India’s higher education seems to be going through a substantial overhaul. Through the 5 years I pursued my PhD, from 2010 to 2015, the stipend increased three folds. Major institutions are opening up to attract foreign faculty and there are now scholarship programs paying on par with a job in a multinational company. However, in every field of education, there exists a huge chasm between the tier 1 institutes such as the IITs and IISc and the rest. The top ranked institutions which are often in constant academic exchange with foreign institutions make original contributions of high quality. As we move down the rankings, the decline in quality is alarming. There are academic networks where a thesis that merely passes a plagiarism test will earn you a PhD. The extra resources our government pumps into the tier 1 institutes may or may not trickle down to the rest of the country just as we are unsure of an economic trickle down. Clearly, the brilliant minds of the country are far larger than the limited positions in tier 1 institutions picked through their one-dimensional screening process. What then is preventing the best minds of our country affiliated with the ordinary institutions of India from motivating themselves and improving their standards when all the material resources are in place? Is there a common factor in our inherent teaching methods that make us not win a Nobel Prize? I believe there is at least one. Loyalty.

Remember the first time you learned Newton’s first law, when you were taught word by word that an object travelling with a constant velocity in a straight line continues to remain unless you intervene? You lost a point for missing each of those key words in an exam. Our teachers believed in phrasing it right because it is one among the laws of nature as they were taught. However, we learned later that this law is applicable within a classical framework and outside of this the law loses its generality and that space and time can curve we don’t even know if anything ever truly travels in a straight line. Ever. Yet we continue to call it a law. Similarly we have several scientific ‘discoveries’ until they stop remaining discoveries or get modified as we inquire closer. While the Indian mind beats itself in succumbing to this loyalty to the laws and discoveries, the rest of the world does not seem to take these words literally. Somehow, a high school student in Germany understands that any equation in a text book is simply a model that holds true only within the limits of our understanding at that point in time. That freshman in the US tests the theory of evolution in his backyard as if he did not believe it when his text books called it a discovery. But the graduate student in India is downright loyal. If something is a law or a discovery, how can we probe it? Law is supposed to be obeyed and a discovery is a truth. There is immense trust on the source of these. We believe our success and acceptance in the world depends on this loyalty. But we were only trying to understand, you may argue. Tell me, is education more about following an idea than improving it?

Can we escape this loyalty? How are we to commit a student to an idea first and encourage him/her to probe it subsequently? If loyalty is removed, would pseudo-science take its place? These are questions I ponder over. I had a revelation when I was in my sixth grade. It was by sheer luck that I encountered a book called The history of mathematics in my mother’s little math library. In this book I was intrigued by the history of the number theory. The development of the idea of a fraction to the conclusion that the number of fractional numbers is countable was presented with the names and periods of the contributing mathematicians. The book showed me how Cantor, a German mathematician, in 1880 showed that all of the fractions (rational numbers) could be counted using a simple sequence through the numbers, even though they are infinite. Fraction were first used by the Egyptians 4000 years ago. Every small formal addition to the idea of fractions since then were documented in this little book. Treading through these developments, they not only became understandable concepts to me but also appeared simply as a sequence of common sense improvements to a previous idea. I could see how a complex theory was indeed many small improvements that happened over decades and even centuries. My mathematics text book of that time simply dictated rational numbers, forcing me to be a slave to the idea. However I felt free knowing their history. Ever since this moment, I searched for the historical development of every idea that I came across. Of course there are geniuses among us who gave us more than just common sense, and they deserve all our respect. But they were born with a human brain. Recently I was in a classroom on non-equilibrium thermodynamics taught by a distinguished professor. To my pleasant surprise, after writing down every equation on the board, he would mark the year of the equation’s origin and make a passing comment about the scientist or the thought process. The course made me imagine those brilliant minds. Soon I felt I was walking among them, even having conversations and raised questions. Soon enough, I realized that the history of an idea is an immense source of encouragement that is often missing in our Indian classrooms. Perhaps, it is time to balance some of that loyalty with a bit of historical background.