Gee, that's so 2017!

Ten (2+0+1+7 = 10, for those cynics who would like a reason for everything) stories about storytellers,increasingly also storymakers.

1. Full credit to The Washington Post and the BBC for taking the lead in early 2017 to initiate stringent fact-check divisions. Facebook, well, tried. And yet, here we go again with fake news (oh, that's SO 2016!) ....

https://www.fastcompany.com/40510552/2017-was-so-fake

2. I think this is an example of why news media's credibility-nosedive continued this year. Worse, let me put it in verse:

When all you do is boo,
the erstwhile-swayed will come back to.

http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/12/28/pew-study-media-coverage-trump-3-times-more-negative-obama

3. Ego is bad. Drop the "I", they say. And sure enough: Padmavati--SC rejects ban plea but govt sets up super-censor ... which then drops the ego-word. Yay.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/bollywood/news/padmavati-becomes-padmavat-leaves-twitterati-in-splits/articleshow/62314196.cms

4. If it weren't so sad, this would be the perfect whodunit for the murder of journalism from the best watchdog of the ruling party.

https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/republic-tv-journalist-resigns-after-being-branded-as-shashi-tharoors-spy-allege/303007


5. #Metoo. The slogan of the year (although technically the claim-term was coined years ago) was also the best metaphor you could have for all that social media stands for.

6. Oh for words that are real but in fact represent fiction! There are tons of them (like calling Pak army's breaking of ceasefire as "terror attack by Pak") .. but this takes the cake, giving the term "mass media" a whole new meaning--standing for en masse blind support:

http://thehoot.org/media-watch/media-practice/demonetization-version-20-the-frozen-accounts-fiction-10290

7. I find it easy to cringe at TV news, but the television coverage of Gurmeet Singh's Dera raid on August 26 was reassuringly courageous and true.

8. Media doesn't always spin. Oh no. It omits too. Most omissions are best justified by editorial discretion in the noble act of gatekeeping. Such convenient discretion defined the relative absence of Not In My Name campaign, much less the months-long farmer agitation in Delhi, and of course most of what the Opposition said outside of the studio interrogations.

9. Who can fault today's governments around the world for jingoism and fear-mongering? We the media take the cake. Sample the post-defeat headline on India Today TV for its thumping "Villains of the Oval"!

10. And in the end, just to not be unfair, one story that makes you feel for the media. Shhhhh--no story, no opposition. Simple!

http://www.news18.com/news/politics/vasundhara-raje-government-shields-judges-babus-with-controversial-ordinance-gags-media-1552385.html

Let us acknowledge inherent media bias

How media can channel bias and still uphold values

Gurmeet Singh Ram Rahim was so popular that one of the top news channels invited him to a paid annual conclave, interviewed him, and even asked him to sing. The arrest of the baba on account of rape charges is hardly an endorsement of rationality. The exposure of this cult, with its mammoth following among all classes of people, merely endorses what we believe in, and what we accept as knowledge. Once he was convicted, media channels went out of their way to berate him and condemn babas in general.

The conviction of Gurmeet Singh aka Baba Ram Rahim of the MSG cult is a victory of rationality and reason. The self-styled baba reportedly had anywhere between two and seven crore followers, depending on which side of political spin you listen to. Yet this so-called affliction they speak of is too widespread to be dismissed as mere madness, as most of our media now claim. Con artists don’t survive without gullibility and trust, self-serving spin and selective silence. They are a metaphor for our social structures.

An unresolved dichotomy between established structures defining our values and democratic right to form our own is the happy hunting ground for our media systems. So irrationality has become a wonderful tool for the media to exploit. This is coupled with a legal framework that technically allows the media to define values, regulate itself, and sell any product. This mix includes the freedom to cherry-pick the stories to tell, a process called gatekeeping. Add to that the concept of "social media management," and you have a potent recipe for mass galvanization of seemingly irrational concepts. There is a lot of emotion being spilled on user-generated platforms, often manipulated by communication managers to provoke more display of emotional and irrational opinion.

When psychology seized the imagination of the public, we realized we are human, after all. As this side of thinking postulated, we should acknowledge that as human beings, we are irrational by nature. And it is this side of us that political leaders, babas and social media managers are exploiting. With newfound amplifications of public voices and reverberations of our own, this exploitation is at never-before proportions, and is set to peak before it declines.

