A four-year degree course in innovation and hands-on learning in India is too perplexing to be welcomed outright and too positive to be dismissed forthwith.
It appears that colleges now will attempt to break the mould of school years of rote. But hold up there. When was the last time you heard of someone with a
degree in inventiveness? The fact that it is to be a degree course itself implies the uncomfortable strait-jacket of curriculum. No idea expands in a suffocating narrowness. The greatest inventors didn’t need such degrees; most, indeed, were known as crackpots. Nikola Tesla, the winner of the War of Currents whose theories and patents made AC current possible, dropped out of two important universities. Despite his pioneering work, towards the end of his life he was dismissed as a mad scientist by colleagues of more conventional thought processes. No one has since heard of his defamers, but he is honoured today with the tesla, the unit for a magnetic field. The greatest experimentalist of them all, Michael Faraday, was the same; he barely went to school, forget college, and today the farad, the unit for capacitance, is named after him. Even Edison. The last untrained genius India produced was Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose letters to the mathematician G.H. Hardy led eventually to more unsolved problems than solved ones. Invention doesn’t need a degree. Its only requirement is the freedom to think.
Okay, so most people don’t have the IQ of a genius. But can you really teach innovation? If so, Delhi University should consider head-mounted light bulbs instead of those funny convocation hats.