EDUCATION IN INDIA.

“No country could hope to rise unless it educated its poor.”

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.



The 68 year old frail Swiss educator, unkempt and not shaven, walked up to Tsar Alexander I of Russia, who, after defeating Napoleon’s army, had set up a make shift headquarters in Basle. Tsar was planning to convert the little school where Pestalozzi was teaching into a military hospital. Unmindful of his fate and, that of his school, Pestalozzi had the courage to speak up for the poor peasants of Russia. The frail old man spoke:



“Allow the poor to rise from their misery. Give them schools so they can attain human dignity!”



Moved almost to tears, the Tsar embraced the old man and kissed him on both his cheeks. Pestalozzi believed that suffering, ignorance and, injustice are not immutable. He believed that the key to remove all these enemies of mankind is the education based on love and understanding.



Pestalozzi has become immortal. His modest grave at the schoolhouse in Bir, near Neuhof, bears this modest epitaph: “All for others, nothing for himself.” Forty-two volumes of his writings, translated to twenty-five languages, have influenced generations of educators and parents. His thoughts created numerous elementary, and job oriented schools in Europe and North America. Many “children’s villages,” around the globe have been named after him.



This brings us to the problem in our country. More than thirty-six per cent of our poor children in the villages have no access to schools, although there are schools in some of those villages. Some of these children do not even have a pair of trousers to go to school. To cap it, children are used as a pair of extra hands by the poor parents. While they slog their brethren in richer communities enjoy their childhood, the birthright of every child. Child labour is not infrequent, despite the fact that it is banned!



Many of the schools do not have even the basic amenities for teaching, not to speak of teachers- that too qualified teachers, to mould these virgin minds into useful citizens of tomorrow. Quite a few schools are used for gambling, after school hours, when they are situated next to alcohol outlets; the latter abound in most of our villages. Primary education, which is the foundation for future development of the child, is the most neglected and least funded activity in Ghandhiji’s India! The recent Public Report on Basic Education (1999) should bring tears to any thinking Indian. The report shows how 47% of schools in some States do not teach their children at all. They are engaged in many other activities using the school premises!



Even after fifty years of political independence, we still live with a slavish western mentality in our education. We seem to have forgotten our hoary past in this field where most of the great minds, even from the West, took their education. Pythogoras was known to have had his indoctrination in the Samkya school of thought for a period of five years. Most of the western wisdom owes its origin to him. It was Albert Einstein who said: “ we owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.” Another great brain that gave unreserved credit to India was Mark Twain, who wrote: “ India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grandmother of tradition. Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only.” French scholar Romain Rolland said: “ If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living man have found a home from the very earliest existence, it is India.” We always look for certificates from the West for any recognition. These certificates should more than please us!



Indian wisdom, in the field of the major sciences, was unsurpassed up until the eighteenth century, when the Royal Society of London, sent a team of twenty scientists to study the Indian knowledge of yore. Some of them lived here for over a couple of decades. One such was a physician, Dr. T. H. Holwell, who gave a graphic description of the successful method of vaccination against small-pox, in his presentation to the Royal College of Physicians of London, in the year 1747. The method was even better than the Jenner’s method, which came into vogue much later, serendipitously. Our astronomy was far too advanced, we had blast furnaces to produce the best steel in the world and, our cloth was so fine that the silk sarees, six yards long, could be manoeuvered into an eggshell.



Sanskrit language is now accepted as the mother of Indo-European languages. The literature in this language is so profound that it would take more than a lifetime for one to master the whole of it. Our medicine was more ancient than all the other systems in the world and, possibly, influenced Hippocratic writings to a great extent! The Vedas, that treasure house of all that needs to be known, are timeless. They have evolved over thousands of years and therefore, by definition, are very scientific. It was an Arkansas Federal Judge who ruled that anything that changes and evolves over a period of time is science.



Even in the field human evolution western scientists themselves are challenging the Darwin’s theory of evolution. Prof. Michael Cremo, an American archeologist, in his recent book Evolution of man-Evidence against Darwin’s Theory, goes to show that man existed, as present day man, for well over 3,50,000 years. There are unequivocal evidences, in his book, to show the presence of man in his present form having walked on the earth for a very long time! The establishment, however, is trying hard to sell the old Darwinian ideas. In a recent book The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins, Professor of Science Communication at the Oxford University, tries very hard to sell the old wine of Darwinism in a new bottle! This smacks of some kind of an agenda to keep the idea afloat. A whole department works to try and sell science to the lay man!



Even quantum physics is coming closer to the old Indian thinking of looking at the whole, and not, at bits and pieces, as is done in all the reductionist sciences. The lepto-quarks, the smallest sub-atomic particles are but the same in all beings. Adi Shankara was quite right when he said that you and your neighbour are but one and the difference that you see is only maya. New science of CHAOS has come very close to the old Indian thought. David Bohm, a well known theoretic physicist, feels that human affairs and other related sciences are like the Hologram. Even if a portion of the hologram is illuminated with a laser beam, the whole hologram gets illuminated. This comes very close to the Vedic tenet:



“ Poornam Idam.Poornam Adaha:….

Poornashya Poornamaadaaya Poornam evashishtathe.



(This is a whole; that is a whole….If a bit comes off the whole, the whole remains a whole and the bit becomes a whole!)



