Education is necessary to free our minds and to enable it to think for itself. Education has two components: One, that enables us to earn our living, and two that liberates our minds and raises individual consciousness to its highest level. The aim of higher education has been under constant change for the last five thousand years. Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Islamic systems of education operated in India till the advent of British rule. Through British rule, we got the western system of education including western experimental science. India had only theoretical science and Mathematics till then. In ancient India, paraa vidya (higher education) was distinguished from aparaa vidya not by the number of years spent by the student but by the nature of problems addressed and the purpose and outcome of education. Research has always been a part and parcel of higher education in India. Individual curiosity-driven fundamental research was the ideal that all academicians followed. When this ideal of pursuing research was institutionalised in the early forties, teaching and research got separated. Ministerial institutions did research, and Universities and colleges did mostly teaching. A social fact of these systems is that they were flooded with middle-class people. Middle-class people want social recognition and approval for whatever they do. Scientists are no exception. Western science demands logic, ethics and rational analysis, while eastern religions demand faith. We got science from the West, but we forgot the scientific temper. This took a toll on the quality of science produced and as a consequence, the quality of science education. Modern experimental scientific research is cost intensive. Funding for research is largely done by government agencies and it is woefully inadequate. India spends less than 0.7 % of GDP on R&D. Being mostly from the middle class, scientists indulged in unethical practices to get quick career benefits and sacrificed excellence and pursuit of Truth! The joy of doing research was replaced by the pleasure of receiving funds and awards. For students, the joy of learning was replaced by the agony and torture of examinations. Examinations became an end in themselves and got dissociated from education and learning. In the last 150 years, more than twenty-seven education commissions, appointed by colonial and independent Indian governments, have influenced our higher education institutes (HEIs). We are still evolving, clueless about what is best for our young people. Although STEM education has attracted the most attention from both public and private sectors, NEP-2020 has ushered in a new era of integration between Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities, on one hand, and between Fundamental and Applied (read Vocational) streams, on the other hand. A redesigning of the University structure and repurposing of higher education towards social transformation is necessary