Home Schoolers Content to Take Children’s Lead

Sally Ryan for The New York Times

Gaby, 9, and Sydney Billings, 7, with their toddler brother, Dylan, make their own decisions about lessons.

By SUSAN SAULNY

Published: November 26, 2006

CHICAGO, Nov. 23 — On weekdays, during what are normal school hours for most students, the Billings children do what they want. One recent afternoon, time passed loudly, and without order or lessons, in their home in a North Side neighborhood here.

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Unschooling the Billings Children

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Sally Ryan for The New York Times

Sydney Billings, 6, one of four siblings in Chicago, is taught through unschooling. Her mother, Juli Walter, calls the process “child-led learning.” More Photos »

Hayden Billings, 4, put a box over his head and had fun marching into things. His sister Gaby, 9, told stories about medieval warrior women, while Sydney, 6, drank hot chocolate and played with Dylan, the baby of the family.

In a traditional school setting, such free time would probably be called recess. But for Juli Walter, the children’s mother, it is “child-led learning,” something she considers the best in home schooling.

“I learned early on that when I do things I’m interested in,” Ms. Walter said, “I learn so much more.”

As the number of children who are home-schooled grows — an estimated 1.1 million nationwide — some parents like Ms. Walter are opting for what is perhaps the most extreme application of the movement’s ideas. They are “unschooling” their children, a philosophy that is broadly defined by its rejection of the basic foundations of conventional education, including not only the schoolhouse but also classes, curriculums and textbooks.

In some ways it is as ancient a pedagogy as time itself, and in its modern American incarnation, is among the oldest home-schooling methods. But it is also the most elusive, a cause of growing concern among some education officials and social scientists.

“It is not clear to me how they will transition to a structured world and meet the most basic requirements for reading, writing and math,” said Luis Huerta, a professor of public policy and education at Teachers College of Columbia University, whose national research includes a focus on home schooling.

There is scant data on the educational results of unschooling, and little knowledge about whether the thousands of unschooled children fare better or worse than regularly schooled students. There is not even reliable data on how many people are unschooling, though many experts suggest the number is growing.

Here in Chicago, a group called the Northside Unschoolers has 100 families registered on its online list. There are similar organizations coast to coast, including the San Francisco Bay Unschooling Network, Unschoolers Unlimited in Guilford, Conn., and the Unschoolers of the Ozarks, serving Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas, although accurate figures for the number of families they serve are hard to come by. Adherents say the rigidity of school-type settings and teacher-led instruction tend to stifle children’s natural curiosity, setting them up for life without a true love of learning.

“When you think about it, the way they do things in school is mostly for crowd control,” said Karen Tucker, a mother of three boys who is an unschooler in Siloam Springs, Ark., and belongs to the Unschoolers of the Ozarks. “We don’t duplicate the methods of school because we’ve rejected school.”

Coming under the umbrella of home education, unschooling is legal in every state, though some regulate it more than others. The only common requirement is that students meet compulsory attendance rules.

In states with the most permissive regulations — many of them in the Midwest, including Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan and Nebraska — the idea of unschooling has flourished in recent years, with families forming online communities, neighborhood-based support groups and social networks for their children.

Members of such organizations form a united front against sometimes fierce criticism from outsiders.

“When you are in a subculture of a subculture, you often get painted as the freak family,” Ms. Tucker said, “and people believe that what the expert says is true, instead of thinking the alternative viewpoint portrayed has some merit.”

Ms. Walter, a natural-childbirth instructor, has had to assuage tense feeling from some of her peers.

“Sometimes people take it personally, like, ‘Oh, school’s not good enough for you?’ ” she said. “No, no. It’s just that this is what works for our family.”

Only 25 states have testing or evaluation requirements for home-schoolers, so it is difficult for researchers to get a representative sample of students to even begin to answer their most basic questions about unschooling. And among home-schoolers, unschoolers bristle the most at the thought of standardized testing.

Ms. Tucker has allowed her son Will, 13, to be tested, but she refuses to look at the scores.

“They’re meaningless to him and me,” Ms. Tucker said. “If you attach a number to your child, your opinion of the child changes, good or bad.”

The Billings children are not graded. Weekends are no different from weekdays, summer from winter. They draw or read or play outside, or go on family outings to libraries, museums or the gym. They also attend activities and take lessons familiar to pupils in traditional schools like Girl Scouts, swimming for Gaby and piano — if they express an interest — but none has seen the inside of a regular classroom.

