One of the greatest unmet challenges of contemporary India has been education. The state has not been able to live up to its self-professed role of providing education to all. It is necessary, in a context of massive and rapid changes brought about by a globalising world and a transforming society, to reiterate the well known but oft-forgotten adage that education is, in essence, about opening up the student's mind to the riches of the universe.
Basudev Chatterji (
chatterji.basu@gmail.com) is a historian presently at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. He is a former Chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research.
This is a revised version of the Convocation Address delivered by the author of Dibrugarh University earlier this year.
Historically, education, and especially universities, have played a central transformatory role. The development of education and universities in the different areas of Europe moulded the mind of the Western world over the centuries. The same is true for the rest of the world, although with different temporal depths.1 Above all, universities have been the custodians of the intellectual capital of the world and promoters of culture and specialised knowledge. In the words of one of the most beautiful minds of the last century, Alfred North Whitehead (1929: 13),
Culture is an activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feelings. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth. What we should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction. Their expert knowledge will give them a ground to start from and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as art.
Before I proceed to make some remarks on our universities, I should like to draw attention to our schools from where the students in our universities are recruited. In a country of the size of India where material, social and cultural endowments are so unevenly distributed, our school system needs to make massive advances not only in terms of numbers but in terms of quality. Elementary education has to be made available to all. It was part of the directive principles of our Constitution; it is now a right. A beginning has been made. I hope that from this stage itself, sufficient attention is paid not merely to the enrolment numbers but also to the standard of education imparted so that children are able to use it as they grow up in life.
The same applies to our secondary school system. Here too, there is need for a huge expansion with innovative pedagogical practices. In both urban and especially in rural areas this alone can provide our children a level playing field in life. Admittedly, in many urban centres there are some very good schools and schoolteachers, but their numbers are too small and access to them is limited. There is enormous difference in the quality of education imparted by schools catering to the different segments of our society. We need many more schools with qualified teachers in both our urban and rural areas.
A large number of the children of the economically disadvantaged miss out on primary education. We need many more schools and dedicated teachers to rescue these children from illiteracy and un-education. The government and a number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are concerned about this and are doing what they can. But the problem is daunting. Legislation to ban child labour has had but limited effect so far. Government efforts need to be augmented by contributions from wider society; the privileged owe this. We should never forget that India is a very rich country of very poor people.
The importance of a good system of school education cannot be emphasised enough. Schools are, after all, where children are trained in the joy and pleasure of learning. It is here that the best from the wealth of tradition is transferred from one generation to another and is continually renewed. Earlier, the family, mothers in particular, gave this training, albeit in differential degrees according to their position in the social hierarchy. Today, even if literacy has grown, modern economic life is weakening this role of the family. Moreover in this time of “information technology,” time for storytelling from the epics, folk tales and other classics of value at home is on the decline. So the dependence on school for the continuance and health of human society is on the rise.
The Ideal School
The general principles of school education remain in the nature of “best ideals” towards which we must strive, knowing well that ideals to be ideals, as Gandhi put it, must ever be beyond reach.
The most fundamental principle is not to clutter the mind of young children with too much information and too many disparate ideas. Undigested, they remain, what Whitehead called “inert ideas.” “Education with inert ideas is not only useless, it is, above all things, harmful—corruptio optimi pessima (Corruption of the best is the worst)” (Whitehead: 13).
From the start, schools need to build upon the natural (Einstein calls it divine) curiosity with which children are endowed. Only a bolus of few important ideas (subjects) and information which further stimulate curiosity need be provided. These must be communicated in a manner which can be easily digested through actual game-like activities, so that the pupils can make them their own and “play” with them in different possible ways, that is, use them. It is thus that the child ceases to be a passive receptacle of disconnected ideas. It is through playful activity that the child acquires the most valuable education—the joy of discovery and understanding; it acquires “the art of the utilisation of knowledge” (Whitehead: 16). As an anonymous wise man of our time puts it:
If I hear, I forget.
If I see, I remember.
If I do, I understand.
