India, May 17 -- Why are twenty-two lakh people competing for what amounts to a few thousand seats in government medical colleges?

Have you observed how animal babies grow up mostly on their own? The young of almost every species are equipped by instinct to navigate the world their parents inhabited, because that world will not change significantly between one generation and the next. The human child is the single exception, and the exception is not incidental; it is the definition of the species. The human child must be raised, not merely kept alive and fed, but formed in full: given enough knowledge of itself to distinguish what draws it from where the crowd around it is headed. When that inner formation is absent, the child grows in t...