Can Management be taught
"The assumption that we can take people who have never managed, bring them into a classroom and teach them management is utterly wrong."

Argument:
The question of whether management education should be limited to candidates with prior experience in a work place cannot be answered without first answering the more fundamental question, what is the objective (or in MBA-speak, deliverable) of management education? At first glance, it seems irrational to restrict any particular field of education on the basis of something as unconnected from academic merit as age. The proponents of having students without work-ex in management schools argue on a number of planks, the prime one being the freshness of high quality talent just out of premier undergraduate schools, a claim which rests on the premise that being scholastically inclined inherently makes one a good manager.

The latter view is particularly in vogue in Indian management education, especially when one considers the top rung schools like the IIMs, which pride themselves on selecting the best and brightest from the country's best undergraduate institutions like the IITs through a rigorous entrance process and subjects them to an exhaustive programme that teaches concepts in economics, business mathematics, organisation theory and even communication, convinced that after two years, they have produced thought leaders who are ready to contribute significantly to the firms they join and society as a whole.

This approach is in keeping with the traditional Indian view of education, and in particular science, as instructive rather than exploratory. However, management cannot be reduced to a science, resting on a few universally valid axioms, but is instead an art of making tradeoffs between often conflicting demands. It would perhaps be more accurate to describe management as decision