 |
 |
The difficulties that are in all countries attendant on any attempt to devise a sound system of education in science or art are accentuated in the case of India by the fact that the government of the country is in the hands of a foreign nation, and the medium of instruction necessarily a foreign tongue. Consequently the very purpose of education has had to be subordinated to the demands made on educational institutions for the supply of the necessary personnel for the recruitment of the subordinate branches of administration.
The higher aims of mental culture, scientific research, intelligent exploration of the treasure buried in the ancient classic of the country, and the co-ordination of knowledge, have all had to be persistently kept in the background. If we try to imagine a country of the size of Europe without Russia, subject to the centralized control of a body of persons foreign to it in every respect, we can guess how the system of education would be made subservient to the needs of its administration. Even though we realize the enormity of the evil of a system of education in which administrative exigencies are so predominant, we cannot free it from the thraldom of those exigencies. The price of intellectual subordination that was perforce paid for this purpose during a continuous series of years, accounts for the intellectual barrenness of India in recent times. Although the payment of the price could not be avoided, the time is now come for the authorities to be aware of it and do all they can to mitigate its effect.
There can be no question under the circumstances of the obligation of the State in the field of education. It has assumed, in addition to the ordinary responsibilities of education in any country, the custody of the moral and intellectual advancement of the people, and it must therefore widen its vision so as to perceive the full extent of its responsibility. For a long time now the Government has concentrated its attention on, and more or less confined its financial assistance to, that kind of education which would supply an adequate number of employees for its own service or for the purposes of those profession closely identified with the administration of the country. The recognized duty of the State as regards universal elementary education, the starting and equipping of model technical institutions, the inspiring and aiding of scientific research, have remained practically outside the purview of the Government. It has become necessary, however, to inaugurate a new era of State obligation in the field of education, which will furnish at the same time a powerful incentive for the community to play its own part in the diffusion of knowledge, the promotion of culture, and the encouragement of mental effort. Further, the success of all administrative undertakings and reforms in a land of illiteracy such as India, which is also governed by a foreign nation, depends so much on a sound conception of State obligation in regard to education, that it will be a serious omission to ignore the problems of Indian education in a treatise concerning the government of the country.
Modern civilization and the canons of political responsibility in many advanced states render free elementary education the duty of the State, and regard secondary and technical education as the duty, and higher education as the privilege of the parent. In many countries, just as the State has a right to compel its subjects to observer the rules of sanitation, for the common good, so also has it taken upon itself the right of compelling every boy or girl to be educated at its own cost. For to be illiterate is to be potentially insanitary and ineligible for the exercise if many of the privileges of a citizen, and nowadays even to be considered an undesirable immigrant. That India, which has been the cradle of learning, should be so appallingly illiterate among the civilized countries of the world cannot but throw a stain on the high aims of British rule. We do not imply that the British rulers in India have loved ignorance for its own sake, and have sought to keep millions of their subjects under the most inglorious bondage of absolute illiteracy. But they dealt with this question of elementary education as though its solution were bound to last through a whole eternity, and as if they were to remain in India throughout this period slowly but surely to solve it. They are still avoiding a definite programme in regard to reducing illiteracy, and at times seem prepared to perplex themselves with wholly irrelevant issues. The sins of commission have been as great s the sins of omission in the policy they have followed in the past, particularly in the sphere of primary education.
Just as the early British rulers destroyed without a thought the most magnificent system of village autonomy in the world, so their later successors uprooted an indigenous system of primary education that was ideally suited to the needs of the people. There are certain things which are assimilated to the soil of the country, and the system of infant education is one of them; and such a system was torn up without a thought, in the passion for centralization, in the firm conviction that Eastern conditions were Western conditions.
With the best of intentions, those with whom lay the shaping of the early government policy have done their worst, and this is precisely the reason why it is so difficult for British administrators to realize the magnitude of the evil. At the base of the indigenous system was the "pial" school, or street school, in every village; and the village schoolmaster was one of the esteemed functionaries of the place, his office in most cases hereditary. He was paid in kind by every household which sent a boy to school: his modern prototype gets the magnificent pay of less than half a dozen rupees a month and has probably to await the arrival of an inspecting schoolmaster. The teacher in India was always held in high esteem, and the teacher of children was no exception. The respect for him in the mind of the child was instilled by the respect, which every parent showed him, and his jurisdiction over the boy was complete and unqualified. Within the school the arrangement was such s showed at glance that the inclinations of childhood had been thoroughly understood and provided for.