That is the great wisdom of India, which has stood the test of time for thousands of years. There have been attempts to split us into groups and then make us fight one another. One such is the Aryan invasion theory, which has been debunked lately very effectively. David Frawley, an American thinker, in his recent book Sages, Kings and Countries exposes the myth of Aryan invasion. The word Aryan has a different meaning in Indian scriptures. The Manu-Smrti says:



“Karthavyam acaram kaaryam akarthavyam anaacaram /

Tisthati prakrtaacare sa arya iti vai smrtah //



[Performing one’s duty as per the Shasthras and at the same time avoiding forbidden duties is the way of an Aryan.]



Aryans, therefore, are not people who have come from outside India to invade the country. They are the good people in society. This is not the basis on which David Frawley argues his case. This is but another very cogent argument, though. Lord Krishna asks Arjuna as to why he is behaving in un-aryan way when he put his Ghaandiva down:



“Anaaryajustam asvargyam akeerthikaram arjuna //2//.



[This un-aryan, shameful, and heaven-excluding way, Arjuna?]



Of course, we have had invasions from across our borders, we had to go through many hurdles, but our culture and our education have stood the test of time. Indian methods of ruling even other countries were unique and peaceful. This is amply exemplified in the statement of one of the former Chinese Ambassadors to the USA, Hu Shih who wrote: "India conquered and dominated China for twenty centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her borders.”



Our ancient system of Gurukula education was never like the one we have chosen for our children today. The student in a gurukula learnt more by example rather than memorizing and replicating. The whole edifice of Indian primary education was based on universal love and compassion and, was aimed at producing a good citizen for the future. The aim, certainly, was not producing good replicators of the textbooks. Education without inculcating human value systems, love and, understanding is no education and, is, in many instances, counter-productive. My worry is only about the primary education, the time when a little child, full of love for everything in this world, is put in an atmosphere of sheer competition from day one in the school. One gets reminded of what Socrates once said:



“Let not my schooling come in the way of my education.”



“No man can teach any one anything that the recipient already does not know” is an old Indian adage. This is probably true according to the modern molecular biology. The day the human being is made in the mother’s womb, the tiny spec of protein that the new life is, weighing just about 0.0000000000001 gm, it would know all about every other living organism in this Universe, postori and priori! This is the consciousness which modern science had been unaware of till very recently.



Education, then is, what Swami Vivekanada once said: “the manifestation of the perfection, which is already in man.” We should let the child bring out the best inside for the good of humanity at large, through the process of education. Even the Greek root of education means the same. To bring out your best, like the mother brings out her child, is education. The greatest impediment for the right type of education today is the competitive ethos even in elementary schools.



Almost from the first day the innocent and loving child is being transformed into a human monster full of jealousy, hatred and, anger in addition to immense pride, because of the competition in the evaluation system. I have been at a loss to understand why we need to rank students that young. They should be helped to learn for themselves with love, caring, camaraderie, and co-operation, the teacher acting like a midwife coaxing, cajoling, empathizing, and encouraging the expectant mother. Just as the pregnant lady herself would have to deliver the baby, the student would have to learn for himself with the help of an understanding teacher, who is only a role model for the growing child. That would bring forth a generation of young men and women who would live and let live.



The monetary economy of today, being spearheaded by the western society and western media, brainwashes the young to compete with greed and with the killing instinct to come up in life. This is manifest in every walk of life, making man unhappy at the end of the day. The dreaded epidemics in the West today are suicide and divorce, both originating from the competitive ethos in early life. Even the other killer diseases like cancer and heart attacks have their origin in these demonic thoughts in the human mind. It is not what he eats that kills him, but it is what eats him that kills him!



Unfortunately, many of our economists and thinkers seem to agree with the western societal rules. There is dichotomy in every walk of life in the West. One example would be sufficient. The United Nations, born to save mankind from total destruction after the Second World War, has a Security Council of five permanent members. They, between themselves, produce ninety per cent of the arms manufactured in this world. Their economy, to a great extent, depends on selling those arms. They have to, per force, create situations of conflict around the world to survive. That makes good business sense but very bad moral sense. That is the long and short of our present make-believe world, the reductio ad absurdum.



To change all that for the better, at least for the next generation, we have to change the elementary education. The emphasis should be on co-operation, love and, understanding as the foundation of that education. Even Pestalozzi set out to prove that “every child has inborn strength, which loving care can awaken. Let your child be as free as possible, let him go and listen, stumble and stand up, err and find.” Children should never be made to fit into adult patterns!



This new method would make the child a partner in progress of a harmonious family of human beings. All the competition in the world could be taught if needed, after the age of fifteen, when the child brought up in love, will never change for the worse. The earlier we concentrate on elementary education the better for the world. India could certainly show the way to the rest of the world. It had done that in the past and time is now ripe to rekindle that spirit in primary education of Universal Love!



Modern science now is waking up to the reality that most of the killer diseases of mankind, like heart attacks and cancer are the result mainly of human mind suffering from the maladies of hostility, anger and, pride. Prevention being better than cure we should start to wake up to the reality and change the education pattern before it is too late. I only hope that the powers-that-be see the writing on the wall. Remember the famous saying of Aristotle:



“Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.”

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