Now for how the media is legitimizing those values. Development communication emerged in the so-called third world as a somewhat necessary alternative to make the fourth estate help a nation in catching up with its western counterparts. In India, funded by the government, radio and television were envisaged to play this role, tying it to an invisible government string. A big ideological dilemma loomed before both the government and the media in 1982, when television went colour and added commercials as an additional revenue source. It was a “mixed model”, loosely combining developmental and commercial goals. By 1991 when media economy was (one of the first industries to be) liberalized, programming also reflected the emerging consumerist society. A study that compared the pre-liberalization Hum Log with the post-liberalization Swabhimaan found a stark contrast in the reflected social values. News channels on television, however, have floundered or basked (depending on which side of the debate you’re on) in the absence of any visible structures governing them.

Let me provide a wider perspective to these structures. In 1947, the so-called Hutchins Commission, assigned by the U.S. media to research and recommend media’s functions in society, recognized social responsibility as its primary and overarching function. The Fairness Doctrine was introduced in the same year, placing equitable content regulation on television coverage to ensure the “free marketplace of ideas.” Pro-government scholars somewhat uncritically observed how the social responsibility function legitimized the institutionalization of the media in a political and social structure. On the other hand, the skeptics lamented that public opinion lost out to organized media, and that the media turned opinion makers of an undesirable kind.

Yet today, we find ourselves at the cusp of the re-emergence of development communication in a very different format. The strings defining the values are development are not constitutional, but ensconced in political power corridors. There is every opportunity for dissent and debate, but our news media has increasingly caricatured that value, creating a format of debate but snuffing out its essence by letting the agendas be dictated by extra-democratic values. For example, a popular business channel claims that its goal is “not only about news, but about a rising India”. To develop this agenda, channels is often seen to create a semblance of debate but maintain a pro-government stance, perhaps in an attempt to create investment in the economy.

The problem is to somehow create public awareness that truth is as much a factor of facts as that of media production and the values of its mouthpieces. This bias is sometimes blatant and audiences must learn to pick them up. Recently, a popular actor said that our Prime Minister is a better actor than him. Given the entertainment potential of that story, a channel picked it up for its prime time debate. In it, the anchor repeatedly cut off the opposition’s spokesperson while she sat silent through the ruling party spokesperson’s argument, even though there were factual errors on both arguments. Recently, the Congress Party lamented the media silence over its campaigns while providing undue coverage to the ruling party, thereby creating an unfair advantage.

The Congress argument is fallacious. The media is heading for a split right under our noses, dividing itself up on political affiliations. There are channels that seem blindly pro-government, and those who are less blind. Objectivity is no longer seen as lack of bias, in an acknowledgment of what an observer calls ‘inherent bias’. So channels whose owners have no political intent behind those biases have invested in balance—hiring anchors and reporters with inherent biases on multiple sides of the divide, in a hope that biases will cancel themselves out. This must be lauded as a great innovation. In the U.S., a somewhat hegemonized inherent media bias is on the liberal side since most liberal values purport to uphold democratic values. They are now challenged by the emergence of conservative channels such as Fox, in turn pitted against the ultra-left MSNBC. In India, we’re fast gravitating towards a politically divided media that chooses its stories selectively, has no hesitation in taking sides, and supporting causes. It would be far more desirable to have a set of channels, each of whose programmes reflect inherent biases. The problem, though, lies in educating the audience about bias-based value systems.

Stuck in a limbo is a third kind of news channels, the dogged category that is fighting to keep a balance, either in a naive belief that objectivity does exist, or in the pretence to show lack of bias as the right value, or making a pusillanimous attempt to appease social media trolls and to avoid government arm-twisting. Acknowledging inherent bias not only removes the burden of the fallacious value of objectivity, it also tells the audience more realistically why all facts are, in fact, constructed through storytelling and gatekeeping mechanisms.

Who's the Me Generation now?

Who's the Me Generation now?

A lesson for me from the millennials on living alone in a crowd

In the United States, the baby boomers, born in the early 1950s, are considered the Me Generation. You can see the influence of this thinking in (especially conservative) sitcoms and other fiction: The parent as a selfish, irresponsible, and sometimes directionless character in pursuit of self-realization, and the teenage son or daughter as hard-working and tolerant. Indian fiction's human representations, for the most part simply a result of accepted age-appropriateness in Indian traditions, are almost exactly reverse: The youngsters have invariably been portrayed as the freedom-loving, often fighting generation.