“I don’t really know what that’s about because I don’t go to school,” said Sydney, who says she likes her life just the way it is. If she had to go to school, she said, “I’d be at school all day and not have time to be with my mom and do fun things.”

Unlike the more familiar home-schoolers of recent years, unschoolers tend not to be religiously motivated. They simply do not approve of ordinary education, and have decided to rearrange their lives around letting their children explore their worlds, unencumbered by the usual pupil-teacher relationship.

If Will wants to pick up a book, Ms. Tucker said, that is fine. But the decision to do so will be his choice, she said.

“The important things that you need to know are important because they’re useful to know,” Ms. Tucker said. “We all desire to get up and learn to walk because it’s a useful skill to have. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see that, just an infant. Will had never been given a lesson in reading, but he read at 7. I tell people it took him seven years to learn to read because all of his experiences added up to learning how to read.”

Much of the basic mathematics that Ms. Walter’s daughters have learned so far, she said, sprung from their desire to calculate how much allowance money they would have to earn to buy dolls featured in their favorite toy catalog.

Each child gets a small weekly allowance that is deposited directly into her own bank account, then the adding and multiplying begins. The lessons have inadvertently, and painlessly, extended to taxes, shipping fees and postage, which she sees as another benefit of unschooling.

“It’s more real-world stuff,” Ms. Walter said. “How many kids get out of high school and don’t know how to balance a checkbook?”

The United States Department of Education last did a survey on home schooling in 2003. That study did not ask about unschooling. But it found that the number of children who were educated at home had soared, increasing by 29 percent, to 1.1 million, from 1999 to 2003.

Experts assume that the upward trend has continued, and some worry that the general public is unaware of the movement’s laissez-faire approach to learning.

“As school choice expands and home-schooling in general grows, this is one of those models that I think the larger public sphere needs to be aware of because the folks who are engaging in these radical forms of school are doing so legally,” said Professor Huerta of Columbia. “If the public and policy makers don’t feel that this is a form of schooling that is producing productive citizens, then people should vote to make changes accordingly.”

Pat Farenga, an author and advocate of unschooling, said the fears were unfounded.

“One criticism I hear over and over is that children won’t be ready for the real world,” Mr. Farenga said. “That’s ridiculous. We’re saying get them out of the classroom and into the real world. It’s not about isolating them and drilling them.”

Peter Kowalke, 27, was unschooled as a child and went on to earn a degree in journalism with a concentration in math three years ago from the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University.

“You don’t know everything, and there are definite gaps in most unschoolers’ backgrounds, but you cover most of what you need,” he said. “And if you find out that you need something that you haven’t studied, you’ll have much more drive to actually learn it.”

“But it can be tough,” said Mr. Kowalke, a magazine writer who is married to a woman who was also unschooled. They met while he was filming a documentary about his educational experiences. “It’s always harder to forge your own path without someone telling you what to do.”

Success Is Relative, and Height Isn’t Everything

Essay

By STEPHEN S. HALL

Published: November 28, 2006

Tallness has always been viewed as a desirable physical trait — so desirable that more than a century ago, Sir Francis Galton began collecting measurements of British schoolchildren as a prelude to his dream of breeding genetically superior human beings. Although his eugenics project went nowhere, his obsession with height survives in a word that has become part of every modern parent’s vocabulary: percentile. Galton both coined the term and developed the statistics that allowed percentiles to be plotted on a growth chart.

Otto Steininger

Since physical size is such an intrinsic feature of basic (not to mention personal) biology, researchers have returned again and again to that fateful intersection of genes, environment and stature. When they throw human qualities like cognition or intelligence into the mix, the combination becomes both fascinating and dangerous, not least because of the half-baked lessons that sometimes make their way from the technical literature to dinner party conversations.

A group of researchers at the University of California, San Diego recently reported, for example, that mutations in a class of genes dubbed Tweedle — as in Tweedledee and Tweedledum — can alter the overall shape of fruit flies; a mutated “TweedleD,” the scientists noted, produced “short and stout” flies. The good news is that this particular class of genes is found only in insects; the bad news is that it reinforces the Galtonian notion of size as a genetically determined trait that can possibly be manipulated.

Such manipulation would look more socially attractive if the mere fact of being taller made a person smarter, as some research has suggested since the 1890s. The most recent researchers to venture fearlessly into the height wars are two well-respected economists at Princeton University. Last August, the economists, Anne Case and Christina Paxson, published a paper called “Stature and Status: Height, Ability and Labor Market Outcomes” that is still reverberating.

