Becoming Professional

Abstract

Abstract This chapter marks a move from models of education to its contents (and discontents). Particular attention has been paid to the way university pedagogy has evolved to mould a new prototype of the private-sector engineer—fluent in English, familiar with global lifestyles, and skilled in management strategies. Training in this model has been adopted widely in engineering colleges under pressure to produce graduates who are ‘employable’, and not merely proficient in the manufacture and use of technology. Though students critique aspects of this training as being incompatible with local social mores (which the college enforces in everyday life), they also learn to focus on the self as the key locus of change. Existing class and caste inequalities are often reproduced and people with existing cultural and social capital are often determined to be more ‘employable’, contributing to a widening gap between those with capital and those without it.