But there is no denying the psyche of the millennial generation. They are born in the late 1980s and are growing up to the joy and burden of being public individuals--the joy of speaking their minds and the burden of being responsible communicators. Of course, what we see more conspicuously around us is a generation exploited and hijacked on social media by political and business interests. But devoid of the temporary influences of those vested-interest strings and ideologies, there is a self-inflicted and self-conferred sense of responsibility among the millennials. Within new structures, there is newfound agency, new ways to express. The phenomenon of what Chetan Bhagat calls "virtue signallers" (although he seems to view them with some skepticism) is impossible to miss: Whether it is conveying the right messages about equal human rights or about sharing secular views, they are teaching themselves civic responsibility.

And yes, I talk about the generation as a group--not individuals. As generation expert Graeme Codrington pointed out to a group of us once, this one is not rebellious. It's one that reconciles, but one that's opinionated. Sure, it's short on attention span, and that's not their fault. In his insightful book The Marketplace of Attention, James Webster describes the institutional mandates that make it so. The most important is also the most unsurprising--the role of social networks and the virtual welter of opinion- and preference-seeking communication. No previous generation has enjoyed being at the centre of so much direct marketing attention and what I believe is a semblance of liberty to choose, and the evolution of taking responsibility is inevitable.

I mean 'semblance' to imply an outward appearance. Evolution has interesting ways, and an example is how the emergence of personalized marketing has balanced with better personal networks. This new emphasis in the new generation doesn't create just linkages. As marketers know, this also creates social influence.

However, the hallmark of this generation is that it lives in 'communication silos'. As the bots claim to know who we are, we only receive communication surrounding that claim of personal interests and prejudices. Eli Pariser calls this the 'you loop' (but perhaps it would be more appropriate to call it the 'me loop'!). When you click on a link, the bots triangulate who we are and bombard us with messages around that subject. Diverse interests seem to confuse bots because of what I suspect is their propensity to triangulate rather than expand.

The baby boomer generation's rebellious ways seem to be passe because the new generation does not worry about access or rights. It claims to have both, and the slightest attempts by the powers that be to curtail those rights will be met with deadly anger. The 'me loop' is therefore a trap, an external, but not genuine, certifier of who we are. Personalization of information has led to new forms of solipsism: Solipsism that stems from the bombardment of echoes, and new forms because the millennials alone have mastered the art, science and commerce of living alone in a crowd. But this self-centredness is beautifully coupled with responsibility. Perhaps at long last, the youth has found a voice of its own, and can spare the mindspace to comment on larger social issues.

Writer’s block, Walter Benjamin, and the problem of plenty

Writer’s block, Walter Benjamin, and the problem of plenty

There are several reasons I’ve grown from a frenetic writer to an occasional one. And as always, let’s blame it on the usual suspect. Among the most significant reasons for my sporadicity is that social media has given me a writer’s block.

As the 1930s German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote, the proliferation of art destroyed the aura around the artist. The introduction of mechanical reproduction in the 19^th century meant that it could be copied and distributed without the authenticity of the original. With the proliferation of social media, there is no aura in writing anymore.

Ideas were never a writer’s domain alone. But putting them into words was somehow a privileged talent, so from Chaucer to Chetan Bhagat, people have heard the voice of the writer, not the voice of the people with ideas. When social media arrived, few expected it would be a platform for writing. It did evolve a new style of writing—pithy, pointed, direct—that was commensurate with the shifting marketplace of attention. Today, everybody on social media seems to have terrific expression skills.

With the rise of storytelling and of professional storytellers that you can hire if you have ideas, the proliferation seems complete. It all started with writing for brands, and that’s a form of writing that flourishes to great business advantage. But the new trend is to share philosophical thoughts, social observations, professional dos-and-don’ts as well. In other words, writing on social media finally seems to be settling down.

And in that environment of having lived more than a decade in the Facebook-LinkedIn-Twitter era, it’s a good time to take stock of what this new form of writing brings to the table: What is the biggest difference between traditional writing and new forms of writing? Has this new democratic form of expression evolved a different consciousness? Does the new style reflect honesty and individuality, or does it echo inevitability and perfunctoriness?