Economists have long been fascinated by data showing that tall adults tend to earn more money. Using data sets from four long-running studies conducted in the United States and Britain, Dr. Case and Dr. Paxson present evidence arguing that on average taller people earn more because they are, quite simply, smarter. They suggest that the difference in cognitive ability becomes apparent as early as age 3. “Throughout childhood,” they write, “taller children perform significantly better on cognitive tests.”

If this were as true as it sounds, the news would obviously provoke great consternation in any parent with a child smaller than average — a status that most of us, thanks to Galton and his percentiles, know by heart. But it turns out that the Princeton story is a bit more nuanced than that, and part of a very long debate.

As Dr. Case and Dr. Paxson make clear in their paper, many studies have shown that height is not just a matter of genes, but has a lot to do with prenatal development, early postnatal nutrition, and even a family’s socioeconomic status. Indeed, the scientists who study human growth have known for almost two centuries that children who have ample early nutrition grow faster and taller than those raised in more deprived circumstances, and well-nourished children also have earlier growth spurts. Good “nurture” of this sort, including minimal exposure to disease, produces children more likely to reach their genetic potential in terms of height. And as the Princeton economists stress, “environmental factors that are thought to influence cognitive development” affect height.

When you add it all up, it says something a little more complicated than “taller people earn more because they’re smarter.” Someone who is 6 feet tall, but might have been 6-foot-2 with better early nutrition, may not have developed as much cognitive ability as someone who was well-formed and well-fed all along but stands 5-foot-6.

The more accurate, but much less catchy, formulation would be: all other things being equal, people who reach their growth potential in height, whether taller or smaller than average, are likelier to be smarter than those who don’t, probably because they benefited from optimal early development. “Part of what we are trying to do,” Dr. Paxson said, “is to focus on height as a way of getting people to focus on growth.”

Dr. Case and Dr. Paxson offered their results as an alternative theory to a much-cited paper published two years ago by Nicola Persico and Andrew Postlewaite of the University of Pennsylvania and Dan Silverman of the University of Michigan. These researchers concluded that the “height premium” in an adult male’s income correlated most strongly with a boy’s height at age 16. They speculated that taller teenagers accrued “human capital” through athletic and social activities. Dr. Postlewaite said in an interview that he did not know how to reconcile the importance of adolescence in his earlier study to the more recent Princeton findings, where adolescence ceased to be a factor when childhood cognition was weighed.

Perhaps the two studies do not require reconciliation, but rather illustrate how imperfect our grasp remains of a fundamental issue — growth and ability — that researchers have been struggling to understand for more than a century. Our measures of cognition remain tentative, and quantification of emotional or social intelligence does not enter into the formulations at all. While understandable, the economist’s focus on income as the key determinant of success reflects a narrow bandwidth of human value; in economic studies of this sort, penniless artists like Vincent Van Gogh or impoverished leaders like Mahatma Gandhi would be examples of bad labor market outcomes.

The most misleading term in the entire discussion may be “on average”— a fact that Dr. James M. Tanner, the British growth researcher, pointed out 40 years ago. “Perhaps the best analogy is with accident statistics,” he said while delivering, of all things, the Galton Lecture to the Eugenics Society in London in 1966. “No one can tell if he will be killed in a motor accident next week, yet the total number of people who will be killed in this period can be predicted rather accurately. Equally the correlation we are discussing, like road deaths, tells us something of sociological but nothing of individual importance.”

Dr. Tanner suggested then, as Dr. Case and Dr. Paxson did several months ago, that it might be useful to study how development in the womb and early childhood affects intelligence. It was a good idea 40 years ago, it’s a better idea today, and it would help shift the public conversation from relative height, which is burdened with social distraction, to optimal growth, which is about giving all children, small and tall, the best chance to reach their physical and intellectual potential.

Stephen S. Hall is the author of “Size Matters: How Height Affects the Health, Happiness and Success of Boys — and the Men They Become” (Houghton Mifflin).

British bonds, built at the hajj

By H.D.S. Greenway | November 28, 2006

LONDON
IN "LORD JIM ," Joseph Conrad's tale of lost honor and redemption, the plot is driven by an incident involving the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims aspire to make at least once in their lives. The novel is set when the 19th century was giving way to the 20th in the flood tide of empire. Jim, a young sea-trained Englishman with dreams of glory and duty in the eastern seas, signs on as mate on a steamer taking Muslim pilgrims from Singapore to Jeddah, the Red Sea port of disembarkation for Mecca.

