The biggest problem with the teaching of Social Science is that it cannot only be taught with the help of books or in a lab or research centre. For those seriously pursuing any particular subject of Social Science the entire world is a classroom or lab.
This may be to some extent true to the teaching of Medicine, Science and Technology too. Yet their teaching is costly and requires state-of-the-art labs, research centres and hospitals in the case of Medical Science. For excelling in Medical Science even human bodies – both alive and dead – are very important. For example, the Father of Gynaecology, James Marion Sims could not have acquired such a stature had he not got enslaved African-American women on whom he performed innumerable operations just for the sake of research. Over 150 years later protestors in the United States, including a lot of Blacks, brought down his statue for this immoral practice.
As Science subjects have to base itself on certain forms and shapes unlike Social Science which rely on amorphous and shapeless entity, excelling in the latter requires a totally different type of education, training and research.
An aspiring Science student of a less developed country can travel to a developed country to pursue higher education in reputed universities and in some years may get international recognition. This is happening in the present-day world. The direct or indirect beneficiaries of this brain-drain are the developed countries, mostly of the West.
In the case of Social Science, the opposite is true, but the people of Third World countries do not understand it. In this case scholars of the West, after acquiring big degrees from their own universities, fan out to countries of Africa, Asia and South America to have first-hand knowledge of the subject they are pursuing – Politics, History, Sociology, Geography, Economics, etc. They know that the thick books they have read and project works they have done in their classrooms were incomplete without the first hand on-the-spot study of the situation.
So we have Belgium-born economist Jean Dreze teaching in as small a city as Ranchi, William Dalrymple spending years in Old Delhi, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre in the slums of Kolkata and Kazuya Nakamizo at Murho village in a small Bihar town of Madhepura to write a biography of B P Mandal of the Mandal Commission fame.
In contrast, most of the Third World students deem it below their status to study Social Science, though this phenomenon is slightly changing now. Besides, as earning money at the early age is their prime objective – because they often come from average or poor families – they see little career option in Social Science.
Even if they take any such Social Science subject as a part of their career, they think that the best way to excel is to reach any country having predominantly White population.
They would read hundreds of books and research papers written by the same western scholars. They would parrot platitudes in any lecture or panel discussion when invited.
Most of them thus lack originality and end up seeing their own country with the western eyes. They are thus of little importance for the country of their origin.
Even the Third World scholars who have succeeded in Social Science globally have adopted the pattern of Western scholars. For example, the 2019 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Abhijit Banerjee went to the USA for higher education but along with his wife Esther Duflo worked extensively in the villages of Africa and Asia. It is on this work that he got the Nobel Prize. Contrary to the practice of Western social scientists, we hardly find any scientist working in specialised areas in research labs and space centres in the Western countries travelling to interiors of Africa and Asia as they have little scope for them. Yes, they may go in some cases, for example, in the case of medical science internationally reputed doctors go and work in the backward and remote villages of less developed countries for their research in any particular disease.
Similarly, agriculture scientists may have to go to some obscure place for their work. For instance, when Norman Borlaug, an American agronomist and the Father of Green Revolution, got the news of winning the Nobel Prize, he was working in a field in Mexico. He is known for his research in wheat production.
The problem with the lesser developed societies is that they are intellectually guided by those Western-educated social scientists of their own origin who have no knowledge of their own village or town. They should in fact “Go to masses, learn from masses and then teach the masses” (as Lenin had once said).
We in the Third World tend to invite a NASA scientist or software engineer from Silicon Valley of our origin to speak on political and educational empowerment of any particular community. The truth is that the said scholar has absolutely no knowledge of the subject he is supposed to speak. Herein lies the difference between developed and less developed societies.