The Crisis Within Education: An Excerpt of G.N. Devy's Lecture Which IIT-B Cancelled
04 February 2024 | The Wire
Last week, the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, cancelled a lecture by celebrated scholar G.N. Devy. Reports said that the committee to regulate such lectures decided to call it off on the eve of its delivery on January 31.
The following is an excerpt from it.
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The present century is often described as the ‘knowledge century’. We cannot be sure if this tag will stay valid until the end of the century or whether future historians will characterise this period as the ‘Age of Knowledge’ as has been the case with the Dark Ages or the Age of Reason in the past.
Perhaps the description sums up the euphoria resulting from the information explosion and the technologies surrounding the exponential growth in the information generated every passing second. It is possible that this epithet may not be sufficiently adequate for characterizing our time. The century has also been forecast to be the era of water wars, an age of deathless humans, an epoch of ecological termination, and the moment for an irreversible merger of the physical and the digital.
The ‘knowledge century’ label is open to discussion and is not incontestable. Indeed, self-perceptions of human civilizations can change quite radically over a relatively short temporal span. But if at all, the present century can be viewed as a unique era in human history, marking a new kind of engagement with what is considered ‘knowledge’, it would be interesting to reflect on where India stands in relation to this new turn in history….