Anyone who has an unkind word to say about India’s education establishment tells us the following: that the system has an unhealthy obsession with rote-learning; the syllabi is monotonous; students are not nearly trained in practical and worldly problems as much as they should be; there is a disproportionate focus on the disciplines of Science, Medicine, Law, and so on. These criticisms, however, are superficial and purely based on the experiences of people who are at the receiving end of Indian Education. There are deeper structural problems that plague this system, and an examination of Indian history and political economy will help us see them closely and clearly, allowing for an effective diagnosis.
Modern Indian Education originates in the early 19th century when scholar-administrators of the East Indian Company realized that they needed the participation of the ‘natives’ in running the provinces that came under British control, chiefly Bengal and the presidencies of Bombay and Madras. This decision was taken partly to fulfill an administrative need, and partly to ensure the satisfaction of the Indian masses, who might rebel if excluded from the day-to-day affairs of their own land. The then Governor of Bombay, Mountstuart Elphinstone—in whose honour the Elphinstone College in Mumbai was founded in 1834—wrote in an 1832 letter to the Secretary to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, that “The most important branch of education, in my opinion, is that designed to prepare natives for public employment.” The British had no plans to educate the Indian masses because their practical instincts told them that it was an impossible task. The mission, then, in the famous words of Thomas Babington Macaulay, was to “do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” This quote from Macaulay’s speech before the Governor-General of India set the stage from which Indian Education took its flight. We’ll argue that the fundamentals of this system of imparting knowledge and instilling skills haven’t changed substantially since the day Lord Macaulay registered those words. Education in Modern India is still aimed towards preparing Indians for “public employment”, rather than to enlighten them about the wisdom of their cultural heritage, or to inculcate in them a concern for the ethical and the political, or to train them in ways that promote rationality and scientific inquiry.
II
Every institution that was set up by the British in pre-independent India sought to serve the overall purpose of Colonialism. Even though the colonialists claimed that their mission in India was a ‘civilizing’ one, scholarship from all quarters have firmly established the British control of India was first and foremost a project of power, whose end result was the cultural and economic leeching of India, leading to deprivation of its masses both in the intellectual and physical spheres. This abuse of the subcontinent, however, sponsored the economic boom that turned the United Kingdom into a ‘developed nation’, a designation that remains coveted among the poorer nations of the world even today. In his recent survey of modern Indian history titled The Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, Shashi Tharoor writes that ‘the economic exploitation of India was integral to the colonial enterprise. And the vast sums of Indian revenues and loot flowing to England…provided the capital for British industry and made possible the financing of the Industrial Revolution.’ This drive to industrialize a swampy European island at the expense of the Indian subcontinent was highly dependent upon the cooperation of Indians, which is why they were allowed to acquire a highly westernized education, which eventually spawned a class of Indians—interestingly called ‘Macaulay’s Children’—that would oil the systematic exploitation of their country. This system had the task of churning out employable men (not women), who were expected to put their cultural inheritance in the backseat while serving their British masters with their newly-acquired Victorian English. “There are good grounds for arguing that education was never a top government funding priority in India or the colonial empire generally when compared with the need to maintain Britain’s place in the balance of world power or the health of the domestic economy,” writes Clive Whitehead in his study Colonial Educators: The British Indian and Colonial Education Service 1958-1983, “…a succession of British governments felt neither the necessity nor the compulsion to tackle the educational needs of the colonial territories properly.”
On the midnight of August 15, 1947, India was freed from colonial domination, but the Indian mind wasn’t. A hundred long years of Western education had turned a “class of persons Indian in blood and color”, into an elite that was “English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” In fact, the country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru admittedly remarked that he was “the last Englishman to rule in India”. Between the 1820s and 1947, a system of education devised by a few white administrators of the East India Company gradually molded the collective Indian mind to look up to the English language in awe, so much so that those who weren’t well-versed in it came to be shamed and were left to feed on self-pity. This system continues till today. So powerful are its effects, that a land that produced Sanskrit and enriched it over many, many centuries doesn’t produce Sanskrit literature anymore, and hasn’t done so in hundreds of years.Whatever non-English literature is produced in other languages, especially in Hindi, or Hindustani, has a negligible circulation. A recent study on the presence of literature in Indian languages at the World Book Fair concludes thus: “the growing vulnerability of Hindi and Indian languages included in the Eighth Schedule of Constitution demands a serious and detailed language discourse. Besides, failure of publications in catering the tastes of readers has virtually pushed the industry on a sticky wicket.”
