Experiential Learning in Education
Shyam Sunder
December 25, 2010
I am grateful to you for assembling on this pleasant, bright, and auspicious
Christmas morning.
Our immediate purpose is to celebrate the opening of Great Lakes Institute’s
laboratory of experiential learning with the assistance of our generous and
farsighted benefactor Mr. Ramanujam at Brakes India. I would like to take these
few minutes to outline its educational purpose, and to share with you the vision
that energizes this experiment on the future of education in India.
First, experiential learning. The ability of the Homo Sapiens to learn in several
modes has allowed us dominance in many aspects of life on this earth, at least for
the time being. (As you probably know, there are serious arguments for ultimate
reversion of earth to insects and cockroaches because humans may fail to use
their great intelligence with wisdom. But that is topic for another day.
As a species, we have learned a great deal within the space of a few million years,
greatly expanding our brains, ability to think, conceptualize, remember, and
create new ideas, artifacts, symbols, and to process them. We have rapidly
expanded our genetic endowment and passed it on through generations. This
evolutionary learning is gifted to us through the genome, and we are hardly
aware of this.
In addition, each one of us learns a great deal more within our individual life
times. In fact, our learning is so extensive that we remain dependent of our
parents for some fifteen to twenty years, and in some cases, well beyond that
period of physical and mental growth. This seems routine until you compare
ourselves with insects, fish, snakes, dogs or cows. They complete their learning
and achieve adulthood with periods ranging from a few minutes to a couple of
years from their birth.
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During this two decade long period of dependence, we learn through several
ways. Most important aspects of learning are built into our genes. These include
skills like walking and aspects of language. However, it is through imitation of
what a baby sees in the surroundings that most learning takes place. Speech is the
most striking of these attributes but there are hundreds of others. The instinct to
imitate is fortunately included in our genes. The baby sees, tries to imitate, fails,
adjusts, and tries again. This fundamental process of learning is far more powerful
than all the teaching in this world. If babies had to depend on parents to learn to
walk and talk, they would never learn.
Beyond these powerful instinctive methods, human learning is supplemented by
our ability to generalize through two methods: one is inference from observation
and the other is logical deduction. Observation that some people who attend
Great Lakes get well-paying jobs leads many others to infer that such jobs result
from the attendance, and therefore attracts others interested in such jobs to this
School. Finally, our faculties of logical deduction allow us to learn that the higher
the income, the more a person can spend on food, clothes and housing, etc.
without going into debt.
Since during your 12 months at the Great Lakes the chances of your genetic
evolution are low, we focus on the last three--imitation, inference and
deduction—as three approaches to learning in formal education.
My earliest memories of learning in the first grade was by imitation—repeating
and memorizing A for apple, and counting by imitating the teacher, even before I
knew what is A or what is number one. While elements of memorization are
retained through all levels of education, it is not enough. Even in the elementary
school, inference and deduction begin to take important roles, and must come to
dominate in a good system of higher education. In secondary or higher education,
a student who relies on imitation and memorization alone is at serious risk of
missing on the essence of education.
The traditional learning in higher education is based on reading, lectures,
discussion, problem solving, laboratory and project work. These tasks combine
imitation, memorization, inference, and deduction in varying degrees in an
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attempt to exploit all our learning faculties to best advantage, and to enable us to
integrate our learning in such a way that it becomes ours forever. One might
forget memorized details after a few years or months, but inferences and
deductions are likely to stay with us for the lifetime. The purpose of higher
education is to give you learning of those elements which are important enough
for you to retain through your lifetime.
Since learning-by-doing is such an effective way of integrating our faculties, it is
hardly surprising that laboratory method of learning has long been an integral
part of education in the sciences. During the recent fifty or so years, we have
developed laboratory methods of learning in social sciences such as economics
and finance. During my visits to the Great Lakes during the past five or six years
(and in the last two days of classes), I have introduced these methods to the Great
Lakes students. When I started using and developing these methods thirty years
ago, only a dozen or so people in the world know about them. Today, there over a
thousand of people around the world using them. Last week I was in China to
inaugurate an experimental economics laboratory at WISE institute at Xiamen
University. This first Nobel Prize to an experimental economist was granted in
2003.
While India has been a bit slow in adopting this method of research and learning,
you should be proud to know that the Great Lakes students are the first in India to
learn from these experiential methods. Last December, I addressed the first
research conference in India on the subject at the University of Mumbai, and in a
couple of months Economic and Political Weekly will devote a special issue to a
review of experimental economics.
Before I end, I would like to touch on another important issue concerning Great
Lakes’ role in reshaping higher education in India, and management education in
particular. Great Lakes is a wonderful visionary experiment to bring the best of
higher education to India in landscape that looks quite bleak. While the
enrollments grow, the quality of higher education in India is in decline. There are
two primary reasons: (1) not enough talented young people (like the ones
attending Great Lakes) choose a life of research, scholarship and teaching. Unless
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the best students from the top of each year’s class choose to devote themselves
to scholarship, Indian education has no future, and it will continue its rapid
decline both in absolute as well as relative terms. Again, my experience in China
should be an eye opener. About 90 percent of my PHD applications at Yale are
from one country. Each week, I receive at least one email from a Chinese student
who want to come to Yale for his PHD. During and after my visits to China, I am
flooded with exceptionally talented people wanting to pursue scholarship. After
my years of lecturing at Great Lakes and other Indian universities, I have yet to
receive a single application from a talented student. Few application that we do
receive are poor quality and have little chance of success in world wide
competition. So the first thing I would like you to think about is—who would you
like to teach your children?
Second problem is financing. Some 16 percent of Yale’s expenses come from
student fees. The rest is subsidized by donations from alumni and business
community (as being done here today by Mr. Ramanujam). Nobody in the world
has found a way of delivering quality education at a profit, or without large
subsidies. Who will pay the money needed for quality education and research in
India. Government does not have the money and will not have the money.
It is for this reason that Great Lakes is a great experiment to create quality higher
education at reasonable cost with the philanthropic support of those who can
afford to pay. This is the public spirit that drove Tata, Birla, and many other
businessmen to create schools of quality higher education in India with their
philanthropy. Unless the fortunate ones among us feel an obligation to support
higher education through their charity, India will not progress. When you leave
Great Lakes in a few months, please do make a commitment to support the
development of this and other not-for-profit schools in India. I do not mean the
for-profit teaching shops that flourish in every part of India today under the guise
of being not-for-profit. Your own self-interest lies in thinking long term, and
provide the public good of quality higher education for all in India. But I am
getting ahead of myself, because public good is the subject of tomorrow’s class
and experiment.
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Under the leadership of your founder Dr. Balachandran, your benefactor Mr.
Ramanujam, your executive Director Prof. Sriram, and Mr. BalaSubramaniam who
has worked tirelessly to make it possible, you are the beneficiaries of this very
special opportunity to learn experientially. Perhaps, when I come here in 2011, I
shall not have to distribute those slips of paper to you and collect them by hand;
we might be able to do all this more easily on computers. However, I have to
admit wondering if you actually enjoyed trading physically during the first day of
class, and would rather not have that experience replaced by computers.
I am grateful to you all for your kind attention.
Merry Christmas to you all.
Bharat mata ki jaya.
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