It is in the same spirit that languages and some mathematical ideas can be taught to children in early education. It is important to point out here that from infancy, children are endowed with the ability to learn to speak and then learn to write. I quote Whitehead (28) again:
What an appalling task, the correlation of meaning with an analysis of sounds …correlation of sounds with shapes. We all know that the infant does it and the miracle of his achievement is explicable. But so are all miracles and yet to the wise they remain miracles. Similarly the hardest task in mathematics is the study of elements of algebra and yet this stage must precede the comparative simplicity of the differential calculations.
There is of course the question of the medium of instruction. Undoubtedly primary education is best imparted through the mother tongue. This is easy in monolingual societies. But the numbers of such societies are few and further shrinking with large number of migration across the world. In India people from neighbouring and distant parts of the country are domiciled in different linguistic regions.2
After Class five, children can be introduced to at least two other useful languages gradually, with the mother tongue acting as a bridge to a multilingual education. Linguistics experts tell us, and we know from our experience of life, whether as parents or academics, that the cognitive functions of the child’s brain at this stage allow this to be achieved with relative ease. And it is easy to see that a multilingual school system is desirable for many reasons: it resists the tyranny of linguistic majoritarianism which only generates the highly flawed idea of “identity politics;” it promotes social inclusiveness; it helps equalise opportunity for social mobility; it helps geographical mobility; it enables interaction with a larger community; and it opens up ever-widening horizons of learning.
Educationists the world over are working hard to come up with the right pedagogical practices for achieving this. The founding fathers of our school education system had devised a three-language formula and in senior school we had a choice of learning the elements of one classical language. This is how I was brought up and I am the richer for it. Besides, it is well known that you do not know your own language well if you do not know another language.
Early training in the learning of languages as well as writing, whether a composition, an essay or a translation of a text, are valuable assets. Writing and thinking go together and exercise the mind. The child learns first-hand how to organise information and the art of presenting them in a coherent manner. Such training is very useful later in life whether in the job market or for higher education and research, and is becoming more so in today’s world. Much rather acquire this training in schools rather than relying on 30-day language teaching shops which have mushroomed in various towns and cities of the country. So I plead that all of us participate with dispassion in evolving an appropriate and effective way of enriching the linguistic abilities of our youth. It does not seem impossible to imagine a world where classical, local, regional and global languages can flourish together.
In senior school, “humanities” must be an integral part of the curriculum. Some practical-minded people ask, what is the use of, say, history and literature? The answer is that they provide the young students understanding of the human condition. And understanding is useful for living an examined life.
Nurturing Freedom
But for any of these to be achieved, dedicated teachers who are artists in nurturing young minds derive pleasure from it and are passionate about it are required in increasingly large numbers and need to be continuously replenished. They have to teach through imaginative methods including a judicious mix of modern technologies and manual skills. Instead of standardised textbooks, it is a schoolteacher who should devise workbooks appropriate to the local circumstances and the social background of children and which yet open up wider horizons of our varied world.
Finally, I should like to suggest that our teachers should be given minimum coercive powers and maximum freedom. This is vital so that they can devise their pedagogical practices without external pressure and interference. For it is the schoolteachers who are to see the years spent at school do not dull the child’s curiosity or curb their individual talent, creativity and originality. Schools are there to prepare the young to develop a harmonious and humane personality, and lay the psychological foundations which alone lead to “a joyous desire for the highest possessions of men [humans]—knowledge and artist-like workmanship” (Einstein 1954: 62). Thus teachers who educate by developing the child-like inclination to play and encourage independent thinking are remembered with respect and affection by the pupils for the rest of their lives. They carry the education acquired from them when they go for their higher education, in particular, the joy of learning through their child-like inclination for play. A memorable aphorism of Nietzsche goes as follows; “Genius is to retrieve the seriousness of a child at play.”
A word about history teaching in schools, which is of special interest to me. At the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), under our outreach programme called “Joys of History,” my colleague and Council Member Narayani Gupta and I discussed our ideas on the teaching of history with some of the finest schoolteachers in Delhi as well as senior officials of the National Council of Educational Research and Training. They have been highly appreciative of some of our ideas, such as the idea of evolving workbooks and project work which sharpen the children’s observational capacities (such as writing a report of what they see on either side of the roads as they come to the school), and stimulating them to seek information rather than making them remember what they do not necessarily want to know.
