Education: The Path to Realise God

CONVOCATION ADDRESS OF THE MADRAS UNIVERSITY, 1946.

Hon. Sri T. PRAKASAM
Barrister-at-Law Premier, Government of Madras

Universities, to fulfil their ordained function, ought to be a miniature of life. Education must direct itself to the dual object of making the individual fit for society, and of making society a safe pattern for the individual. Education that forgets the society in which the educated must live is not worth the anxious days and nights devoted to it. The word “Society”, is derived from a Latin word that means an ally. Society is a group of individuals allied for a common end. The common end governs all, and that end is the harmonious development of society as a whole. Education is the process by which the individual sheds, and is made to shed, his selfishness, in order to live for the common end. And selfishness is far removed ham self-fulfilment. There could be doubt, uncertainty and difference of opinion about methods of education. But about the object of education there could be no diversity of views.

It was not always and not everywhere that this high object was kept in mind. The nations of the world were not ruled by common men, or even for the common weal of common men, and so the social motive was not given effect to in educational institutions. Feudalism and capitalism, with their gross exploita­tion of the weak, and based on private property, were, and are, inconsistent with the highest ideals of education. You cannot organise world society on the basis of inequality and exploitation, and at the same time hope to educate the young of all nations to love the world as one. Two world wars have taught us that. The imperfections of the political State, with its distorted social and economic structure, reflected themselves in the educational field as well; and education, instead of being available to all ranks of people, and exalting all men, was the exclusive privilege of a few, and frequently degraded even the few. It was not till towards the end of the last century that, all the world over, the common man was remembered, compulsory primary education introduced, and the social object of education to some extent recognised.

We in this country have had even a more chequered history of education. In ancient times we had our seats of learning where knowledge was pursued with a single-minded devotion, and the sciences studied and built in a manner no different from the ways employed in the best universities of today. The science of today is not a gift to us from the west. It is knowledge to the shaping of which our ancients contributed their full and mighty share; and knowledge belongs to man, and not to east or west. Nalanda and Taxila and several other of our ancient universities perfected the science of education, but education to our ancients was not a trick of the memory or a fashion of the intellect. It was a high ritual on the path to realise God.

The religious aspect was, however, not destructive of the social or educational aspect. It would be true to say that the Vedas themselves were not confined to the mere teaching of religion. The Vedas embraced all knowledge, and in the pursuit of truth and godliness, which was the object of the Vedas, the truths of science had their legitimate place.

Coming to modern times in India, the great diversity, in the field of education, between object and achievement becomes very apparent. Lord Macaulay gave us the English language as the medium of instruction, and substituted for the social object, the object of serving the East India Company. Education became the process of manufacturing servants of the company. We reap the fruits today, and find that education, instead of making our young men and women fit for the heritage and the environment that belong to them, and to which they belong, turns them away from all that is theirs, and leaves them neither happy in themselves nor willing to serve the people and make them happy. The educated think themselves a class apart from the uneducated; and in a country like ours: which is based so largely on an agricultural economy, this leads to the widening of the gulf between village and town, and between the agriculturist, who is the bone of the country, and the educated parasite, who lives on the soil but gives nothing to it.

Today, we in India might feel proud that the universities have produced our P. C. Rays, our Ramans and our Radhakrishnans­ and all honour to them who have kept the torch of learning bright, but till there is a full and final re-orientation of the object of education in this great land of ours, and till we break the barriers between the educated and the uneducated, between the village and the town, and between the agriculturist and the parasite, we have no reason to be proud of our system of education. Education must make us fitter to live in our own environment and to make it better, not to escape from it. It is not the fault of our educated young men and women that they do not think of the Indian village as the keystone of our economy. I venture to say that education our country has proceeded, so far, on far too academic lines, has been divorced from the needs of the land. The emphasis must be shifted from learning for the sake of learning to learning in order to meet the needs of the country. The Indian village must dominate all schemes of education, and the day must come when the educated shall go to their villages, like dedicated men, and place their gifts freely at the altar of the countryside.

It is because of this divergence from the reality of our needs in the very basis of our schemes of education that all the evils arise within the framework of the educational system itself. Today all our colleges are overcrowded, and young men and women who have finished their school, course pass to the univer­sity course with an inevitability which is not there. The university course is not, and ought not to be, a mere continuation of the high school course. Not every one who passes put of a high school becomes fit for the university. The universities are special seats of learning, and should be open only to the specially gifted. Technical courses, as in the polytechnics of Europe, should absorb the bulk of those who have completed the high school course. It is the absence of these technical courses that is the greatest blot on our educational system. If there were correlation between educational courses and the needs of the community, ninety per cent from schools would seek the technical courses, and not rush into universities. These technical courses; with specific objects in view, should be organised, maintaining the legitimate proportion between the agricultural and the industrial needs of our country.

It has been said that there are three kinds of waste in our university education. The first kind of waste consists in the fact that much of the expenditure incurred on university education, whether it is incurred by the Government or by private bodies or by students paying fees, is incurred uselessly. It is a waste in the sense that it does not bring any adequate return. It is a waste because only 30 per cent of the university men find employ­ment of a type which may be in keeping with their attainments or commensurate with the time and money which have been spent on their education; about 20 per cent of them go without any employment at all; and 50 per cent are found in jobs for which high school education would be perfectly sufficient.

Secondly, there is another kind of waste in that a very large number of those who enter the university do not succeed in passing their examinations. It is said that, among the universities in the world, there are no other, where such large numbers of students fail at examinations as they do in Indian universities.

