Book Extract : HARVARD, OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE : The Past , Present And Future Of Excellence In Education By Rajesh Talwar

Rajesh Talwar, former UN official current consultant, lawyer, and best-selling author unveils HARVARD, OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE: THE PAST PRESENT AND FUTURE OF EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION, a thought-provoking book that delves into education reform, supporting the government’s aim of high-quality education and offering guidance for policymakers to enhance India’s global education standards.

1
HARVARD HARVEST: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE USEFUL

A great deal of learning takes place outside classrooms as well. At the Harvard Kennedy School, I remember evenings where there would be a choice between going to attend a talk in the auditorium to listen to the visiting prime minister of, say, country X or going to another venue near the library where, say, the defence minister of country Y was coming to speak. Sometimes there would even be a third speaker from country Z in another hall. In terms of an intellectual diet, we were rather spoilt for choice, and it was often difficult to decide where to go. The point is that if you spend a year listening to such eminent and influential people talk, it cannot help but contribute to the widening of your mental horizons, more especially if you are studying international relations at the Harvard Kennedy School but even otherwise. These days you can access the speeches of world leaders on YouTube, but this is not at all the same thing as being able to watch, say, a live discussion between acknowledged global experts, with time allotted at the end to ask any queries that you might have.

One of the interesting discussions I attended during my time at Harvard was titled ‘Presidential Leadership and the Rise of American Power’. Professor Joseph S. Nye, who taught UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon when he was a student at Harvard and coined the term ‘soft power’ now in common usage, chaired that discussion. Also present was Professor Nancy F. Koehn, a relatively young but extremely knowledgeable historian from the Harvard Business School (HBS). It surprised me that the HBS had a historian on its faculty. Nancy taught leadership and entrepreneurial history but clearly had a deep understanding of historical issues of wider import. It goes without saying that dons like Professor Nye are hugely well connected and influential, but what is often not sufficiently appreciated is how those associations can impact, sometimes profoundly, their understanding of their subject matter, which they correspondingly transmit to their students. It was while answering a question from the audience, and in order to illustrate a point, that he regaled us with small snippets from a conversation with George Bush Senior during dinner the previous weekend.

At universities all over the world, knowledge is broken up and separated into different disciplines to enable students to study them better, but actually knowledge is one whole, and everything is connected. So it makes perfect academic sense to have a historian in the business school – though perhaps the role reversal of having a ‘negotiation expert’ in the Department of History might be stretching the point! As one of the world’s preeminent universities, Harvard recognises the artificial divide that often exists between different subjects. Not only this: it encourages crosspollination. This is why while studying Mastering Negotiation at the Harvard Kennedy School we also had staff come across from the Harvard School of Business (and there were plans, I was told, in the future to have someone come in from the Harvard School of Law as well). This substantially enriched the overall experience.

Pg 15-17

About The Author

Rajesh Talwar has written on a variety of themes ranging from social justice to law and culture for international and national magazines, newspapers, and websites including The Guardian, The Economic Times, the Pioneer, and Sunday Observer.

( Extracted with due permission from author, publisher)