Perhaps the biggest difference is that it’s largely shorn of pomp and superiority. Writers have traditionally been the bearers of information, insight, new thought and above all, new meaning to life’s various domains. They wielded authority and influence in what was largely one-way communication. The reverential attitude of readers towards traditional writers may persist, but the writing is no longer lapped up without analysis or independent commentary. The comments, typically underneath an article, are read with as much gusto as the article itself.

Security of the control over privacy walls also means more honesty. Today’s writing is personal and modest in scope, often an opinion that seeks approval in smaller, more intimate, friends’ circles within the social media. Echo chambers always existed, but social media platforms have increasingly put up opaque privacy walls, enabling us to express without the constraint of public view.

Manipulating the perception of popularity is much like old times, except that its management is both easy and well-supported by the very platforms that also democratize communication. Because these ‘walls’ can be broken at will, they also enable us to segment audiences for our writing with much more precision—and influence.

But what about the content? Social media observers will tell you that only one among hundreds of articles on social media catches genuine public fancy. Yet this ratio is very encouraging if you like the democracy of writing. In all fairness, I am routinely amazed at the number of people with ideas and insights—and these are people across domains, ages, and the proverbial professional ladder. You needed specialists to write about science, engineering, medicine, and so on, because those trained in any of those domains are not trained in writing, and vice versa. Not anymore, it seems. Simple, honest expression transcends formal training, and of course, the plethora of material available on the social media is great training material in itself.

It is this plethora that is responsible for my writer’s block. Amidst this welter of insight, all of which seems well-consumed, how do I wedge out my niche thought? What if my idea gets torn apart—what would that do to my self-esteem as a writer? Benjamin would give us the Mona Lisa smile—my reading of him has always been that he played with ambiguity to overcome Fascist threats. In hushed undertones, he would say, this is all a good thing. It’s just history repeating itself. What happened to art with mechanical reproduction is happening to writing with social media’s digital reproduction. If, as Benjamin argued, the loss of aura at the hands of reproduction makes the original work of art lose its authenticity, we may propose that in the age of digital reproduction, it is enhanced.  

Reproduceability on social media has been well harnessed—and it seems that’s a good thing. Along with ‘likes’ and emojis, what makes your favourite platforms rub their hands in glee is  reproduction through retweets, shares, or anything else they call it. Sharing—which can be seen as akin to printing more copies—is not always the norm, though. Many users of LinkedIn copy with impunity—and many of these are HR managers who are in charge of personnel behaviour. More often than not, attribution remains dubious and the promoters of the platforms seem to have no real problem with unattributed copying, since it’s all free. It seems intellectual output becomes property only when there is a monetary transaction to it. That said, those who copy are clearly not as worried about getting a message across as they are about promoting their visibility, and that, to me, is a telling difference.

As you can tell from the tone I’m using, a traditional writer like me frowns at such newfangled but seemingly well-accepted behaviour as copying. Since it is all free and non-transactional, does it also make it ethical? Has copying without attribution become a disruptive new trend? Will it sound the death of intellectual property in writing? Good old time will tell. Democratization is great, but I now need to wrap my head around yet another new normal in proliferation and reproduceability.

Assessment is feedback on learning

Interesting interview with Shreyanka Basu, blogger and researcher

When each evaluation is not a race for grades but an assessment of the student's progress towards making the imperfect world as perfect as they can...

Sep 14, 2015

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Shashidhar Nanjundaiah

Teaches ‘Communication Skills’ in the classroom & anywhere he finds an idea about to germinate. Corridors and staircases are his favourite playgrounds for a really meaningful discussion.

Hello and thank you for joining us today. How does your story begin?

As a television and (later) print media person in the 1990s, I (like many others at that time) witnessed a yawning gap in trained talent in the media industries. As someone who had freshly returned from the US after a highly educational MS in Communication, my eyes had been opened to the other gap--between the educational system in India and that in the US.

So when I had the opportunity to be the Director at Symbiosis Institute of Media & Communication, I jumped at it. This was early 2000s and the fact that I was both from the media industry itself and came from a fresh perspective on pedagogy was well received both by students and industry. And so what started as a passion turned out to be a sort of a discovery of my bearings for me.

So who is a teacher according to you?

Good question. The definition and the function of a teacher has changed over time and I will limit myself to higher education. With the advent of the interactive media and the legendary "information overload", a teacher is one who can inspire a student to learn.

