Long before closed-circuit TV (CCTV) cameras were installed in school classrooms, Michael Apple used the black box as a metaphor to convey the mystery of routine teaching. I was reminded of his metaphor when a student told me that her teacher had recently explained the caste system as a genetic classification. According to this teacher, the upper castes have been in a dominant position because they are genetically superior and fitter to survive than the lower castes. When a student tried to intervene and quoted BR Ambedkar’s denial of the genetic theory of caste, the teacher replied that Ambedkar was not a scientist.
This peep into the mysterious black box of routine teaching offers no clue about what can be done to improve this teacher’s understanding of Indian society. We can’t guess what books she has read on the well-researched subject of caste. Perhaps we can speculate about the books she has not read or heard about. In all likelihood, she has not read any, and her views about the caste system merely reflect a widely prevalent perception that the problem of caste hierarchy is a colonial myth.
In our system of public higher education, there is no provision for course evaluation. In the western world that our system is now vigorously trying to emulate and compete with, course content and teachers’ knowledge are put through an evaluation process at regular intervals. If such a procedure were to be adopted in India, many strange practices and habits would emerge from the black box. For now, our only source is a student who might tell us what teachers know and how they teach.
Since no course evaluation or any other procedure ensuring transparency exists, pedagogic experience remains confined to a student’s personal memory. Whether the course content or the teacher conveyed social or ideological prejudice, it does not enter the public domain. In this larger context, the much-debated official guidelines meant to curb discrimination — the University Grants Commission’s Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions Regulations, 2026 — seem an innocuous attempt to avoid structural issues.
One major issue is the division between public and private higher education. The two sectors have moved apart at a remarkable pace over the last few decades. By and large, their separate paths of growth have followed the trajectories that school education witnessed earlier. As a nation, we were accustomed to living in a steeply hierarchical society. The Constitution offered a vision of equality and social justice, and mass education promised to push us towards that goal.
An important condition for education to fulfil its promise was common schooling, but that proved elusive for a long time. Indeed, separate schooling meant a paucity of common or shared experiences of childhood across socio-economic classes. Just 15 years ago, the Right to Education (RTE) Act presented some limited movement towards common schooling by making a 25% reservation for students from the economically weaker sections mandatory in private schools. This provision created a narrow bridge of commonality.
No such bridge exists between public and fully private higher education. Free to charge whatever fee they wish, private universities have no legal necessity to follow the reservation policy. While overall reservation in public universities is touching 50% — and in some states it is more — private universities claim to enrol purely based on merit. Under that banner, they are free to charge the fee they want, and some are charging astounding amounts. Merit, thus, goes with the paying capacity of parents. Public universities, on the other hand, not only follow the government’s reservation policy but also charge remarkably low fees. No wonder they function with a permanent scarcity of the basic necessities of a good educational institution.
This structural compartmentalisation of the system is a form of discrimination that no guidelines can address or mitigate. The discriminatory aspect of the public-private division has been further sharpened by the stark financial gap between the two kinds of institutions. When you visit colleges fully dependent on State funds, the poverty of their library and laboratory resources stares at you. The teacher-student ratio in private institutions and public institutions is also vastly different. Large classes are now a common story in even the most reputed public universities.
No inspection-based data, accreditation grade, or exam results can conceal the gap between the pedagogic experiences that the two kinds of learning venues give to their respective students. Under prevailing conditions, it is hard to imagine a brilliant Dalit boy or girl entering the gates of a high-fee-charging private university. No doubt, some private universities have provisions for subsidised fees and other systems of support for the needy. These systems can hardly compensate for the massive burden of disadvantages that students from lower caste and other underprivileged backgrounds carry since early childhood and primary school days. In any case, the entry of a handful of underprivileged students in the portals of private universities is no answer to the vast, negative echoes of a divided education system.
Krishna Kumar is a former director of NCERT and the author of Smaller Citizens. The views expressed are personal
