3 Review(s)

The book presents the first full-fledged endeavour to unravel, at the academic level, the conditions and consequences of private control of public education. Private control of public education in India has the dubious distinction of owing its origin to the deliberate decisions of the colonial masters, taken in pursuance of their overall designs. The author has traced the functional transformation that the institution of private control has undergone with changing socio-political contact. It is posited that the path of development in India, since Independence, has been of arrested capitalism with feudal fetters and colonial curbs. Consequently, artificial appetites are raised to ever-increasing heights and the system cannot satiate them even minimally. In this context, concrete contemporary conditions of private management of kanpur colleges have been analysed. On the basis of an incisive analysis of available documentary and other case material the author advances the thesis that the private managements are a redundant role. In practice they disoriented the teacher’s role, the student’s role and put them against each other as well as against their better self in fact, against education itself. The author argues with empirical evidence that the siege laid by private control on higher education subverts the professed national values of secularism, democracy, national integration, egalitarianism and a scientific and modern outlook. Plausibility, rather than perfect finality, is the criterion accepted by the author to draw his conclusions. His conception of a social scientist as a self-conscious actor, who combines passionate involvement in social transformation with theoretical foreseeing, provides a refreshingly off-beat methodological approach.