Those who advocate the use of higher education to educate for sustainable development know that what they really seek is some form of value education but they avoid calling it that. Instead, they use the euphemism of ‘competence’ to make it appear more acceptable to higher education. The plan works in situations where we judge the quality of education by how many pass exams, or what the students think about the teachers, but generally fails when we judge the quality of education as resulting in social change.

We would all agree that the creation of autonomous thinking individuals should be the goal of education (whether it has any direct social purpose or not). However, the majority of schools/colleges in India (and possibly in Pakistan and a number of such countries) fail in this regard. This is not due to the burden of any other social purpose or the planned need for indoctrination. What happens in our education system is the outcome of a number of constraints…