre, Ricky and Doughboy -- and their tragic passage into manhood(Swanson). Characteristics of a blaxploitation film when set in the Northeast or West Coast, typically take place in Ghettos and feature plotlines which entail crime, hit men, drug dealers, and pimps. These Norman 2 films revolve around an atmosphere of crime and drug-dealing. Ethnic