Schooling in India — The First Frontier

Nalanda University — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda
As India ( Bharat ) is nearing it’s 70th independence day this August 15th, I can’t help but think about what freedom really means. As I see it from a 30,000 feet level (a saying borrowed from my Indian Air Force Pilot father who served the country for many decades), I still see mental slavery rampant in most of the populace, both rural and urban.
“I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. — But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia . . .”
Now, Indians have been continuously programmed via schooling and the education system for close 200 years, but surprisingly not much has changed even after independence which happened 7 decades back. The objective of the colonialists was to suppress local indigenous thought process and cultures and introduce their own, which they have done remarkably well.
The contempt for local knowledge was so entrenched that in 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay, laid down as “The Civilizing Mission”(1) a document, you can read in it’s entirety, but pay attention to this particular extract:
This coming from the representative of a country that owes most of it’s wealth and knowledge to it’s plundering of the sub-continent as well as claiming to have actually had a goal to “better” the natives.
This coming from a country who owes gratitude to the millions of Indian soldiers who served during both world wars (something that became a thorn in their own flesh multiple times such as the Revolt of 1857 (2) (contemptuously dubbed, “The Sepoy Mutiny”), the pan Indian revolt led by the legendary Jyotindranath Mukherjee or “Bagha Jatin”(3) (many people think he is more entitled to be called the “Father of the Nation” than anyone else, but sadly he isn’t in regular history books despite sufficient documentation), and finally the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946 (4) which literally forced the British to leave India finally, because of sheer numbers and suppressed anger.
There’s a lot more, but I want to re-focus this on schooling and education, because that is where thought is really formed and encouraged (or supposed to be). Prior to any of the invasions, India already had institutions of higher learning and specialization in Takshashila (in current day Pakistan) and Nalanda and the traditional gurukula system which has been handing down knowledge for over 5000 years. It’s ironic for the British Macaulay to dub this backward, considering a lot of modern science actually came out of these ancient systems even though they haven’t been properly attributed to such as; rhinoplasty (5) which is called nasa-sandhana in ayurveda and dates back to both Sushruta (wikipedia dates conflict with science museum dates I’ve seen) as well as a few rishikas (6) according to scholars of sanskrit I recently had the pleasure of speaking to. However, I have personally encountered healing methods in India (yoga is the only thing that cured my asthma and modern medical science could not do anything except pump me with steroids during an attack). I have actually seen Siddha practitioners reverse dead kidneys and take people off dialysis and completely cure many forms of cancer in very short periods. This is my eye-witness account, so you can feel free to dismiss whatever you like.
Nevertheless, my interest in education started with the birth of my first daughter. I always knew there was something off with my schooling. Unlike others, I didn’t enjoy it a bit, even though I was slightly better than average (in a way it was nice because you can easily bypass attention which gets focused on the top and the bottom of the class). However, during studying for my engineering degree I realized the faults of the system. It was not designed for learning at all. It’s a top-down information delivery mechanism which divides everything into defined easy to follow spaces with no real exploratory mechanisms. I learnt that, exploration comes later but it is dependent on funding of projects which in turn are dependent on the commercial viability of the ideas. In a sense it is slavery to money (which pretty much every government today is simply printing).
And when one starts going down the rabbit hole, you realize that this idea starts in school. The idea that the world is divided into a limited set of well defined subjects which must be taught by qualified teachers at school in well defined periods of time is absolutely berserk. And out of this insanity comes curricula. The same curricula that was used to enslave the minds of the colonies by their rulers, and is now used by the politicians.
While it is heartening to see many schools shunning the idea of formal education and giving things other than STEM, it’s due, the focus on STEM subjects is actually disheartening because they’re re-establishing the unfortunate and unnecessary hierarchy of importance that already exists between Science and Mathematics compared to the Arts. While, I’m not anti-science (I am anti bad science, which is popular and for another day), I don’t want to be anti-arts either which seems to completely penetrate the Indian education system. Arts is always extra-curricular or co-curricular and denigrated as a second grade citizen in learning.
As an example, in a few different visits to Arivu School at Mysore where they have annual themes, I noticed how children learn so much just from the theme. As an example, they had the bicycle theme one year and all the students learnt different topics through the bicycle theme. In physics there’s the concept of gyroscope, cycles have both a history and geography, but the thing that actually spoke to me the most was the romantic love story of a couple (7) who met at an Indian university, got married and then she (who was of royal lineage) went back to her country. The guy had to cycle through 8 countries to reach this little European nation. They mapped the bicycle route and learnt a lot about the countries he rode through to reach Sweden. It’s a far more interesting way to learn both geography and culture.
