Dear editor,
The April 5 editorial “Challenges for universities” certainly makes a strong case for discussions on the need for higher education facing the globalized working environment in Korea and elsewhere in the world including India.
Today, education is increasingly becoming the primary determinant of overall development in the emerging knowledge economies of Korea and India.
To understand, analyze and interpret the challenges for higher education and suggest long-term preventive and promoting policy measures is the objective of this piece.
Every boy and girl is seeking the opportunity to go to school, college, university or professional institution. If the present population is not trained to face the globalized world, we will make our youth subordinate as servants and clerks.
To my mind, there is always a trade-off between the quality and quantity of education, particularly at the university level. To ensure both, we need to do some soul-searching with the commitment and political will for fundamental changes in our mental makeup.
A public-private partnership model is alright, but this calls for ethics in education more than commercialization which has practically deteriorated standards.
To ensure quality, higher education is required for some in an institutional set-up, while the rest of the degree seekers should avail themselves of distance education, which is doing a great service.
For proper development of any country we need education, real education and not merely literacy through the “3Rs” (reading, [w]riting and [a]rhythmatic) or 3Ls (looking, listening and learning from TV) programs of mass literacy. Education is no longer to be treated as a social expenditure and should now be treated as the most important investment and growth indicator of development.
Dr. M.M. Goel
Professor of Indian economy
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul