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<h1 class="gmail-big_article_header gmail-capz">The National System Of Education</h1>
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controversy over official language was and continues to resonate in the
field of education, and the nationalist visualization of the place of
languages in education appears quaint, writes author R.V. Vaidyanatha
Ayyar</i></p></div>
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<div datetime="March 6, 2018, 4:16 p.m.">
<span class="gmail-date">06</span>
<span class="gmail-month"><a href="http://businessworld.in/date/06-March-2018">March, 2018</a></span>
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<p></p><p></p><p>Apart
from the education system, administrative structures, and policies
inherited from the Raj, Independent India was also the legatee of a
grand vision of education that went by the name of national system of
education. The expression ‘national system’ entered the vocabulary of
educational discourse during the agitation against the bifurcation of
Bengal by Viceroy Curzon in 1905. That agitation is a historic landmark
in that it radicalized nationalist politics, and spectacularly altered
nationalist perception about many aspects of British rule including the
education introduced by the British. In pursuance of orders issued by
the Government prohibiting students from participating in political
meetings and demonstrations, several students were rusticated during the
Anti-Partition agitation for participating in political activities.<br><br>This
action of the authorities led to a movement among the students to
boycott the Calcutta University which they described as golamkhana
(house for manufacturing slaves). Eminent citizens of Bengal felt that
it was their patriotic duty to provide for the education of students who
had suffered. They established a National Council of Education, Bengal
for organizing a system of education on national lines under 1906, the
Indian National Congress adopted a resolution that the time had arrived
for the people all over the country to earnestly take up the question of
national education for both boys and girls and ‘organize a system of
literary, scientific, and technical education suited to the requirements
of the country, on national lines under national control and directed
towards the realization of national destiny’.<br><br>Hirendranath Datta
described Swaraj as a three-headed Goddess—one head being political, the
second industrial, and the third educational. The National Council of
Education established twenty-five secondary, about 300 primary national
schools, as well as the Bengal National College headed by Sri Aurobindo
as principal.<br><br>A rival body, the Society for the Promotion of
Technical Education, established the Bengal Institute of Technology
which evolved into the Jadavpur University. In 1910, this Society was
amalgamated with the National Council of Education. Once the Partition
of Bengal was annulled and the anti-Partition movement died out, the
national schools faded away. National educational institutions once
again got a boost in the wake of the Non-cooperation Movement (1920–2),
and the response of students to the call of <a href="http://businessworld.in/topics/Mahatma-Gandhi-256" class="gmail-description_topic_highlight">Mahatma Gandhi</a>
to boycott schools, colleges, and other institutions set up by the Raj.
Unlike the anti-Partition struggle of 1905, the Non-cooperation
Movement encompassed the whole country; consequently national education
institutions were set up all over the country, and these included
universities like Jamia Millia Islamia and the Bihar, Gujarat, and Kashi
Vidyapiths. The idea of asking students to boycott Government and
Governmentaided educational institutions and of providing a parallel
system of institutions was based on the belief that Swaraj would be won
in a year.<br><br>Once it became clear that the freedom struggle would
be long-drawn-out, the concept of running a parallel education system
was given up. Lala Lajpat Rai voiced the new consensus that a national
system of education could be established only after freedom when a
national state would come into being. Consequently, after the
Non-cooperation Movement, nationalist efforts were focussed on managing a
few institutions on an experimental basis rather than on expanding the
network of national educational institutions. Nationalists were one in
condemning the system of education introduced by the British as failing
to inculcate the love of motherland, fostering servile imitation of
England and English values, laying far too much emphasis on English
language to the detriment of the Indian languages, and neglecting
vocational education. However, when it came to defining precisely what
the national system of education was nationalist thinking was divergent.