Now, this school has been run as a non-profit and has been struggling for funds recently due to its requirement to build more infrastructure. And, they focus and give a lot of importance to non-academic development of the child, and a very healthy way of even tackling academic subjects (no tests, homework etc because there’s continuous evaluation by the teachers unbeknownst to the child). They’re doing so many things right and it’s heartening to see, but when it comes to “official” curricula, they still follow the Karnataka State Board, which is unfortunate, because it’s defined curricula.
In fact, besides Arivu, I also looked at some other incredible schools that are following an alternative philosophy of education such as Sholai, the schools based on J Krishnamurthy’s philosophies and many other institutions.
I was trying really hard to find at least ONE school in India that follows something akin to the Sudbury school model, and I’m sad to say, I’ve not found one yet. It’s no wonder that the number of homeschoolers, and more importantly unschoolers in India is on the rise. The issue always goes back to still being slaves to curricula which dates back to British invasions and their modifications to the education systems and thought processes that were indigenous.
While most people are aware to some extent of Ayurveda, Unani and some even about Siddha medicine as an example, hardly anyone has heard of or even gives credence to the wealth of information at our disposal in our indigenous systems. One such example is the imposition of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act as recently as 2009 which is no less than idiocy. Read up on how this has negatively affected the baiga tribes (9). There are thousands of such systems in India. The negative effects that happened in Ladakh due to this intervention are evident and have been studied. It’s the same psychological colonial mindset which thinks it needs to “civilize” everyone.
This idiocy of being a slave to a defined curricula set by the state (a bunch of clueless people) continues despite sufficient evidence of the positives of the contrary. An organic farmer out of Kollegal, Kailash Murthy went into natural farming (an ancient indigenous method) and his production quantities as well as quality is literally a slap in the face of modern conventional agriculture with a western input bias taught in universities. There are hundreds of such examples. Also, did you know that since independence, not a single organic farmer in India has committed suicide unlike their counterparts doing modern agriculture as taught by universities? So, which should really be taught and propagated.
The interesting thing is the farms and the journeys of these organic farmers. Each farm is unique. Each journey is unique. It’s most unlike a factory. It’s products are healthier for the body and have a much lower footprint on the environment. Many of the forest farms don’t even need to be watered, unlike the umpteen borewells which are not only depleting groundwater levels but are risking desertification of formerly fertile land.
Factory farming just doesn’t cut it and doesn’t provide a long-term solution to the farmer or the consumer and risks our bio-diversity. We’ve already made extinct many indigenous bovine breeds in favour of a couple of high producing western breeds without taking into account things like environmental impacts and total cost of ownership over it’s lifetime. There still exist very idiotic policies in the state of Kerala when it comes to indigenous cattle.
Factory systems do produce a similar product everytime, and curricula has been doing this with education. Do you really want your child’s thought process to be factory produced? Everything similar.
Till Indians shun the entire concept of formal curricula at least at the basic schooling level, develop respect for indigenous methods that worked, study their true history from whatever sources available and let children develop, they’ll continue to be slaves of their colonizers, because of their mindset.
The urge to “teach” and control is so prevalent, it’s not even funny. In fact, I challenge any parent to pick up any language foreign to them faster than a child under 7 thrown into an immersion environment such as a foreign country or a different territory where they don’t speak the language.
References
The places where I did see this being practiced in India is Swaraj University and many families who unschool their kids. It is my hope, that schools in India will have the guts to actually completely ditch their affiliations to boards and institutions and come out of the slave mindset.
Only, then will India be truly free. Free to actually think and have original thoughts, and to get rid of the colonized mindset, so prevalent even 70 years after independence.
- The Civilizing Mission — By Thomas Macaulay Babington
- The Great Revolt of 1857 — By Deepak Chaturvedi
- Bagha Jatin, The Forgotten Hero — By Anirban Ganguly
- The Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of 1946 — By Anirban Mitra
- Nasa-Sandhana in Ayurveda — Rajesh Gupta, Narendra Singh Sekhawat
- Ancient Indias liberated Women — By Brishti Guha
- Cycling Across 8 Countries — By Shabdita Pareek
- Unschooled Mumbai Teenager — Indian Express
- Indigenizing Curriculum — By Padma Sarangapani
- Launching the Multiversity — By Claude Alvares
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on August 9, 2017.
