CAO Daily Editorial analysis for UPSC IAS 02-October, 2017
Current Affairs Only Daily Editorial Analysis for Competitive Exams
2nd October, 2107
Archives
For a knowledge economy (The Hindu)
Context
This article explains the issues and solution regarding education system in India
In news
India plans to pump in over Rs. 10,000 crore to build 20 world-class higher education institutions.
Knowledge
Knowledge is a familiarity, awareness, or understanding of someone or something, such as facts, information, descriptions, or skills, which is acquired through experience or education by perceiving, discovering, or learning.
Knowledge can refer to a theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.
Issues
- Today, knowledge-intensive and high-technology industries contribute the most to long-term growth.
- U.S. accounts for 33% of global output of knowledge-intensive services, China 10%, but India only 2%. In high-technology manufacturing, India barely exists.
Suggested solutions
- We need to provide more autonomy to public institutions in hiring and firing people.
- We need to create a conducive knowledge ecosystem.
- The creation of a knowledge ecosystem that allows for robust institutions that focus on information gathering, planning, research, teaching, credit supply, and ensuring that people are filled with hope rather than derision for the society in which they live will make a society wealthier.
How?
Institutions can generate an ecosystem for innovation in many ways
- By providing access to knowledge capital,
- An atmosphere of inquiry,
- An experimental environment where those ideas can be tested
We also need to ensure ease in movement of personnel between universities and industry.
Obstacles
Outdated service conditions in the government sector discriminate against people who make such lateral shifts.
Nobel Prize in Literature: Honouring the elusive ‘ideal’ (Livemint)
Context
This article explains the facts of Noble Prize in literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature (Swedish: Nobelpriset i litteratur) has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words of the will of Alfred Nobel, produced “in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”
What is “ideal direction”?
Just five countries have accounted for nearly half the literature prizes since 1901: France, the United States, Britain, Germany and Sweden.
What counts as literature?
- In 2015 and 2016, the award went to writers outside the conventional conception of “literature” as novels and poetry. Svetlana Alexievich’s books are artistic sociopolitical reportage, and Bob Dylan’s lyrics arguably have more power as song than on the page.
- If the academy is determined to be adventurous, it could find other forms of art to consider as literature.
- Graphic novels, for example, arguably have built up the moral weight and imaginative power to be considered literature that goes beyond entertainment.
- A Nobel prize for graphic novels “doesn’t seem unreasonable at all”, Gabriel Winslow-Yost, an editor at the New York Review of Books, told AP.
Criticism
From 1901 to 1912, the committee, headed by the conservative Carl David af Wirsén, weighed the literary quality of a work against its contribution towards humanity’s struggle ‘toward the ideal’. Tolstoy, Ibsen, Zola, and Mark Twain were rejected in favor of authors little read today.
Also, many believe Sweden’s historic antipathy towards Russia is the reason neither Tolstoy nor Anton Chekhov was awarded the prize. During World War I and its immediate aftermath, the committee adopted a policy of neutrality, favouring writers from non-combatant countries.
