Education

An Argument for education

The only language common to all peoples and cultures is the language of dissent-
Arundhati Roy


This article seeks to investigate the effectiveness and the relevancy of architecture education in India.

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Architecture Education in India works in a vaccum and hardly addresses the demands of the changing market. With India on poised to a growth rate of 8% to 9% through the next decade, it will face a serious shortage of skills if not of manpower in architecture.
The new market scenario is increasingly becoming complex, specialized and demanding that would need a very high level of skill and expertise. This changing workplace is not being addressed to in the education of architecture. It would be highly captious to point that architecture education in India is poor. Architecture education in India, like other fields of educations is quite painfully exhaustive and at the same time archaic. The syllabus and its contents are a relic, handed down from our colonial rulers. The present architecture education is a slightly developed version of the course content than the earlier RIBA[i] structured courses taught in the late sixties. It does have its advantages but also certain disadvantages, which this article seeks to address. The disadvantages stifflles original thought, which is the prime vehicle for ideas and discourse in education.

Consider this, India is a nation of 4000 architecture graduates adding to an existing pool of architects each year, which has little influence on the amount of architectural theory generated and the profession fairs badly in the amount of theory publications. This reflects quite poorly on how little resource is available for use by the profession. Till today IIA[ii] and CA[iii] has brought out an absymal number of publications of value or substance to bring to any consequential discourse in Indian architecture. Further, embarassing is the definite lack or non-existence of even technical books or publication in architecture, which many poorer economies in the west as well as the east have called on their own.

Most courses in architecture do not address the current market conditions and there is a definite disconnect between the market and the classroom. For e.g, the form of wood construction taught has been obsolete due to its costs and the newer methods of wood construction (engineered joists, built up roofs, shingled roofs[iv], platform framing or ballon framing [v]construction) as followed largely in the west where wood is cheaper (due to labour costs) is not taught. Subjects like specification and materials is taught like clauses from the bible, and does not train students in find solutions to real world situations. The large amount of sweat is spent in an exhaustive look at construction and architecture and very little is spent on training in problem solving. Its appalling to see how clueless are some students after their graduation( which by the way assure you the title of an “architect”) about how to generate a viable program or look at data and sort for relevant information for real world projects, eventhough all the necessary tools and databooks have been made available to them. It is also true that these students had professors who themselves were clueless about the same when they graduated and it should be hardly suprising to find those “professors” (for a lack of a lesser word) drawn into education with the aforesaid level of skill or lack of it. Most schools do not require professors to publish papers or conduct research or practice. Problems are further compounded because of the appalling compensation levels, abysmal teacher-student ratio and lack of qualified or experienced leaders. In the west a professor can never stay stagnant with their qualifications and are required to publish papers regualrly and stay updated with changing trends.

Indian education inherently has some shortcomings, which exponentially reveal themselves at the graduate level education. Unlike the west, Indian school systems till the high school is the envy of the world, as education tends to be instructive in those formative years. At the graduate and higher level, learning is based on nurturing original thought and training students in problem solving and raising questions to accepted theories. While in the west, paper writing or original thought is the most critical of all theory based courses, in India the emphasis is on “mugging” facts and reproduce them in the same form. Most theory is accepted on its face-value and the printed text seem to legitimize the theory put forward. This has lead to a clone-candidate scenario, where every candidate goes throught exactly the same process in education and is expected to learn and reproduce the same material in the same manner. Due to this, the large section of evaluation of candidates is based strictly on scores that literally measures the capability of the candidate to reproduce and recall information learnt in the classrooms. This process of examination and evaluation is not only futile but laughable for a country which boasts of orginal thinkers like Bhaskaracharya, Aryabhatta,C.V Raman and J.C Bose. Further, to add mayhem to misery our educationists in the board of AIA ,AICTE[vi] and CA wallow in this mediocrity as their survival depends on the continual of the same standards, as their own existence is upheld to such mediocre standards.


Good architectural education is based on three distinct aspects.1) Ability to impart knowledge in the field 2) Ability to stimulate critical thinking.3) Ability to test a candidate and evaluate his capability4) Ability to successfully undergo transition from the classroom to the market.
It is interesting to see that most professional courses undertaken by the AICTE addressess the first aspect only. The other three crucial aspects have either been ignored or is shoddily approached. The AICTE and CA focus on quality is limited to regular visits to the school to maintain their registration. Such visits although laudable to an extent, the “school inspections” are based on a syllabus that has left itself wildly to be interpreted or taught. The lack of quality professors or infrastructure invariably leads to the rigging and staging of such inspections by “disciplining “ the student and some are even strife with corrupt practices. Most books on architecture are foreign publications and very little such knowledge is based in the Indian scenario. Testing practes in India is was best described to me by an imminent architect in India. He said, “ In India the educationists wants to know what the student does not know and in the west they grade a student for what he knows”. I have seen many juries that as a student, where there was a potrayal of bravado by the teachers in ridiculing the student. Most testing systems are highly erroneous and partial ,favoritism is nothing new to the eye. Arundhati Roy potrayed this dismal affairs in his National Award winning movie “ In which Annie gives it to those one” about the life of an architecture student.