No teacher can ever inform a student enough. But s/he can illuminate the path of learning by helping to cultivate inquisitiveness and passion. 'Learn-ability' is a big problem in higher education. By encouraging the rote and "learning-by-following" method, our education system actually discourages 'learn-ability'.

What inspires you as a person?

The thrills of watching a student develop the right attitudes, skills and strengths to transit the learnability-worldview-employability scale. I mean, that's a no-brainer, I guess: success (in whatever way we define it) always inspires.

And how do you leverage these inspiration cues and bring them to your class - to address the issue of poor learn-ability?

At the heart of problem of learnability lies the academic approach or the pedagogy. I’ve recently written about why, even in an interdisciplinary world, each curricular domain is unique enough to demand different structures and delivery methods. By bringing in experiential learning alone or concepts alone or by bringing both of them in disjointed silos does not help the cause. 

It is critical to integrate concepts, practice and "live" execution. That takes a student beyond learnability, and teaches him/her how to implement concepts. That’s the way forward if we, as teachers, must expect to see a real change in the professions we so love to criticize.

The triangulation you talk about - one typically sees that as an approach in scientific experiments. So what I am hearing is with any of the 3 legs missing - the piece is not complete concepts- practice- live execution?

I am not sure it happens in scientific experiments. Not in all contexts. The part that I find missing most of the times (except in medical education) is the live execution. Integrating concepts into practice can only happen if the implementer learns to fill the learning gaps between classroom learning and live situations. Those gaps--for example, using intelligent ways to get a police officer to grant you an interview for a story--can only be filled in live situations.

And how do the teachers prepare themselves to respond to what you are talking about- because at one level this would imply less teaching as we know it?

Therein lies the biggest problem--the problem of scalability. Unless we evolve what I'm talking about as a model for teachers, they often do not seem to see the point. And while there may be less teaching in the traditional sense, but there is more guiding. That said, I believe that all teachers do try. Many of the younger ones are excited by the new methods. In my experience, even the older ones are highly appreciative of this model. But it can get a little too disruptive (inconvenient even) for some teachers. 

These days one hears about alternative approaches like inquiry led education - what is your take?

At the higher education levels, inquiry-led education is what we need to gravitate toward. I just don't feel we were ready for it as of now except in a rare exception of an elite institute where the best-schooled students enroll. But indeed, inquiry should be at the heart of higher education. 

So are there any alternate models that can serve us in this context

Each student must develop projects and research-based inferences, thereby leading to unique curricula and unique profiles for the industry. Inquiry-driven education is the level to aspire for at the highest levels of education, but the seed must be sown in the initial stages. That is the biggest difference in the education systems in the US and India.

In the former, research is a part of even school curricula, and again in college, and so on. In India, research suddenly descends on the student at a postgraduate level—if even at that level.  The model  whereby a student builds his/her own unique curriculum should be introduced at the postgraduate level, and could be based on initial (say, in the first two semesters at the postgraduate level) understanding of various subjects within the broad domain. The student then chooses a set of courses that, in combination, becomes unique. 

For example, if a student wishes to become an ad or corporate filmmaker, he/she must have expertise in a set of subjects that cuts laterally across domains—from public relations and strategic communication to basics of finance to actual film making. So learning happens independently, but is founded on the learning systems that we have created for the purpose.  The college is therefore a career laboratory.

Of course, this is no way an invention: It is the norm in western systems, but we need to have the vision and the will to introduce it. At the moment, it seems we are grappling with teacher protests because a new system may be too radical for all teachers to absorb and train in.

Simply because of scalability problems (thanks to variable levels of previous education and social upbringing), these models need to operate in parallel--and sometimes in tandem. This means they will remain the outliers until there is enough scale and volumes among the innovative institutions. Such is the paradox of all innovation I suppose.

Where in the overall spectrum do these alternate efforts fit in?

The spectrum is from top-down input as in schools to research-based inquiry in colleges to independent learning at postgraduate levels. By guiding postgraduate students to initiate themselves into the industries, teachers can perform the role of guiding projects.

How has being a teacher impacted you personally and your life in general

I have become much more philosophical. My worldview has more dimensions--social, economic, business, developmental. I have also become more anxious! Amidst the joy of seeing batch after batch of youngsters bursting with energy and talent, there is the dread of failure.

