The Education Problem: Raj Reddy (Part 4)

Raj explains his theory of the “local best”, as well as how he identifies these students for admission into his school’s masters program.

SM: You are also saying the book or lecture based education is not the way to go. RR: That is what I am saying. If this person is just putting the same kind of content as lectures, then he and I are miles apart.

SM: My conclusion is that a knowledge base can make a big difference in education, it can fill the hole that exists and become the standard for education. Take algebra for example. It is the same material – it’s not like we are re-inventing algebra. It should be taught the same way using a single “best practice” format. RR: Yes. A lot of the people in this country also provide content online, content on CD’s, and so on. There is a company that sells a lot of CD’s and makes money doing so called The Teaching Company. They have a large number of very nice lectures. They take the very best teachers from around the country, pay them some money, and record their lectures.

That is also a school in the box, but that is not what I am talking about. What I want to do is something where the people learn by doing, not by being lectured at. There are many experts in education so you will probably find a million different proposals. It just so happens that I have one and I am trying to make it happen, and it is happening fortunately, but it is not enough. I think the proposal I have is scalable in interesting ways, and if it happens it will have very interesting consequences.

SM: Your proposal is happening? Can you tell us a little bit more about specifically what you are doing and how you are funding it? RR: Yes, go look at the website www.gurukulam.in, and let me tell you a little bit of the historical background. I have been thinking about this issue for five or six years, maybe even longer, and I started various experiments; one of them was called a Masters Degree in IT that I started about five years ago.

I said, “Let’s ignore the fact that these kids didn’t get into the IIT’s, let’s just let anybody apply regardless of their undergraduate degree. If you pass the entrance test we will take them and give them an IT education in two years as a graduate degree”. We created the program and students took the entrance test. What happened, much to my surprise, was that only people from cities got in. The rest of the people from the villages could not even take the entrance test. They didn’t understand English. They couldn’t understand the questions and they couldn’t pass the exams. As a result, over the last four years we have been graduating students, but all I have done is sub-selected a group of people who are already well off.

My concern, five years ago and even now, is that 80% of the people in India live in villages, and out of this 80% the chances that they will go to a college is 1:20. On the other hand, if they are from a city the chance is 1:5. The bottom line is if you are born to uneducated parents in a village the chances that you will go to college is 1:200, and the chance that you would get into the IIT’s is 0. You will never get in. The question I asked was, does that mean that all of these people are stupid? Is all of the intelligence concentrated in the cities? Or should we be doing something different than what we have been doing?

To answer these questions I came up with this model of the local best versus the national best. Right now you take an SAT exam and what happens? You can see the rank order, the best people are at the top. There is no measure of their background, where did they come from. There is a concept in cognitive science called “time on task”. If you spent 100 hours learning mathematics and I spend 30 hours learning mathematics, even if we are equally good – have the same IQ – you will do better on the exam.

The net result is if you happen to be from the city from an educated, rich family, you can afford to spend 2 lacs going to tutorial colleges, and you will do much better taking the IIT entrance exams than me in a little village.

[To Be Continued]

[Part 3]

[Part 2]

[Part 1]

This segment is part 4 in the series : The Education Problem: Raj Reddy
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