The ship, Patna, was "as old as the hills . . . and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water tank." The pilgrims, 800 of them from "the outskirts of the East," stream aboard "after treading the jungle paths, descending the rivers . . . crossing in small canoes" to fulfill their religious obligation.

Once at sea, the small band of European officers convince themselves that the bulkheads are about to give way, and that they will all go to the bottom within minutes "like a flat iron."

Jim's scruffy shipmates hastily lower a boat and, to his horror, Jim perceives that "the white men were about to leave the ship," abandoning their 800 darker charges to drown. Jim is contemptuous, but as a squall hits he panics and jumps into the lifeboat just before the Patna slips beneath the waves, or so he thinks.

The Patna does not sink, however, and is humiliatingly found adrift by a French gunboat and towed to Aden, after the French crew assure themselves that the passengers are free from plague. For the hajj was an early indicator of the globalization of disease. People coming from so many countries and packed together often ended up as incubators of infection that were transported back to their homelands.

Jim has broken the code of an Englishman, and that of the white man in the East, and he spends the rest of his life atoning for it.

Today, the tide of empire has receded from eastern shores, and the white man's burden, that Jim so keenly felt, has slipped from British shoulders. British responsibility now for the hajj is limited to Britain's own Muslim subjects who do not tread down jungle paths or cross rivers in small canoes, but embark in airliners or chartered flights from London and other United Kingdom cities to the north.

Today, about 25,000 of the 1.8 million British Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mecca, which, ironically, is about the same number that travels from Malaysia, the country that now encompasses the lands where Lord Jim treaded.

At a briefing arranged by the Foreign Office recently, I learned of the efforts the British government is making to assist British pilgrims, an effort I am told is unique in Europe. The British government sends doctors and nurses, all volunteers, to assist British subjects should they get sick during the hajj. The doctors and nurses have to be Muslims, of course, because non believers are not allowed within the city limits of Mecca, the birth place of the Prophet Mohammed.

The doctors and nurses provide medical care for British pilgrims for when they are on the hajj, and keep track of ailments when pilgrims return to Britain with the ever-present possibility of bringing diseases back with them, as was the case in Lord Jim's day.

The British Foreign Office also provides consular services for Britons during the hajj. Should a passport be lost, or , as sometimes happens, a pilgrim dies, there will be someone from the Foreign Office -- a Muslim of course-- to help when they land in Jeddah, or in Mecca itself.

The "Foreign & Commonwealth Office," in conjunction with the "London Central Mosque Trust & Islamic Cultural Center," issues a small pamphlet, "Advice to British Hajjis," which gives passport advice, warns pilgrims of what shots to take, and where they can locate the British consular and medical teams once in Mecca.

If something goes wrong, "the British hajj delegation is on hand to assist you," the pamphlet says.

In an age when discontent is rising among European Muslims, and terrorism is being visited upon the land, the British hajj delegation is a quiet but meaningful gesture to bond British Muslims and their government, making up for the transgressions of Lord Jim and the crew of the Patna.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Indian brides pay a high price

By Amelia Gentleman International Herald Tribune

Published: October 22, 2006

NEW DELHI Once the wedding guests were all assembled, the father of the bride brought out a large metal tray on which he had piled up 51,000 rupees (in notes of 10 and 50 rupees, to make the heap look larger) and handed it to the groom.

A new television and sofa were conspicuously displayed in the same room, so that every member of the party could see what was being offered from the bride's family to the groom as a dowry. A full list of all the other items was copied out by hand and handed to five witnesses - itemizing all the pieces of furniture, kitchen equipment and jewelry that would be delivered in payment.

Unfortunately for Kamlesh, the 18-year-old bride, who uses only one name, the payment from her father, Misrilal, was insufficient. Her new husband had expected a scooter; his parents had wanted more than the 51,000 rupees - about $1,100 - that they got. During three years of marriage, the requests for an extended dowry settlement began to be accompanied by worsening bouts of violence - until in August, he beat her over the head with a wooden stick, tied her up and locked her in the cow shed as she bled profusely.

Violent dowry harassment is an increasingly visible phenomenon in India.

An average of one dowry death is reported every 77 minutes according to the National Crime Record Bureau and victim support groups say complaints of dowry harassment are rising, fueled by a rising climate of consumerism.

"Everyone is becoming more and more westernized - they want expensive clothes, they want the consumer objects which are constantly advertised on television. A dowry is seen as an easy way to get them," said Varsha Jha, an official with the Delhi Commission for Women.