What if we cannot implement our concepts and our model well enough to make our students employable enough? And I define employability in such harshly stringent terms that accomplishing that goal is never a 100% absolute. Each year, I'd like to inch closer to that 100% mark, though. That lends me the optimism I need!

What is your wish for the community of teachers?

My ideal Teacher's Day would be the day my students (at higher education level) would identify the true purpose they're learning: to have the ability to learn and contribute each day in the real world, and not merely pass exams for the sake of grades.

My perfect Teacher's Day would be the day every teacher understands their changing role in a world where technology has given birth to hundreds of faceless teachers. That day would be when each evaluation is not a race for grades but an assessment of the student's progress towards making the imperfect world as perfect as they can.

Thank you so much Shashidhar! It's been awesome to chat with you. We wish you the very best for your future. Teacher Tales is an inspirational interview series conceptualized by Shreyanka Basu. The idea of Teacher Tales comes from Shreyanka’s personal belief about teaching. The goal of Teacher Tales is to be a witness to the passion that drives teachers to take up this profession. It touches upon the things that inspire teachers and how they bring the same to their classrooms. It focuses on the evolving narrative of what it means to be a teacher in the larger context of learning and education. Its ambition is to raise a toast to the great human beings behind the inspiring teachers. It celebrates both young and experienced teachers.

If you know a teacher who has inspired you and others like you please do write in to us at Shreyanka.basu@gmail.com  with the subject line – Teacher Tales Recommend a Teacher.

A review of The Judge (2014) by David Dobkin

Reviewed on October 19, 2014

The Judge (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1872194/)

(My title: The Judge Who Couldn't Be Father)

http://www.psicocine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/el-juez-trailer-robert-downey-jr.jpg

Indisputably an Oscar-nominee, including Duvall and Downey Jr for acting. Their on-screen relationship is so powerfully authentic that the easiest thing for even the most skeptical audience is the suspension of disbelief that every filmmaker dreams of.

Set in the Bible belt, the movie's corn-growing Midwest brought back personally good and shocking memories I have of the very same region: attempts to convert me (how do you convert an agnostic? Simple: Bible-belters equated me with a heretic!), the sight of a rifle in a window as I foolishly tried to take photos of a quaint old house-cum-gas station ...

Yet the movie couldn't be more deceptive in its intent especially as it begins with what you could mistake for a My Cousin Vinny-esque urbane resolution to criminal case.

Instead, it ends up being celebratory of the core values of family, professional ethics, and collective social responsibility that Hollywood sweepingly overlooks in its zest to project love, individualism and independence--the other celebrated sides of the same nation. Indeed, the slick, profanity-spewing Downey Jr is the one with an agenda to twist the case free of its ethical burden. The jury's surprise verdict is unbelievable to him. How can winning be less important than any other considerations?

Downey's progression from his own sense of innocence to experience is a highlight. The intricacies oh human vs professional relationships are his voyage through life--his edgy relationships get much more well-rounded, sorted and plain by the end of it all.

The subject is unique to Hollywood, but a social professional-vs-personal dilemma that's far more widely discussed in Indian cinema. (Remember the unforgettably intense Shakti?) While being persistently personal (Duvall's body is so tortured--but can you tell by looking at his immaculate turnout in court? How more American can you get!), the movie's genius lies in its rawness of expression--recall the softly undulating and verdant landscape that hides humanity--along with its message of what's right with the world and its immense spectrum.

Liberal Arts can produce problem-solving professionals

Better industry relevance for humanities and social sciences

Our world does not have many walls. Not anymore, anyway. As rhetorical questions go, is it time for higher education to emulate our world?

The exponential growth of opportunities in humanities and social sciences—especially that triggered by the communication industries, traditional, social and digital media, but now hugely popular in the infotech industries—is here to stay. But are educators readying their students to be problem-solvers?

In my own country, India, education has prided itself on being specialized and (hence) straitjacketed. It’s time to change that. Liberal arts professionals (and until a few years ago, that right there was an oxymoron!) create content, discover who we are, uphold the values of life and art, campaign for protecting the environment, govern and administer nations, help us understand economies, communicate with the world, and more. Unlike their techie counterparts, there is immense need for their broader understanding of the world and the factors that govern it.

As a graduate student of communication in the United States in the 1990s I learned as much from the formats and structures of education and overall systemic environment as I did from the content itself. A few years ago, I had an opportunity to attend an "Invention Convention" for school children up to nine years, whose products were chosen from about 10 schools in (the rather rural) Warren County in New Jersey, USA.