Anybody who knows anything of child nature knows that it cannot keep quiet or attentive except under conditions of criminal cruelty. It must be moving its limbs and making a noise, and if possible must have at its disposal a quantity of sand. The system of instruction in the indigenous primary school provided for all these; each child freely squatted on the floor, and was not perched up on a bench; each had a quantity of sand spread before it, and all the children simultaneously and lustily pronounced each letter of the alphabet as they traced it on the sand with their tiny fingers or with a small piece of stick. There was enough sand and ample scope for the noise which children love so much, and which is so greatly conducive to their health. The primary schoolmaster of those days would have thought one of his calling a dangerous lunatic if he had kept his school still and silent. The task was as nearly assimilated to play as possible, and the merry sonorous sing-song noise with easy recourse to sand took them on the wings of playfulness, with nothing of the deleterious effects of the oppressively silent model schoolroom of the present day, constructed by the Public Works Department and presided over by a qualified primary-school teacher. All that has been reformed out of existence now. The primary school has been the first rung in a highly centralized system of departmental education. The scheme of primary education then was a consistent whole it itself and aimed at the imparting of the amount of learning essential for every man, whatever his work in life was to be. The boy learnt reading, writing, and arithmetic in a finished manner. As oral lessons he was taught multiplication tables, including fractions, as a piece of exercise for the lungs, in fact as an arithmetical song, without any effort to his memory. A sum in simple fractions, or the calculation of compound interest involving fractional rates, the old school men were able to solve by a process which had become a habit of the tongue. Today, on the other hand, our graduates of modern English education will require a quarter sheet of paper and a pencil for the same sum before they hazard an answer. Yet those were days when the Public Works Department did not plan, estimate, and supervise the school building where the boy had his instruction. Blackboards and slates and pencils were unknown. There were no registers, returns, and inspections; there was no demi-god of a Director of Public Instruction and no super-divinity of an education member to interest himself in the nature, scope, and efficiency of the instruction imparted by the village-teacher. The elaborate centralized tomfoolery that now prevails in primary education has come as blight and as a curse, and the bureaucracy is altogether unable to grasp the fact.
The notion of that estimable Englishman who told his colleague that the British Government should make immediate provision for giving socks and boots to the people of India, at least to those who bore palanquins, has been given full play by the men who have shaped the policy of the Government in regard to primary education. Under the old method of instruction, along with reading, writing, and arithmetic, moral aphorisms were ingrained in his mind with the earliest recollections of school life; a little more time spent in school, and he grappled with the rules of grammar and committed to memory stanzas embodying admirable moral sentiments, which sunk deep in his heart. His future course depended on the status of his family. If he was an artisan he became at once an apprentice under his parent or guardian, who observed him while he was at work. Doing all such minor services as might be entrusted to him; he learned the art as he grew day by day. That was the system of technical instruction. If he were to be apprenticed to a physician, he had to be; in the first instance, practically a labourer and an attendant, collecting and drying drugs, pounding them, and in fact learning the art and science, step by step, from the lowest intellectual grade. If he wanted to study higher literature, and was not trained by his own father, he was left under the care of a teacher. The distinction he earned in after life as artisan, carpenter, architect, goldsmith, physician, scholar, commentator, or author depended on his own aptitude and exertion.
Thus the primary and the secondary course, the technical course and the higher scholastic course, were each different, and formed parts of an ideal system of instruction. Ideal, because, apart from combining all the merits that a system of instruction ought to possess, it was free from two overpowering vices if the modern system: firstly the preponderance of examinations; and secondly, the conversion of the function of the teacher from that of a builder of character and complete manhood into that of a mere intellectual coach.
In the indigenous system of instruction the primary teacher was in the first place the person who moulded the character of the boy; the teacher had entire jurisdiction over the boy for what did in school, at home or abroad. The care of the boy was in fact entrusted to the teacher, and so much so that, if the boy proved troublesome in any respect, the teacher had only to be summoned and to call out the name of the boy to ensure instant obedience. The teacher realised his duty outside the school as much as inside it, and the parents of the boy recognised the teacher's jurisdiction as co-extensive with the physical and mental activity of the boy and with his moral inclinations as well. The teacher studied the boy, his ways and his aptitudes, and his pronouncement was received by the parents with all the confidence and deference that an expert's opinion commands today from a business firm. The boy, in fact grew under the eye of his teacher. Similarly, when he worked as an apprentice artisan or when he was studying the higher branches of any science, literature, or art, he was moulded on character and judgement by his teacher, with whom he often lived and to whom he often rendered personal services. If any object must be dear to a mother, it is her son, and to an Indian mother her son is all her treasure on earth, the very apple of her eye, one with whose welfare her very heart-strings are bound up, and her affection transcends all those dictates of philosophy to which she is usually amenable. If a mother in India could frankly, and with the utmost earnestness and spirit, say to a teacher that she had borne a son to be moulded or marred in character and culture by him, that he ceased to be her child from the time the teacher took possession of him - and nothing was more common in India that the expression of such a sentiment - then one can easily comprehend how the teacher in former times became in India apart and parcel of the family, and how not simply the tuition of the boy, but the boy himself, was entrusted to his care.
