I Grew Up Clueless
Growing up in India, I was fortunate enough to attend a pretty decent school (SFS school) in a second-tier city (Nagpur). I say I was fortunate because at that time only a small percentage of Indian children could attend school and of those who could, most got a fairly mediocre education at best.
Our school was good by the prevailing standards. By sheer good fortune, many of my classmates ended up being fairly successful in various professions. Half a dozen became doctors, a couple very successful lawyers, a dozen engineers, a couple US-trained PhD economists (including yours truly), many teachers, a tenured US professor, and a handful businessmen. A fairly large cohort ended up migrating to the US.
Looking back at it, I’d say that the education we received was passable in math and science but sorely lacking in the social sciences. That was because education was controlled by government bureaucrats who knew little of any relevance and had no clue what education was about. I suspect that they were uneducated themselves. Continue reading “India’s Great Virtue: Democracy”