The ideas of time and location can be taught through similar exercises. Recently one of the schools set their students to go to a major market of Delhi and acquire information through interviews of shopkeepers and buyers about the past of that location. Through such an exercise important questions arose which the teacher could help them find answers to. I sincerely hope that many such experiments are tried to see if there is not a better way to impart historical mindedness without recourse to dry facts. Above all we need to insulate history teaching from becoming the playground of external and non-academic pressures to which it is particularly susceptible in our country.
Historically, as I have already mentioned at the outset, universities have trained the pioneers of human civilisations. They are meant to be institutions of knowledge and higher research. But, as Whitehead had pointed out long ago, this is not enough to justify their existence. With the advent of print culture and the system of apprenticeship, and more recently the internet, acquisition of knowledge and professional training can be more cheaply acquired, wrote Whitehead (97–98),
The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life by uniting
the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of knowledge. The university imparts information, but it imparts it imaginatively. At least, this is the function which it should perform for society. A university which fails in this respect has no reason for existence...[I]maginative consideration transforms knowledge. A fact is no longer a bare fact: it is invested with all its possibilities. It is no longer a burden on the memory: it is energising as the poet of our dreams and the architect of our purposes. Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts: it is a way of illuminating the facts…It enables men [persons] to construct an intellectual vision of a new world, and it preserves the zest of life by the suggestion of satisfying purposes.
Universities are also the place where the youth enter an active phase of self-development. In this phase they require to be given some leisure, freedom to think fearlessly and to interact with other minds in the university within a culture of argument and dissent. Most importantly, as in schools, they should not be overburdened with too many subjects and too strenuous a point system. It only leads to superficiality. Again, like in schools, the quality of the faculty of colleges and universities is central to their effective functioning. They have to execute the task of education and research. Contact and conversation with the young students at their imaginative best is vital for imaginative teaching and research.
The ‘Modern’ University
The year 1857 is known more for the Great Revolt and less for the fact that three “modern” universities were established in the three Presidencies of the British Empire in India. The intellectual encounter of India with Western knowledge systems was well underway for some time. It intensified as the British began to organise their rule over India from the Presidency of Bengal. Not surprisingly, it was in Calcutta that the encounter was at its most intense. A small section of its traditionally educated classes, mostly upper-caste males, took the lead in evaluating the “usefulness” of Western/ “modern” learning to deal with the challenges of their changing times. They regarded such learning to be the source of the ascendancy of the West through which it established its dominance over the rest of the world. How else could a handful of men from an island country come to rule over a vast subcontinent with an age-old civilisation (the knowledge about which too had been substantially provided by the early British and European Orientalists).
It was this social group which took the initiative in founding the Hindu College in Calcutta in 1817 (later called the Presidency College, and like the Cotton College in Guwahati, is now a full-fledged university). This was a period of intense debate and argument within these social groups about what was valuable in both India’s traditional learning and “modern” education. They took up issues of religion, women’s education and scientific education and increasingly questioned the reasons for India’s subjection. So a major dynamic and catalytic force in Indian society was already at work. The establishment of the three modern universities gave a fresh impetus to
this force.
The British founders of these universities might have intended them for their own purposes, but we all know from life that intentions often produce unintended consequences. Indeed, the relationship between human intentions and actions and the consequences are far too complex, especially where the life of the mind is concerned. By the third quarter of the 19th century, it was from these universities that there emerged a small but vocal and articulate intelligentsia—one of the first of its kind in the non-Western world. Although highly restricted in numbers in relation to the total population of the country, their influence was not so restricted, especially over time.