On the other hand, in
the present system of education one need hardly notice how thoroughly
the teacher has been disestablished from his function as a builder of
character, and relegated to the position of an instructor within the school,
with no concern whatever in the moral and emotional development of the
pupil. The teacher would resent the idea that there is anything remiss
on his part in not having a care for the boy outside the school, while
the boy himself is now prepared to turn round on the teacher and ask him
what he means by calling him to book for what took place outside the pale
of the school. The change from status to contract which has taken place
in every other department since the establishment of the British Government,
has operated nowhere with more disastrous consequences than in the relation
between the pupil and master.
The other evil is the examination evil. Not the acquisition
of knowledge, but the passing of an examination, has become the end and
aim of the teacher as well as the pupil, and the strain has become severe,
unproductive, and deleterious. The University itself is a mere examining
board, a condition which has vitiated the entire system of education.
The colleges prepare the student for examination by the University, the
high school prepare the students for college, and the primary schools
for the secondary schools. They are all engaged in the one task of manufacturing
passed candidates! The entire edifice of the system of education is founded
upon examination; the student studies to pass, and the teacher teaches
him to pass an examination; and we have the spectacle of hundreds of teachers
of all ranks engaged in perfecting a system of hot-house growth, oppressive
and artificial, blunting the intellect, enfeebling the mind, and in the
end prostrating the man. One can conceive what a huge process of mental
demoralisation and moral degradation is involved, when the resources of
the State and the available energy of all educational institutions on
the country are devoted to such a purpose.
If anything is calculated to convert a growing, developing,
and expanding mind into a mere mechanism adapted for a process of selection
and rejection and retention of facts, it is a system of education in which
examination is the be-all and end-all of a student's career. Instead of
assimilation, there is mere loading; instead of mental development, there
is a process of what is bound ultimately to prove mental enervation; instead
of culture becoming the end, passing a test becomes the end; and finally,
instead of a man whose mind has been fortified by the acquisition of valuable
and well-assimilated knowledge, whose actions are the outcome of healthy
emotions, rational convictions, and well-balanced judgement, we have a
sorry specimen of a passed candidate.
Indian student life culminates in producing a vast majority
of failed candidates, and a small minority of passed candidates; and the
few exceptions superior to either class occur in spite of our system.
The teacher does not influence the judgement, train the emotions, and
build the character of the student, but undertakes to coach him for a
test; and the whole-hearted aim of the student himself is in exceptional
cases to get a pass as high as he can; it does not matter how low in most
others. The strain imposed on him is tremendous, as the strain of all
unnatural processes is bound to be. Is it not a feat of intellectual acrobatics
to pass off the appearance of knowledge for knowledge itself, and to be
capable of doing this simultaneously with regard to a number of subjects,
at the risk of being pronounced a failure in all, if he should fail in
any one of them? What can be calculated to make a mechanism of a mind
more efficiently than this? If in this annual process of selection and
rejection of candidates a large number must be permanently thrown out,
what an amount of intellectual wreckage does the growing and accumulating
percentage of failures evidence! Apart from all other considerations,
is it a healthy feature that thousands of young men should be permitted
to go through life as educational failures? The present system is so deplorably
constituted that most of those who pass successfully become too soon in
life victims of the stain they have gone through, in many cases leaving
their parents impoverished; and most of those who do not get through successfully
believe that a stamp of failure has been put on them from which there
is no escape so long as educational qualification counts for anything.
Such is the system of the present, yielding the minimum of benefit and
the maximum of evil.