Although the giving and taking of dowry is banned here under legislation that threatens a five-year jail term, activists describe the law as "ornamental" and point out that it is almost never imposed. Dowry negotiations remain an integral part of wedding arrangements, although, to avoid legal complications, the payments are often referred to as wedding gifts.

Kamlesh has barely spoken since the attack and doctors are investigating whether she suffered permanent brain damage. The Delhi Commission for Women, a government-funded body, is helping her to prosecute her husband, who is currently under arrest for the beating.

Officials at the commission see about 40 abused women every day, and estimate that approximately 85 percent of these cases are related to dowry demands, a figure that they say has grown over the past five years.

"There has been a rise in the materialistic way of life across India and dowry demands have risen to become more extravagant in line with these materialistic needs," Kiran Walia, chairwoman of the group, said. "It is one thing to give and take dowry. But what is really obnoxious is the torture women undergo because the dowry is less than expected."

Disputes over inadequate dowry split couples from every social strata. This week the former Indian cricket player Manoj Prabhakar was in court trying to settle a case of alleged harassment filed by his estranged wife, Sandhya. She says that the Maruti car, jewelry, television, fridge, sofa-set, double bed and cash handed over by her family as dowry when they married were considered unsatisfactory by her husband, and alleged that he harassed her for more from the start of their marriage. He denies this.

"People are getting more greedy and aggressive in their dowry demands," said Jha, of the Delhi Commission for Women. "You might expect that as the country becomes more and more Westernized, this traditional practice would be dying out, like other traditions, but actually the reverse is true. The old habits remain."

"The men say, 'I'll just ask the girl's parents to get me a Honda.' But they forget that then they have to buy the petrol, so they go back to the bride's family to ask for the petrol money. It's not a one- step system; it's a continuous process."

Kamlesh's father had been saving for his daughter's wedding and dowry for 16 years before she married, and was squirreling away as much as he could from his daily earnings as a carpenter of around 125 rupees. The total cost of the wedding and dowry came to around 250,000 rupees, 60,000 of which he borrowed from his boss. When the demands for further dowry payments from the groom's side began coming, it was impossible for him to meet them.

Misrilal said his daughter was being bullied for an increased dowry payment from the start. After her husband attacked her in August, he left her, tied up, in the shed for several days, without food or water, until relatives came to her rescue.

"Within a year of marriage he was beating her because of dowry," Misrilal said, sitting with his daughter in a hospital corridor, waiting for her head wound to be examined.

The burden both of dowry payments and lavish weddings is one of the main reasons why female feticide - the practice of aborting female fetuses - remains widespread in India. Earlier this year a report in The Lancet, a British medical journal, indicated that as many as 10 million female fetuses may have been aborted in India over the past 20 years by families trying to avoid the expense of having a daughter and hoping to secure themselves a male heir.

"After all this torture, I feel that having a daughter is a curse," Misrilal said.

At the headquarters of the Delhi Commission for Women, the chairwoman, Walia, was meeting relatives of a young woman, Kusum Hardina, who set fire to herself a few weeks ago because she felt so desperate at the constant pressure from her in-laws to extract a higher dowry payment from her family.

On Sept. 22, she fought with her mother-in-law and brother-in-law over the dowry and then in a fit of anger poured kerosene over herself and set it alight. As she lay dying in hospital, she gave a statement to the police saying she had done it because she was being harassed for a dowry, Walia said.

She had tried to explain to her parents that she was being tormented, but they told her to stick with her husband. When she told the police, they sent around an officer who beat up her husband, which did not calm relations.

"We gave 22,000 rupees when they got married. But they wanted a color television, a motorcycle and a fridge as well," Asharam, the brother of the dead woman, said. "Her husband doesn't earn much as a builder, but he was greedy for possessions."

"Dowry should be stopped," he added. "Why should you give the husband's family money when you are already giving them a girl?"

Walia has launched an awareness-raising campaign, sending counselors to universities across the capital to alert students to the problem of dowry violence. But she was not optimistic about it chances of success.

"It is very unfortunate, but even educated boys are doing this. The rich set standards for the rest of society. I have no hope that this is coming to an end," she said.

For many Indians, higher education does more harm than good

By Anand Giridharadas / International Herald Tribune

Published: November 26, 2006

It would seem a good time to be Kinjal Bhuptani. She is a college student studying business in the financial capital of one of hottest economies on earth.