Among them were powerful thinkers, scientists, litterateurs, artists and of course lawyers who pioneered changes in perceptions and social outlook and values and world views; it is they who initiated ideas of “nationalism,” freedom and socio-economic development and mediated some of the major influences which shaped modern Indian life. Most importantly, they provided a pool of dedicated teachers not only in the presidencies but in the newer colleges and universities which came up gradually in different parts of the country in the late 19th and the early decades of the 20th centuries. Each one of these colleges and universities, whether in Allahabad, Delhi, Lahore or Lucknow or in southern and western India, could attract excellent faculties and their academic standards were high. But the number and spread of these institutions of higher learning was limited and small in size and largely restricted to the privileged sections of local society. The emergence and the role of the Indian intelligentsia is a long, complex and fascinating story on which there is much to say but it cannot be said here.
The point I wish to highlight here is that these modern universities were unencumbered by any ancient or medieval religious baggage as was the case in Europe. The latter became “modern” over the centuries, slowly responding to the attitudinal changes in the wider society. For example, women’s admission came about towards the end of the 19th century. India had the advantage of a latecomer to “modernity” and women’s admission to universities took a relatively short time. From the start Indian universities were open to all, at least in principle. But in the mid-19th century, institutions of higher learning everywhere were meant for the select few, not for the masses and this remained the case until well into the early decades of the 20th century. So these open universities remained the preserve of the privileged classes. There were few women and fewer lower-caste students mainly because, as I already pointed out, the society was deeply hierarchical and patriarchal and marked by highly uneven distribution of incomes.
Making Universities Universal
There was some expansion of universities, but their number was small until after the World War II. The United States took the lead in rapid expansion of universities and provided the lead in setting up what came to be called “mass” universities. Once India became independent, the ideals of equality and social inclusiveness became a major impulse behind the expansion of universities. An educational commission set up under S Radhakrishnan in 1948 declared that “education is a universal right, not a class privilege.” The report also recommended a more active role for the universities in the transformation of society (Ministry of Education 1950). Attainment of equality and inclusiveness thus became the central aims of social policy.
These were laudable aims. There followed a steady expansion of higher education all across the country while existing universities and colleges expanded with more students and more teachers. The benefit was most apparent in the case of women. A number of separate colleges for women were established and these were followed by co-educational colleges. By the late 1960s and early 1970s the number of women in postgraduate departments, whether as students or faculty, began to rise. Their ability to succeed in academia has given them a greater confidence in their abilities and has changed relations between the sexes within the institutions of learning. But we must remember that most of these women too come from upper and middle classes. In the wider society old patriarchal attitudes still persist. It is only recently that first generation educated women from the disadvantaged groups are getting into universities.
As universities became more inclusive, their castes and community compositions also began to change for the better. Universities which are socially more inclusive also gain academically. The admission of students and the recruitment of faculty from new social classes and communities bring fresh talents and fresh experience. Unfortunately, in India the accommodation of the disadvantaged castes has been driven more by the government and sociopolitical movements rather than by any growth in material and intellectual resources which has produced some not-so-happy consequences for maintaining academic standards. This was not the case in the inclusion of women in which organised political pressure had played little part.
There is now a pervasive tension between demands of social inclusion and academic discrimination. The main reason for this is that, unlike in Europe and America, our universities were made socially more inclusive by the policymakers without simultaneously paying sufficient attention to steady expansion and improvement of our elementary and secondary education, particularly with an aim to bring students from disadvantaged castes and communities.
In this context the recent trend of rapidly, and sometimes rashly, setting up of more universities without adequate planning and resources—infrastructural and human—have exacerbated the problem of the quality of education. The progress of higher education cannot be measured in numbers alone. The need of the hour is to strike the right balance between the twin goals of social inclusion and academic excellence. Many of these points have been admirably elaborated by the distinguished sociologist and social anthropologist Andre Beteille whose views on the challenges to the university and higher education in general is now available in a collection of his articles (2010).