The children came up with products that provided practical answers to some household and social problems of modern American life. What impressed me even more than the design elements was the preparation of the school children to explain, pitch, market and communicate effectively.

The mail-switch product, fully functional, was one such on display there — designed by a sparkling-eyed, shy, 8-year-old young woman. (Would it surprise us, if she went on to do something innovative in her career?) There were 20 such products on display.

The solutions, suitable for their local community, reflected the kids' ability to identify a need, engage with their local environment, and think seamlessly between physics, the social sciences, economics, design, as well as theory and common sense. They did so, in their own way, independently, and with some simple but effective guidance from their teachers.

That's entrepreneurship. Most industries encourage it, and thousands of youngsters every year decide to become entrepreneurs.

Cut to higher education: We have heard the industry rhetoric about the issues about a large percentage of professional graduates:

- Lack of quality output and innovative thinking; not outcome-oriented enough. Advertising professionals, for example, who are not equipped to understand the purpose and the difference between cleverness and effectiveness;

- Employees who lack the ability to apply classroom education to the professions. In particular, fresh graduates who lack the ability to analyze situations from an all-round or 360-degree approach.

- Graduates who do not have the ability or attitude to learn — that supreme capability of problem-solving, to constantly ask fundamental (and original) questions and to seek out innovative answers.

- Graduates who do not know the basic facts about their environment and their world and, in general, have not developed a worldview, resulting in poor situation-negotiating skills.

The combination of learnability and development of a weltanschauung, and the ability to analyze situations and think independently for solutions is critical to all domains.

Using the problem-solving approach

Liberal arts are all about the human factor, and educators must understand how individuals make all the difference. The problem in pedagogy is not so much in the content as it is in the approach and methodology. If each level of higher education in liberal arts provided the following, each of us would feel far more educated than we do today:

1. Provide input in a variety of general subjects – Geography, History, Statistics, Economics, Psychology, to name a few – but convert that input in an applied way; applied to the student’s major field of study. All it takes is a refresher course of what we already learnt at school. But this time around, the subjects are linked to the profession that students have chosen.

2. Build unique curricula around independent research projects. Allow students to evolve interdisciplinary project proposals that would run through a large part of their tenure, and then—under advisement—choose subjects and classes that would be most useful to that project. The successful completion of an interdisciplinary project is a sure way of making graduates think analytically and to break down academic walls.

3. Promote innovative and independent thinking. In a student-centric environment, it is imperative to offer “creative space”—the environment and time for students to explore thoughts on specific subjects. This is possible when students are given food for analytical thought but enough resources and time to back it up. Many (especially) privately owned colleges are anxious to “fill up the time” in a day, as though that were the best way to justify the tuition they charge.

In my experience, almost any course can be delivered in a problem-solution format. For example, in Communication Theory, how will a certain theory be relevant in the future (and so how will you apply it in a certain situation)? Each class is a problem-solving exercise, where a presentation is only a small part. The presentation ends with a problem that must be put to the test. If you plant the right questions in young minds, they evolve into answers.

A simple example of unlocking that potential is for professors to present a problem at the end of each slide in their presentation (“How does the Active Audience theory relate to the current election campaign?”) and groupthink a solution. Thus, the professor’s presentation itself promotes interdisciplinary thinking ... not to mention the ability to think like a researcher.

In a survey I conducted in late 2008, senior industry practitioners and hiring managers in India, USA and UK unanimously agreed that this approach would provide a more global worldview and make students more employable. The challenge would be to train the trainers, but the design of how-to must follow the vision, and periodic training programs would be essential cogs to new or hybrid methods of pedagogy in liberal arts.

Given students’ and institutions’ socialization patterns (especially in India and similar "high-culture" countries), a methodological disruption won’t be easy. While I am sure several universities are using innovative methods of teaching, it is time institutions of learning in general recognized their accountability through making graduates change-makers in their professions—well and truly beyond merely helping them find employment. At India Today Media Institute, we think it is not merely possible but achievable. Much of this has been possible in my previous experiences, but clearly, there is some distance still to cover.

The author is Dean, India Today Media Institute, New Delhi.

First published by LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140614041524-6714335-liberal-arts-education-can-produce-problem-solving-professionals?trk=hb_ntf_MEGAPHONE_ARTICLE_COMMENT