Certainly the horizon of knowledge has been expanded, new
subjects have been added to the curriculum of study, equality of opportunity
has been created, a standard of merit has been instituted, and the latest
advances in the domain of experimental sciences are embodied in the syllabus
of instruction. All these are no doubt great benefits, but they could
have been secured at much less cost and to far better advantage. If only
British Ministers had recognised the merits of the prevalent system of
instruction before they so ruthlessly displaced it, a great deal of what
was good in it would have been preserved. Did they remember that monuments
and palaces, hill-forts and citadels, had been built long before the existence
of an engineering college? Did they remember that so vast was the advance
made in the study of astronomy and in the methods of astronomical calculation
that, without any of the aids of a modern observatory, planetary movements
and even meteorological events had been foretold with marvellous accuracy?
Did they remember that the properties of drugs and minerals had been so
perfected, as to excite the wonder of modern scientists - and that all
this had been achieved without the aid of a modern laboratory? In what
branches of skilled workmanship was the Indian without eminent aptitude?
What is becoming of all this knowledge, of all the skill and all the capacity
which then was in existence in such abundance? Already we have become
strangers to our own inheritance that the monumental works of the past
in every branch of science and art seem to us as though they were the
achievements of a nation we know not, whose descendants we seem not to
be! For such a result the British Government is not a little answerable.
Vandalism is the only word we can apply to the destructive work they have
accomplished in constructing new systems.
Those who, for instance, swept off the indigenous system
of primary education, hardly knowing what they were about, are still experimenting
with the early boyhood of Indians. They were guilty of two capital errors
of judgement: first, in believing that the British method, from the infant
standard of instruction upwards, could be transplanted to India; and second,
in the name of efficiency in bringing even primary education under a centralised
control. In fact, the notion has taken possession of them that primary
school teachers should be trained in the latest methods of German pedagogy
for teaching infants. The Indian system, on the other hand, would have
produced admirable results if only the Government had offered financial
support and entertained some respect for what had stood the test of time
and would have been in a flourishing state to-day but for the blighting
zeal of a centralising bureaucracy. A well-shaded choultry with an open
space round it, a plentiful supply of sand for the children to trace the
alphabet in, would be enough equipment, and benches and chairs might altogether
disappear in all primary schools.
India is a poor country, but until yesterday, with all
its poverty, it loved learning wit such exclusive passion that material
comfort had little fascination for its people. The result of British administration,
however, has been to raise the cost of everything that it has touched,
and even primary education and secondary education has become prohibitively
costly, and no one can now think of education except as a rich man's privilege.
Picture-books, kindergarten toys, model gardens, and excursions for object
lessons may all be in the fitness of things in European countries, but
in India, where the poverty of people is overwhelming, the ancient method
of instruction is the best and most substantially suited for the country.
Further, the genius of the Indian people has been entirely different from
that of European nations. To multiply wants, to make a man endlessly dependent
on external aid, to make three steps of one - such has been the trend
of European civilisation. That is the spirit of industrialism; text-books,
picture-books, atlases, nay, even note-books are produced in a spirit
of competition in the West; but it will be a sad plight for Indian primary
education to be made an objective of this spirit of industrialism.
The shortest and cheapest route to learning, however thorny
and rugged it may be, not a royal road with an avenue of trees, is the
one that the Indian has been taught to prefer. Moreover, the Indian principle
has been to teach first what is to last through life, and to make it a
part of a man's individuality. Moral aphorisms and mathematical tables,
following invocation to the All-Ruling Power, were amongst the earliest
acquisitions of the Indian schoolboy. Now his first introduction is to
the picture of a striped zebra which he comes to glorify in his childish
fancy as an object of consequence in his school-going, and his first acquaintance
with letters is bound up with associations with the palm-tree, the spider,
and the crab. These he sees with his own eyes as they are, but when he
sees them in his books as well, he believes that he is taught in the school
to know them more intimately. He grows up with no seeds of moral dictates,
religious humility, trust, and faith sown in his mind at this morning
hour of his education. He is practically led to begin his moral and mental
development without any deeper foundation than the feeble excitement caused
by the sight of picture maps and clay models. This is all very well for
a nation that has its faith embedded in a robust materialism and believes
in curing, by a spirit of magnificent social service, moral and social
evils whose growth has been left unhindered and unhampered. For a people
whose problem of life has never been identical with an acquisition of
the comforts of the world or limited by the balance they may have in the
bank or in the cash-box, and with whom prevention rather than cure of
evils, social and moral, has claimed prime considerations, the dawn of
school life has always been associated with moral and religious notions
rendered charming to the senses of the adolescent by a vivid manner of
portrayal.
The ideal schoolboy of the Hindus is one who insisted
upon beginning his practice of the alphabet with the name of the God of
his own choice, which method the imperious and self-glorifying king, his
father, would not brook. He obtained relief from the parental tyranny
by the deliverance of Providence, whose omnipresence he asserted, while
the haughty father in supreme disdain denied it again, kicking a pillar
and asking the boy whether his God, if omnipresent, was in that pillar.
