[lg policy] India: The National System Of Education

Wed Mar 7 15:45:14 UTC 2018

 The National System Of Education

*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, writes author R.V. Vaidyanatha Ayyar*
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06 March, 2018 <http://businessworld.in/date/06-March-2018>
by BW Online Bureau
<http://businessworld.in/author/BW-Online-Bureau/BW-Online-Bureau-1>
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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.

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’.

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.

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 Mahatma Gandhi <http://businessworld.in/topics/Mahatma-Gandhi-256> 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.

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’.

Thinking on education by savants like Sri Aurobindo, Annie Besant, Mahatma
Gandhi <http://businessworld.in/topics/Mahatma-Gandhi-256>, 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.

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’.

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:

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?

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.

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.

*Excerpted with permission from Oxford University Press*

*Book details: 'History of Education Policymaking in India, 1947–2016' by
R. V. Vaidyanatha Ayyar; 744 pages; Rs 1,995*

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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