Bulletin Supplement Aug 1969

Must the West be Followed? Improvement is something for which one could search constantly, but entirely new methods need to be introduced ver y circumspectly. I n particular, need we here in the East necessarily feel we have to follow all the recent innovations of the West? Are they all necessarily wise and beneficial? And if we are considering changes, should we not be careful to review also the traditional ways of the older civilizations of these parts, and consider whether we have not abandoned, or over-modified, some of them too much already? Let us have the courage to change back if necessary, and not think there can be no change except in the direction of what is wholly new or currently fashionable. To give one example, are we so sure that the modern tendency to concentrate all higher instruction into the Universities, to the near exclusion of other methods of training for the higher professions, is sound? I n the past, lawyers, for example, were trained on the job by lawyers, engineers by engineers, accountants and business men by their own kind. The Universities have subsumed much of this work of instruction: although the professions must still turn the student into practical lawyers, engineers and so on even after graduation. For the higher professions there are certainly advantages in this dual system: a sound theoretical basis is assured the student, and undoubtedly there were deficiencies i n the old system. But should we not stop at a handful of the higher professions? It is not credible to me that all forms of higher career training woul d be improved by a spell of University instruction, and I believe the Universities would do wel l to examine proposed new courses critically and be certain that they would really be effective in turning out better trained men. As a corollary, open support for other forms of training, and open resistance by the Universities to the idea that only a BA after one's name entitles one to claim to be fully educated, would, I am sure, be a source of strength to the University system in the long run: just as the contrary assumption has, I believe, proved damaging. For it is the student who has set his heart on a degree, believing it to be sole portal to a successful career, but who finds at the end of it all that he is still unfitted fo r employment at the status-level he has thought would be his, who becomes the distruntled and critical student. I believe the Universities should now make some endeavour to correct the generation of expectatio from a University training in the young public's mind which cannot be fulfilled. A t the same time, these same ideas have swollen the Universities to the point where severe strains are inevitable. A l l these problems I am sure you will be considering in the days to come, and I wish you every success in your deliberations. I am sure this first Asian Workshop will prove the desirability of further gatherings of the same kind in future. And now, of course, it remains only for me to wish you all once again a very happy stay. It has been, I repeat, a pleasure to welcome you all here; and to declare, as I now do, this first Asian Workshop open. The Keyno te Speaker Mr. Tarlok Singh, a distinguished scholar, author, economist and administrator, was the keynote speaker of the Workshop. Mr. Singh is Honorary Fellow of London School of Economics and Political Science, Fellow of the Institute for International Economics Studies, University of Stockholm, and Visiting Senior Research Economist, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, U.S.A. . Formerly he served as the Private Secretary to the Vice-President of the Interim Government and later to the Prime Minister of Indi a during the period of 1946-47. On the opening day, the theme of the Asian Workshop on Highe r Education, 'A New Man for a New Society: Universities and Colleges as Agents of Change', was clearly defined by Mr. Tarlok Singh in his keynote speech on 'Modernization and Educational Policy'. The following is an outline of the speech: 1. The theme of the Asian Workshop on Higher Education has education at its core, but bears on the entire process of change — social, economic, technological an d political — which now engulfs various cultures and economies in Asia. In looking at education at the present time, in fact we bring under purview the whole of society, the past equally with the future. 2. I n many of the countries in Asia, there has been greater advance in the past two decades than in the preceding five. However, social change and development have fallen behind economic developm as seen i n the aggregate and, for a variety — 6 —