This denied and reviled, the God manifested himself, according to Hindu
Puranic lore, as leonine man, justified the faith of the child, and rescued
him from the tyranny of one who was at once his father and king, a religious
tyrant and an infidel. Just as the Hindu boy began his alphabet by venerating
the name of God, so also an author as profound as Sushrutha, one of the
greatest Indian writers on anatomy and medicine, whose works will come
as a surprise to Western scholars of the present day, or a grammarian
like Panini, the perfection of whose work is marvellous, would not begin
his works without an invocation. Thus the Hindu aim of existence are fundamentally
different from those of European nations. They were imparted to awakening
childhood by associating secular knowledge with reverence to the Supreme
Being, and later on in the career of the student by making the finite
knowledge of man a narrow pathway from which to see glimpses of the domain
of the unchanging and the eternal. Mundane existence in their view has
been but a gift and an occasion for realising ulterior truths, by acting
upon which the Hindu strove and even now strives to obtain final bliss.
Whatever may befall the schoolboy as he grows up, whatever doubts may
assail him, however scornful of undemonstrable sentiments and beliefs
he may grow to be, the time when he begins to go to school is the time
for him to learn reverence and to imbibe in his earliest sayings and repetitions
the dictates of good conduct.
Our British rulers are not, of course, opposed to any of
these things, but they have devised such that there is absolutely no scope
for the national system to prevail. They should be convinced sooner rather
than later of the fact that they cannot make India a part of Europe, and
that the best thing they can do is to help India along its own line of
development, and not to try to transform it, a process which can only
end by mutilating it. The education of children is almost like the cultivation
of the soil, which is bound up with the physical features and meteorological
conditions of the tract of the country wherein the cultivable area lies.
To utilise the Western system of instruction in the very earliest stages
is not only to begin by giving a wholly wrong outlook, but to deprive
the child of what it may fail in most cases to regain in later life. In
spite of all these years of mistake, there is still for the Government
to retrace its steps and to release primary education in this country
from the trammels of a Western outfit, from the tyranny of a foreign method,
and from the essential unproductiveness of making early education a process
of feeding the supposed fancies of the child, not according to the genius
of his own race, but in keeping with that of another. Above all, the certain
contingency of gradually but inevitably making primary education as costly
as it is in the United Kingdom is to be dreaded as a curse in the disguise
of a boon. To place it under the withering control of a centralised department
with a radiating staff of Indian, Provincial, and upper subordinate and
lower services, is to let in the scorching heat of a departmental divinity
from one of the many solar systems of the Indian bureaucracy. To release
primary education from the bondage of centralised control, and to free
it from its Western habiliments, is to restore to the nation its own children.
We do not want the Western quality and the Western standard of costliness,
in the primary school at any rate. Let the Western method and manner begin
from the high school secondary course, and to a fuller extent from the
high school course, and have to free play in the collegiate curriculum.
Let the nation have the privilege and the responsibility, the right and
the obligation, of laying the foundations of education as the genius of
the race demands and the means of the people will permit. Let no child
be denied education because the Western trappings in which it is to be
clothed are so costly that all the children cannot afford it.
To an Indian it is the substance and not the manner of
giving which is important; let England by all means have for herself the
Western method of teaching the alphabet and the numbers, but let India
be allowed its immemorial method so far as the system of inculcating early
moral lessons and of strengthening the faculties of the mind is concerned.
After this is accomplished, let the Director and his abundant and fast-increasing
staff of Inspectors, Assistant-Inspectors, Sub-Assistants, Inspecting
School Masters, and any others who may be in store for a service-ridden
country like India, assume charge of the education of the boy. But in
the first instance, at the softest, tenderest, and most impressionable
period of existence, let the community itself perform the ceremony of
initiating the child's education. The primary school is, in fact, a portion
of home; it is not even a place of migration, as is the college; in literal
truth the beginning of a boy's education is a sacrament of Hindu life.
It is an actual ceremony of initiation with appropriate hymns which to-day,
through the all-pervading fascination of Western ideals, is being allowed
by men of modern education to fall into disguise. This sacred custom has
been wrenched from its ancient setting and cast aside to make room for
Western methods totally unsuitable to Eastern conditions, and for which
the people also have to pay. As if all this were not sufficient, the expenditure
on this score is made an obstacle in the way of free elementary education.