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First Person Singluar

Indian Education System – Macaulay legacy, Kapil Sibal reformer

Aroon Sharma
Jul 2009

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It's the season of Union minister’s selling100 day agenda-dreams to the Prime Minister. Of all, the 'Brave New World' of Kapil Sibal has substance. The wish list of the Union HRD Minister is to “detraumatise students” in schools. His confessional is that he himself suffered. Me too, Mr Sibal! I gained on the 'swing' of subjects, I understood to make up for the losses on the 'merry-go-around' of subjects, and I did not?

I owe no gratitude to my private paid tutors. They glued me indoors when it was time to kick about outdoors. Their be all and end all was marks. The aversion I developed was such that I loathed text books. For, I had to puke 5 questions in 3 hours, on a humid day in March, all what had been pushed down my throat -- by teachers by rote, by tutors by rote and by keybooks. My answers were a veiled rote. And hailed!

I wondered why examinations could not be held in the cooler clime of winter; why sciences, beyond the basics, were being forced on me when I was inclined towards humanities. Of what use would Sanskrit be (Latin is not being taught in the West) in India's three-subject graduation and a single-subject post graduation? Along this line of textual tension, one of my recurrent relaxtant was an American poet.

Lydia Huntley Sourgney (1791-1865) was an essayist of her times, too. (to my shock, she doesn't figure in Cambridge Encyclopedia, Chambers' Dictionary of World History, not even The Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia ). And is not at the book fairs. I had then come across a quote by her which mirrored by mind, mesmerized me. ( I may never get to share it with Kapil Sibal in person but e-mail I surely would ).

It is etched in my total recall even today - though I have forgotten the Summers I sweated through; the Springs I swung through in school, college and campus. Lydia Huntley Sourgney wrote: “The true order of learning should be: First, what is necessary; second, what is useful; and third, what is ornamental. To reverse this arrangement is like beginning to build at the top of the edifice!”

Her contemporary across the Atlantic was Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859). It’s wrong to ascribe pioneering of anglicized education in India to him. He was no educationist. He was a reformist - a follower of the 'Utilitarian School of Political Thought' led by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill - who became the First Law Member of Governor General Lord William Bentinck's Indian Council in 1835.

Settled in Calcutta, then East India Company's Capital, Macaulay reviewed judicial procedures for two years before codifying a draft as Chairman of the First Law Commission. By 1860-61 it was incorporated as 'Indian Penal Codes for Civil and Criminal Procedures' (Sidelight: Section 377, May the gay note, was by him. It was liberalized in 1884, again 1935, finally repealed in Free India 2009).

It was Macaulay the jurist who set the agenda for education in India. Access the National Archives! In 1835, a debate was held on allocating funds for education. Thomas Babington Macaulay's paper denigrated the classics of Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic as “unequal to that of an average English school boy”. He was opposed but he out argued all convincing that the British would have reliable 'clerical servants'.

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1 Comments >>

rohitdubey

11 Aug 2011 (03:15:06)

carreyar this for life is education MTECH COMPUTER

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