IGNORANCE IS BLISS : U.S. college students in India.

There is nothing like meeting a college student for getting a sense of popular culture. My husband and I, who live in northern India, have just taken on a project in collaboration with a university in the United States that sends students to India. Our job is to organize a nine-week, academic, classroom-based course, interspersed with field trips and cultural events, which culminates in a four-week field placement in a development organization. For us, it has been fascinating to see how U.S. students view education and to discover some of our own biases.

One of our first surprises was that the students view their professors as equal partners. While most of them are willing to concede that the teacher may have more information on the subject at hand, this confers no special status, nor does it render his opinions any more valuable than their own.

This conflicts sharply with the Indian view. Here the teacher is the repository of all wisdom and the student is simply meant to receive. An American living in India, I have been highly critical of this view, especially as my own children have moved through the school system. They are often bored to the point of tears as the teacher drones on, never challenged or questioned. One of the inevitable side effects of such a system is a generation of students unable to think for themselves.

Confronted with the opposite approach of the U.S. students, however, I now find myself more sympathetic to a system of education that demands a person know something before he speaks. The visiting American students, when presented with the lectures our professors think necessary-given the students' near total unfamiliarity with Indian history, geography, politics, culture, and religion-complain of mind-numbing boredom and even, to quote one of them, "oppression." But when the subjects are opened for discussion, the students' comments betray an almost blissful ignorance and superficiality.

This is not surprising: They really know next to nothing about the material. What is surprising is their continued insistence that they are well-informed. The problem goes beyond typical undergraduate arrogance and seems to reflect a common situation in U.S. society today, where the sheer wealth of media-generated material on every conceivable subject makes most people believe they are reasonably well-informed about a wide variety of issues. After they've read a few copies of Time or Newsweek and sat through a newsmagazine-type television program or two, a whole range of topics-the situation in Kosovo, the fighting in Kashmir, genetic engineering, euthanasia, and the latest breakthrough in computer technology-are all checked off the list and considered understood.

Here in India, educated people are often amused by the efforts of uneducated people to use terms they clearly do not understand. Any intravenous drip, for example, is invariably referred to as "glucose." Electricity is known generically as "light." What seems to amuse those in the know is the way people latch on to the terms, confusing the part for the whole.

It is, however, something we all do, all the time, but in such an intelligent, articulate way as to fool both ourselves and most of the people we meet. Occasionally we encounter a real expert in a subject on which we are holding forth and the result can be ludicrous. (In my rabid antinuke days, when I based my arguments mainly on moral indignation, I was once picked up while hitchhiking by a man who turned out to be a nuclear physicist. He let me go on at great length about the dangers of radiation and the half-life of nuclear waste material-I quoted from half- understood leaflets with what I thought was brilliant effect-before finally revealing himself.)

The value of studying in a foreign country (particularly one as foreign as India) may lie chiefly in the experience of being totally without reference points, of being compelled to see things as if for the first time, and to come to conclusions based not on the past but on the immediate present. This is the dream that most of our students come to India holding, and they are convinced that the conclusions they come to, based purely on their own extremely limited experiences here, will somehow be both wise and correct. This might be possible if they were older, and would be even more likely if they were solidly grounded in their own disciplines. That they do not seem to be, in spite of having excellent grades, is an interesting comment on the present system of education in the United States. But I do not blame the students. The problem goes way back, perhaps to the way they were treated as children.

One of the big differences in the Indian style of child rearing and the American is that in India the child is given very little control, or even pretense of control. Unconditional love, yes, and the assurance that all her needs will be met (as far as possible), whether this is convenient for the parents or not. But her opinion is never requested, and she is expected to mind her own business and not interfere in adult affairs. This does not seem to be the case in the United States where children are given enormous importance and respect, where they are deferred to and often asked to contribute to family decision making.

The problem with this approach is the importance given to cognitive development at a time when the cognitive is relatively unimportant. Small children require emotional security first. They need to know that their parents are always there for them, managing their lives and taking care of business so that they can get on with being kids. Instead, in the United States they are solemnly consulted about where the family should go on vacation and required to negotiate with their parents as to the size of their allowance and the time they must go to bed.

I have done this sort of stuff with my own children and it has been a source of amazement to my Indian husband. "Why are you asking them?" he asks incredulously. I have always felt more enlightened than he in my respect for them as individuals. But now, seeing the results in the form of these U.S. university students, I am beginning to wonder if I haven't burdened my children with decisions they have neither the competence nor the need to make. Will they, like the students, end up believing they are perfectly equipped to give their opinion on whatever subject, simply because they have one? Will they go through life believing that every individual's opinion is as valuable as the next person's, regardless of experience, knowledge, wisdom, or spiritual depth? I shudder at the idea.