III
The mindset that is shaped by modern schooling not only affects the language one speaks, but the life one chooses to live. Today, a large majority in this country is convinced that their own cultural and traditional heritage is vacuous, futile, and of no significance. In Carol Black’s documentary Schooling the World, a Ladakhi woman who admitted her children into an English-medium school laments that “with modern schooling, the old values of cooperation and compassion are starting to decline. Now people are thinking, I have to be a doctor or an engineer and the traditional ways of helping one another, of kindness and cooperation, are slowly dying out.” Another observes how, “before modern schooling, our education focused on the spiritual teachings. But now the emphasis is on material success. People go to school so that they can make a lot of money, have a big house, [and] drive a nice car. The whole idea of learning has been turned around to mean, “How can I make a lot of money?””
This lust for money is hinged upon another relic that independent India inherited from colonial India: the modern economy. The ‘modern economy’ is based, fundamentally, on the principles of the 18th century Industrial Revolution. The economic success of the then colonial powers, and even of the Asian Tigers and China in contemporary times, can all be attributed to the policies that align with that of Great Britain during its zenith in the 18th century. Economists today suggest that the proliferation of manufacturing sector lies at the heart of this recipe of economic growth. Carol Black, on the contrary, argues that it is the preparedness of the human resource for the coveted manufacturing sector that lies at the center of the economic development. No wonder that after South Korea gained independence, it invested huge sums in education which produced individuals ready to complement the industrial boom that was to follow. With the coming of the multinationals like Samsung, LG and Hyundai and a ‘skilled’ workforce suited as per the needs of the industry, South Korea was able to increase its per capita income to an unprecedented level. However, in the process duplicating the economic success of the Industrial Revolution, we end up essentializing education and reducing it to a tool to serve the needs of the industry and earning money, as if nothing else matters. India was stricken with this very same malady after independence. In the face of economic backwardness, Indian leaders and economists sought refuge in large-scale industrialization, which eventually shaped two important pillars of our nation—an education factory that pumps out engineers, and a cultural hysteria that worships Engineering. Since then, even though the landscape of the world economy has changed, India’s education establishment hasn’t. The country still produces more engineers than it needs, shooting the rate of unemployment and sparking sudden layoffs.
To demonstrate the frailty of the economic model based on industrialization, let us put it in the perspective of world history. Suppose we were to map out human history on a football field. Let the goal line on one end of the field stand for 1 million B.C., which is a conservative estimate of when humans became distinguishable from other primates. Let the other goal line correspond to 2000 A.D. If we were to organize and group history on the basis of means of production practiced by man, hunting and gathering occupy the first 99 yards of this 100-yard field; systematic agriculture begins in the last yard. The year 1 A.D. is only 7 inches from the final goal line, and the Industrial Revolution begins less than one inch before the same. In the history of humankind, the era of modern economic growth is equal to the width of a golf ball perched at the end of the football field. Since Capitalism is such a recent phenomenon, we should not claim to understand it in its entirety (as a matter of fact, the periodic recessions and persistent unemployment, both of which we want to avoid but can’t, serve as a proof that we do not fully comprehend it). As anthropologist Wade Davis rightly puts it, “… modern day economy is just one way of organizing economic activity.” Therefore to alter the notion and base the education on industrialization, of which we know so little, is preposterous.
IV
The offsprings of Homo Sapiens are unique in the sense that unlike other mammals, they are born prematurely. They emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace and can be molded with a surprising degree of freedom. That is why we can teach our kids to become a Christian or a Buddhist, a Socialist or a Capitalist, a war-monger or a peacenik. When viewed in this light, education becomes essential for its objective is not just to augment the earning capacity of an individual but also to acclimatize him of his surroundings. As Schooling the Worldsuccinctly puts it, children who enter the institutionalized education system are bereft of the knowledge of Ladakh, its language, its soil, its culture and its ethos. The modern education system seeks to build a uniformity of sorts. It seeks to create a workforce capable of getting jobs at the expense of human individuality. Those who stray from this normalized path are branded as failures. They form, what economists call, the urban informal sector. These people fail to enter the club of the ‘chosen ones’ who benefit from capitalism, and also lose out on the opportunity to learn about their immediate culture and ethos. Hence the phrase Dhobi ka kutta, naa ghar ka naa ghaat ka.
To conclude, we posit that the Indian education system is detached from our indigenous way of life. Rather than teaching us about the importance of our local cultures and the value of our inheritance, Indians are instead trained to venerate Western ideals of progress and run after 'development'. By these views we do not at all advocate a reactionary or conservative worldview that is expressed by certain political factions today, but put forward an idea for an education system that cuts its ties from the British past of this country and shapes children in ways that do not foster an inferiority complex in them regarding their local languages and practices, while simultaneously teaching them about the ways of the world. Rather than striking a balance between the local and the international, rural and urban, family and individual, modern education in India seems to only promote uninhibited Westernization, a recklessness towards the environment, an urban contempt for the rural way of life, and a thoughtless pursuit of individualism.
-Ayush Tiwari
-Raghav Gupta
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