ABSTRACT
The existing diagnoses of the crisis in the humanistic institution of the university in India share a puzzling feature: they do not talk about the core concepts of education at all. Instead, they are about institutional faults, bureaucratic apathy, lack of funding and infrastructure, the dullness of the Indian student or the divided nature of the social fabric and issues of social justice – factors that are external to education. This is in marked contrast to the Western scholarship on the university where the crisis is discussed in terms of the idea of liberal education, the importance of cultural inheritance and the centrality of humanities to the formation of the student. What explains this conspicuous difference? Rather than seek answers in external factors and fault-finding narratives, I argue that we must look into the very conception of education (and the cluster of concepts associated with it) that we have taken as self-evident. Probing into the deep intellectual-cultural roots of liberal education and the category habit/lines of thinking that have come to govern this model, I explore its effects and limits when transplanted into the Indian context. Further, I show that Gandhi and Tagore locate the crisis in the cultural difference between Europe and India and grasp the disjunctive role played by the European model in the Indian context. They provide us with the diagnosis that the contemporary scholars entirely miss: the crisis in education is a crisis in education and learning.
