Today the best of students and the best of parents have shifted their academic allegiance from ‘social/humane’ to ‘professional’ education under the diktat of market imperatives. The professional pragmatics, powered by information, technological and market superhighways, have forever changed the pedagogical contours and thrust of higher education. While on one hand this ‘shift and speed’ has led to virtual mushrooming of ‘instant-education-outlets,’ on the other it has created an unprecedented epistemic lull in the discipline of Social Sciences and Humanities. The lucre inherent in instant information has taken the lustre off conventional knowledge and wisdom, and put Social Science education under tremendous pressure. In other words the displacement has created an epistemic imbalance that needs to be addressed instantly, especially by custodians of education—institutional or otherwise.
The current academic bias exists at various levels. Apart from facing inter-disciplinary academic indifference vis-a-vis technological or management education, within the discipline itself, Social Sciences education suffers from a kind of language-schism as medium of instruction and ‘subject-resource’ at the level of higher education. While it is still easier to get good text-books in English, there is a definite paucity of standard text (book) resources in Hindi or other Indian languages. At one level this also acts as a dampener for the Social Science enthusiast.