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) is responsible for not only promoting the profession but it has developed many tools for the practicing architect like graphic standards, contract documents, handbooks pertaining to standards, legal issues, professional practice and they are used widely and help architects limit their liability exposure. The primary driver of such tools were the market itself, which had little sympathy and forgiveness for bad quality construction and practices. This has resulted in construction of reasonable quality and end users/clients have largely benifitted from such systems where they are assured of quality products. While in the west, contractor, construction manager, surveyors, engineeres largely share the large amount of liability for quality and workmanship, in India architects gladly and often reluctantly have to deal or own such areas of responsibility. Further, the profession is regulated by a apex body of the Council of Architecture CA in Delhi and represents the AICTE in administering regulations in education of architecture, practice and registration requirements. The title of an ‘architect’ is the one and only professional title that is protected, defined by these regulating bodies. The reality of the market scenarios is that there are varying levels of skills required for a contemporary practice. Architectural interns or apprentices, architecural assistants, Project Architects, Project Managers , Architectural Designers, Interior designers are job description which needs specific training and should be open to training right from the school level. The five year architecture course is painfully long and inadequate cannot accomplish to address these needs. Ironically a new graduate and a practicing architect has the same legal capacity of an “architect[vii]”.

In spite of such large liabilities, architects in India have very little tools or knowledge to deal with such situation on their own. Large corporate practices are just beginning to be seen on the horizon and capitalism is bringing with it a sense of purpose to the profession. If education cannot match the changing needs of this extremely demanding marketplace then we would be faced with an increasing competition from professionals from abroad where the construction industry has matured to an envious level. Further, this situation will be compounded with the problem of a large pool of younger generation of architects who will choose to leave their country and pursue work abroad and where they have better opportunity to pursue their goals in the academic field and a greater financial reward at the workplace.

Surely, not all the blame can be given to education. The mediocrity of our socialistic politics and the “license raj” era market has to share the blame, but the market cannot completely be responsible for the throes of architectural graduates opting to pursue studies abroad or choosing to pursue other options than the traditional practice of architecture.


So, what happened to education that makes young generation of architects in India head to the west, which eventually has driven scores of them to adopt a new homeland. Unlike engineering fields, architecture is a deeply a cultural actively and deep-rooted to the context. The answer may lie in our past political scenario, when India under socialism had little to no real rewards, monetary or otherwise to architects and architecture as a profession. Socialist India and the bureaucracy that plagues everything in a socialistic system did not reap rewards for excellence. Ultimately, change has to come from the outside as well as from within. When, I was the editor of the college magazine, I made an attempt to persuade the then “powers to be” by subtexting and underscoring one of my favorite quotes beneath the HOD’s message - “ The best gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of freedom” . Although, I still believe in it and had little to cheer then in those days, we few friends always talked of ways it could always be better. For those who remember our classmate late comrade Prachi Kousadikar[viii], we spent countless days in the the canteen debating and arguing over our education system, because we believed in the Argumentative tradition. It is very easy to accept the system , but it takes a lot of courage to defy, deny and change it. Argument and debate is the essence of a democracy and it’s a very old Indian tradition. The Mahabharata cites how Arjuna argues over going to war with his brothers with his guru, Krishna . Amratya Sen cites in his new landmark book “The Argumentative Indian” about the how a century ago Raja RamMohan Roy compared death with the inability to defend an argument. In essence it is what makes us an Indian and the legendary Indian tradition of thought and ideas were refined through centuries of such debates. It eventually leads to clarity of thought, acceptance or rejection of ideas. India has done that for centures in a non-violent way without arrows or guns. Its time to hang a graffiti board and listen than drumming the voices of dissent.

There could be many things done to our education that can hold immense possibilities for the new generation. We could have a watershed in education in India. But for that to happen, the powers to be whether the CA , AICTE or a college principal , have to begin by atleast accepting that we have a problem.


Somshankar Bose Assoc. AIA
Architect
Flad and Associates.USA
Visiting design critic University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Member Wisconsin AIA convention committee 2006

[i] Royal Institute of British Architects
[ii] Professional body-Indian Institute of Architects
[iii] Regulatory body –Council of Architecture Delhi
[iv] Type of built –up roof construction , refer Francis Ching’s Builing Construction Illustrated.
[v] types of wood construction, refer Francis Ching’s Builing Construction Illustrated .
[vi] All India Council of Technical Education
[vii] The title of an architect is protected and regulated by the 1972 Act of the parliament.
[viii] Our classmate from the 1994-99 batch whom we lost in the summer of 2003.

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