But she has no illusions of sharing in India's newfound prosperity when she graduates from Hinduja College this spring. While others land $100,000-a- year jobs at Goldman Sachs and Microsoft, she is more likely to make $4 a day selling credit cards door to door.

Bhuptani's mistake, if you can call it that, was not getting into one of India's most elite universities, like the Indian Institutes of Management or Indian Institutes of Technology. Those who are admitted go on to enjoy big paychecks on Wall Street and to manage some of the world's largest companies.

In the shadow of those elite institutions, most of the 11 million students in the 18,000 Indian colleges and universities receive starkly inferior training, heavy on obeisance and light on marketable skills, students, educators and business leaders say. All but a tiny handful of graduates are considered unemployable by top global and local companies.

"We might as well not have studied," Bhuptani said.

The Indian educational system is locking millions of students in the bottom berth of a two-tier economy, critics argue, depriving the country of the fullest expression of their talents and denying students a chance to share in the fruits of reform.

The problem, experts say, is in a classroom environment that infantilizes students well into their mid-20s, emphasizing silent note-taking and discipline at the expense of analysis, debate and persuasion.

Students at second- and third-tier colleges suffer not because of a dearth of technical ability or intelligence, critics note. Most simply lack the "soft skills" sought by a new generation of employers but still not taught by change-resistant colleges: the ability to speak crisp English with a placeless accent, to design and give PowerPoint presentations, to write in logically ordered paragraphs, to work collegially in teams, to grasp the nuances of leadership.

"It's almost literally a matter of life and death for them," said Kiran Karnik, president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies, an influential trade body that represents many of India's leading employers. A study that the group published last year concluded that just 10 percent of Indian graduates with generalist degrees were considered employable by major companies, compared with 25 percent of engineers.

"The university has become a placeholder," said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a former Harvard professor who recently resigned in frustration from the National Knowledge Commission, a panel advising the Indian government on overhauling its education system.

India is one of those rare countries where you become less able to find a job the more educated you get. College graduates suffer from higher jobless rates - 17 percent in the 2001 census - than high school graduates.

But even as graduates complain of the paucity of jobs, companies across India lament a lack of skilled talent. The paradox is explained, experts say, by the poor quality of the undergraduate experience. India's thousands of colleges are swallowing millions of new students every year, only to spit out degree holders that no one wants to hire.

The differences between elite colleges and those attended by the majority can be striking. St. Stephens College in New Delhi, one of the country's best-known colleges, counts among its alumni a well-known novelist (Amitav Ghosh), a top United Nations official (Shashi Tharoor), and a former president of Pakistan (General Muhammad Zia-ul- Haq), and offers an illustration, through contrast, of what lesser institutions lack.

P. Jacob Cherian, the acting principal, said the essential difference was a focus on leadership and communication skills, neglected at most other institutions. As on leading Western campuses, the students have frequent chances to meet and attend speeches by prominent leaders.

"It's when you practice the skills that you actually learn them," Cherian said.

But outside elite enclaves like St. Stephens, tertiary education is an exercise in drudgery. Take, for example, Hinduja College in Mumbai. It is in one of India's richest enclaves, but it is a second-tier, no-name school, exemplifying a middling college experience.

Between lectures, dozens of students swarmed around a reporter to complain about their education.

"What the market wants and what the school provides are totally different," said Sohail Kutchi, a commerce student.

The students said they were not learning to communicate effectively, even as mainstay activities in the Indian economy evolve from pushing papers to answering phones and making presentations. There were few chances to work in groups or hold discussions. And in this purportedly English-language college, the professors used bad grammar and spoke in thick accents.

Education experts argue that students are also graduating without the ability to assess problems and find creative solutions, in large part because their professors encourage them to be meek and obsequious.

"Out! Out! Close the door! Close the door!" a management professor barked at a student who entered his classroom at Hinduja two minutes late. A second student, caught whispering, was asked to stand up for the duration of class.

At Hinduja, the mode of instruction is often more evocative of a communist re- education camp than a modern campus.

That is bad news for Indian companies, which are on a hiring binge. Infosys, a leading outsourcing company, will take on 25,000 new people this year, from a pool of 1.5 million applicants.

The rejected are likely to include many smart graduates who merely lack skills like communication, poise and global exposure, said Mohandas Pai, director of human resources at Infosys.

"You might be very bright," he said, "but since you are studying in the vernacular you cannot speak good English. You are not taught presentation skills in your college, so you lose out."