Why Humanities
Finally, a few observations on certain other aspects of our universities. Today the impulse for “expert knowledge” is driven by the global market forces making us acquisitive and greedy consumerists for material comforts to the neglect of higher human values. The neglect of the “humanities”—history, literature, philosophy—is rampant. Higher education in universities and specialised institutions of various kinds train the young to succeed as homo faber or homo oikonomicusand not for the full flowering of the homo humanus, with serious consequences for the general culture of societies. The social values of peace, compassion and tolerance have been pushed to the background, leading to a loss of our humanity. But there is hope yet. All over the world, sensible people are putting up resistance to these self-destructive tendencies of modern civilisation. Environmental studies, peace studies and sustainable development studies are attracting the youth and have become part of the curriculum of increasing number of universities.
Humanities also prepare the youth for understanding life in its manifold form which await them in the future. It helps in understanding with sympathy and empathy the ups and downs of life, feelings, sentiments, and desires of fellow individuals and thereby contributes to “hygiene in the sphere of the mind” (Einstein 1954: 55), and thus resist the loss of humanity in our alienating modern world. Moreover, humanities help create citizens whose ability to think independently and with reason and be guided by their conscience is perhaps the only protection of our democracy. Nussbaum’s book (2010) on the importance of humanities for a healthy democracy lays out this argument well.
Another worrying tendency is that the management of institutions of higher learning has become highly bureaucratised and despite protestations by the government to the contrary the autonomy of these institutions has been substantially eroded. The University Grants Commission (UGC) was set up in 1956 to oversee the functioning of universities under its care in such a manner as to protect their autonomy and to uphold the standard of education and research in them. Ironically, the UGC has itself become a source of intrusion into the autonomy of universities. Imagine military generals being appointed as vice chancellors of universities!
Moreover there is too much pressure on the faculty to publish. The output of a university cannot be solely valued by the number of articles and books published by the teachers. On the contrary, this pressure has promoted an unhealthy trend of the multiplication of journals and publishers of dubious credentials. For, as Whitehead points out, many of the best university teachers with fertile minds, especially in the humanities, find it difficult or even impossible to reduce the substance of their thought to writing. Their direct contact with pupils in the form of lectures or personal discussions are of the greatest value both for the students and the university. The contribution of such teachers often go unrecognised. “Fortunately one of
them is immortal—Socrates” (Whitehead 1929: 103).
Coffee House
All these have vitiated the atmosphere of our universities. The most important constituents of an healthy atmosphere in the universities are its openness, its sympathy with all life and above all
the freedom or swaraj of the mind. “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high…where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way in the dreary desert sand of dead habit” are well known to all educated Indians, but in reality argument and dissent is so often discouraged and at times, even repressed. This does not befit the institutions of higher learning and scholarship.
There is also to be noticed in our universities today that a space for regular interaction amongst the university fraternity—a space for thinking aloud in conversation—is fast disappearing. Earlier, perhaps, such a space was provided by the Indian Coffee Board in its much loved Coffee Houses. Now that they are not there, universities must consider creating such a space, where we can talk about our work, our passions and what keeps us going. KFCs and Café Coffee Days are not the spaces I have in mind.
Finally, I feel that our universities should open their gates to individuals, whether as faculty or pupils, from every part of the world. Living and working together with individuals of different regions and nationalities helps mutual understanding and strengthens the idea of global communities. Local and regional and narrow, exclusivist community passions cannot be allowed to override the crying need for openness to the world; we do a disservice to humanity if we “fragment” the world within “‘narrow domestic walls.” Every university needs to open its doors and windows to the world and thereby find its place in the commonwealth of scholarship and science. Only then will they be able to realise the full potential of their power and fulfil their duties to the society and the world at large.
I should like to sum up with the following words of Einstein (1954: 66–67):
It is not enough to teach man [person] a specialty. Through it [s]he may become a kind of useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and lively feeling for values. [S]he must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise [s]he—with his [her] specialised knowledge—more closely resembles a well trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. [S]he must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow-men [beings] and to the community.
These precious things are conveyed to younger generation through personal contact with those who teach, not—or at least not in the main—through textbooks. It is this that the primarily constitutes and preserves culture. This is what I have in mind when I recommend the ‘humanities’ as important ...Overemphasis on the competitive system and premature specialisations on the ground of immediate usefulness kill the spirit on which all cultural life depends, specialised knowledge included. ….Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty.
