Caught in the NET

A literary KBC, written instead of oral, without any lifelines, or phone a friend and most importantly sans cheque awards, this sums up what NET is: the formidable National Eligibility Test or JRF : Junior Research Fellowship exams, due this year on the 28th June.
All enthusiastic about it initially, I ignorantly picked a preparation book from Upkar Publications, prepared by a certain Dr. B. B. Jain. I soon discovered that Dr. Jain merrily thinks that Chinua Achebe co-wrote the seminal The Empire Writes Back, (postcolonial enthusiasts please don’t tear your hair) that the epic is the most sublime form of poetry (what ever happened to concrete poetry) and that a writerly text has nothing to do with Roland Barthes’ le scriptable (this takes the straw).
Dr. Jain, or should I say the NET bureau also thinks that it is most important to know that Spenser dedicated his Faery Queene to Walter Raleigh, which year a certain King/Queen died, which year O’Neill was awarded the Nobel and what was the correct chronological order of Thomas Hardy’s novels. The NET bureau is so particular about dates that I don’t seem to be able to read anything (read as magazines/newspapers) without having the dates pop in front of my eyes, waiting to be duly memorized.
What irks me about this whole business is the utter irrelevance of the test, its ancient format and the stupidly/nonsensically, Victorian/Augustan/Puritan kind of approach to Literature. Knowing about how many times Milton married will not make anyone a qualified lecturer. No lecturer needs to know that useless piece of information by heart. Nor is it necessary to even pass it on to students, especially the next generation. This will only perpetuate English lecturers who unwittingly refer to the back benchers as the backside of the class, pronounce Herbert as Harvard, can’t spell Chaucer correctly, and teach material downloaded from Spark notes. Students need teachers who are more competent than them, not less competent.
From the research point of view (for JRF) it is unnecessary to know how many pilgrims went to St Thomas a Beckett. It would rather be better to know that Chaucer might have had feminist leanings while writing the Wife of Bath’s portrait, and analyse his depiction of her. And who the hell researches on all the crap that is asked in Paper 2 and 3 of NET? There should be sections on Postcolonial studies, contemporary theory, feminist theory, Marxist theory, post structuralism, cultural materialism, new historicism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, subaltern studies, linguistics, ELT, eco criticism, translation studies, media studies… the list can go on. Students will be then required to answer pertinent questions from their related research areas.
And for lecturers, wouldn’t it be simpler if there was an interview, or just a solid PhD, not written entirely by the guide or copy-pasted from a previous thesis. Being thorough in what you teach is more than sufficient, and please, no substandard lecturers/researchers in the name of reservations. It simply marginalises competence.
But there’s a catch. The new HRD minister has made clearing the NET a necessity for anyone who wants a lectureship. If this trend goes on, we will not produce intelligent teachers, but machines and that too rusted and outdated ones.