A Community University

I visualise a more rooted and functional alternative university system as a communitarian and cooperative one, wherein a whole township is fused into teaching, researching and learning while dwellers would carry out their usual businesses as town-dwellers do, sweeping the streets, running a shop or a factory. Roles such as ordinary citizens, administrators, learners and teachers would be flexible and changeable. A practising doctor may also teach in a classroom and undertake some research work at a lab.  A businessperson would teach management, and a management professor would own some business. A sanitary worker would be taking classes on hygiene or folk music. A homemaker would be tutoring on childcare and cooking and discussing the literary merits of Kalidas or the mysteries of the universe at some public fora. Here, education would be a lived experience and nourish life instead of dictating and dominating people. Classrooms, labs, and institutional centres would be scattered over the whole geography, and things would be coordinated by those willing to do so and capable of doing so. In the traditional system of India, communities used to patronise the education of their young and even outsiders in the case of larger townships. Hermitages were small communities of teachers and learners. Till very late, many settlements within some larger townships served as such communities. Even now, if a township evolves into a community and cooperative university or a university fuses itself into a township, it would make education really democratic, and such a setup would end the self-arrogated rights of scholasticism over folks.  

Niraj Kumar Jha