As Sri Aurobindo wrote ‘a purely negative argument … does not carry us
very far; it does not tell us what in principle or practice we desire or
ought to in its place’.<br><br>Thinking on education by savants like Sri Aurobindo, Annie Besant, <a href="http://businessworld.in/topics/Mahatma-Gandhi-256" class="gmail-description_topic_highlight">Mahatma Gandhi</a>,
and Rabindranath Tagore was nuanced and did not seek a rejection lock,
stock, and barrel of the education introduced by the British. If the
national system of education is not a wholesale rejection of the
education that the British introduced, the question that arises is what
it is then. Conceptualization of a national system of education acquired
greater salience after Independence. It was Naik who sought to give a
coherent answer to that question. From his study of education during the
British Raj and of the freedom struggle, Naik visualized that the
national system of education had five essential elements of which the
first is ‘the provision of seven years of basic education to every child
(age group 7–14)’. The second is ‘liquidation of mass illiteracy which
Mahatma Gandhi described as the sin and national shame of India, and
the development of a programme of adult education which must include
political education’. The third is ‘the reduction of the over-importance
attached to English; the development of Hindi as the link language for
the country … and the use of regional languages as the media of
instruction at all stages’. The fourth is working with the hands, and
social or national service being an integral part of all education with a
view to creating a work-based culture and to minimizing the large
traditional gap between the intelligentsia and the people.<br><br>The
fifth one is ‘relating education to India’s great cultural traditions of
the past and her present needs and future aspirations so that Indian
education comes into its own, ceases to be a servile imitation of
Britain, and aims at creating, not a lesser England, but a greater
India’.<br><br>As Naik was Member-Secretary of the Kothari Commission,
his visualization of a national system of education influenced the
report of that commission. The visualization presented no problem except
the conceptualization of language policy, for the consensus on language
which prevailed among nationalists during the freedom struggle
evaporated by the time the Constitution was being drafted, and official
language came to be the most bitter and divisive issue. Some of the key
questions were:<br><br>Should India have a national language? What
should be the link language between the Union and States and among the
States? Could any of the Indian languages be given precedence over
others? If so, which? If it were Hindi, should be it be Sanskritized
Hindi or Hindustani (spoken language understood in most of north India
and an amalgam of Hindi and Urdu)? If Hindi were to be given precedence
what would be the status of other major Indian languages?<br><br>What
would be the position of English and Sanskrit? It was a veritable
mission impossible to resolve the status of Hindi vis-à-vis other Indian
languages in a way which satisfied the Hindi enthusiasts and at the
same time allayed the apprehension of non-Hindi speakers that the status
sought by Hindi enthusiasts would not diminish the importance of other
India languages and reduce non-Hindi speakers to the status of
second-rate citizens. Eventually Constitution-makers opted for a
‘half-hearted compromise’ which papered over the unbridgeable
differences.<br><br>Hindi was adopted not as the national language but
only as an official language, and a grace period of fifteen years was
provided for English to be used as an official language along with
Hindi. Even with that compromise the House was sharply polarized and
Hindi was approved as official language with just a majority of one
vote. Fifteen years after the Constitution came into effect, when the
grace period for English lapsed and Hindi became the sole official
language, anti-Hindi riots erupted in Tamil Nadu, the lasting legacy of
which is that English has come to be one of the two official languages
of India, more or less permanently. It is apposite to mention that even
now in Tamil Nadu, Hindi is not taught in Government schools and that
state is the only state in the country which does not have Navodaya
Vidayalayas where Hindi is one of the subjects. Over years, the
importance of English has been growing more and more, and did not
decline as nationalists fervently hoped. Upset by the opposition to
Hindi, Acharya Kriplani sarcastically observed that ‘Even Indian babies
do not say Amma or Appa, but mummy and papa …’; ‘We talk to our dogs in
English… In England (English) may disappear, (but) in India it will
not’. What was said as a riposte came to be a verity. The controversy
over official language was and continues to resonate in the field of
education, and the nationalist visualization of the place of languages
in education appears quaint.<br><em><br>Excerpted with permission from Oxford University Press</em><br><br><em>Book details: 'History of Education Policymaking in India, 1947–2016' by R. V. Vaidyanatha Ayyar; 744 pages; Rs 1,995</em></p></div></div>
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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