Thirdly, there is waste alleged, because even those who pass their examinations are supposed not to come up to the high standard obtaining elsewhere, barring certain exceptions. But this is a matter of opinion, and it need not be feared that men from our universities are of a lower calibre, compared to men from universities in the rest of the world.

Waste of the first kind is attributable to the fact that the universities neglect the practical needs of the community as a whole. To remedy this waste, universities should train only that number of graduates Pass, Honours, Post-graduate and Professional as can be easily absorbed in the several walks of life for which they are trained. The first thing to be done is to get a correct esti­mate of the number of persons required for public services for which the minimum qualification is a university degree. Secondly, there should be a similar estimate of the needs of private enter­prise in agriculture, industry, transport and other branches of business and trade. An estimate should be made of the extent to which Government are likely to expand in the course of the next 10 or 20 years in the Agricultural, Veterinary, Medical, Health, Engineering, Fisheries, Forests, and Mining Departments, and a similar estimate should also be made of the prospects of industrial expansion in the province. When such estimates are made it is easy to calculate the number of different branches that are required in the province. Admissions into universities and colleges should be regulated accordingly. Today there is such a rush for admission into colleges. Admissions are being made without any such data or plan. It is because of this that we find so much waste.

The second type of waste arising out of a large number of failures can be prevented by restricting the admission to university courses only to such persons as are fit to receive university educa­tion in colleges, by improving standards of instruction and discipline in colleges, and by bringing about greater personal contact between the teachers and the students. Restricting admissions may not be quite so easy, but it has to be attempted. There will be a clamour against such a course. The reason for this would be that there are no alternative educational courses open to students who are not found fit for university education. It is the absence of such courses that drives students to the universities. A reform of secondary education should be undertaken; and technical, vocational courses at the high school level, and diploma courses in technical subjects above the high school level, should be opened. When we talk of replanning university education, it must be understood that it cannot be done piecemeal, and must form an integral part of the re-planning of education as a whole.

Education and the Community

Talking of education and the needs of the community, I wish to tell you of a student of a northern university, who also served for a few years as a lecturer in his university, and later started an industry of his own in the fields of his village, in Godavari delta, aided by a friend. The business relates to the preparation of Potassium Permanganate and Soda Ash from dried tobacco and dried plantain stems and possibly other raw material. The industry was started in three small thatched sheds, in a field. When I went there I found one shed full of dried tobacco stems. Out of this and other raw material, which people usually throw away or burn to ashes, the two salts were being prepared. The whole process was explained and the salts were shown to me. I felt then that in those thatched sheds throbbed the heart of a greater university than even his Alma Mater’s. Such achievements could be reproduced by some of you according to, the varying natural gifts you possess, and according to the branch of knowledge you belonged to at the university. To such of you as could reproduce this achievement, the great ideal is always Sir P.C. Ray, the founder of the Bengal Chemical & Pharmaceutical Works, than whom a more farsighted patriot never lived in our land. You should go out with full confidence in yourselves, determined to apply the knowledge gained by you for practical purposes.

Our great poet, Rabindranath Tagore, described the inter­dependence of education and life in no uncertain terms when he wrote in his

CREATIVE UNITY:

“The highest mission of education is to help us to realise the inner principle of unity of all knowledge and all the activities of one’s social and spiritual being. Society in the early stage was held together by its economic co-operation. The idea of such economic co-operation should be made the basis of your university. It must not only instruct but live; not only think but produce. Our ancient Tapovanams or forest schools, which were natural universities, were not shut off from the daily life of the people. Masters and students gathered fruit and fuel, took their cattle out to graze, supporting themselves by the work of their own hand. Spiritual education was a part of spiritual life itself which compre­hended all life. Our centre of culture should not only be the centre of the intellectual life of India, but the centre of her economic life also.

“It must co-operate with the village round it, cultivate land, breed cattle, spin clothes, press oil from the oil seeds; it must produce all the necessaries, devising the best means, using the best materials, and calling science to its aid. Its very existence should depend upon the success of its industrial activities, carried out on the co-operative principles which will unite the teachers and students and villagers of the neighbourhood in a living and active bond of necessity. This will give us also a practical industrial training whose motive force is not the greed of profit. In other words, this institution should be a perpetual creation by the enthusiasm of the soul; a world in itself, self-sustaining, independent, with ever-renew­ing life, radiating life across space and time, attracting and maintaining around it a planitary system of dependent bodies. Its aim should lie in imparting life-breath to the complete man, who is intellectual as well as economic, bound by special bonds, but aspiring towards spiritual freedom and final perfection.”

Evil of Communalism

There are many distressing problems that confront us today in the field of education, as they do in every other field, but the thing to do is to face the problems and hold our heads high. Of all the evils that harm us, the most distressing is the evil of communalism, and communalism is showing its head even in sanctuaries of learning. It is true that no man has a greater right than another to be educated. But higher university education and higher technical education must be regarded as the privilege of only those who have proved themselves specially fit. Merit, irrespective of community, should decide the privilege. Communa­lism must go, but only by an initial process of levelling up; and the levelling up, in the sphere of higher and technical education at any rate, ought not to be at the price of merit. To punish the meritorious for communal reasons is to keep communalism alive and let talent die. But when education ceases to be a mere passport for a job, the evil of communalism in the field of educa­tion will also cease to be.

Our country is on the threshold of a great beginning. We need all the talent and all the spirit of service in the land to build our future. Stalwarts among patriots, like Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, are leading the country into that classless society that is based on equality and social service and not on the profit motive. Ignorance, poverty and ill-health must be liquidated. Let no one among you fail the leaders of the land. Your country has a claim on you before you have a claim on your country, because the country as a whole is in a more deplorable state than you as individuals are in. This is a moment in our history when we should rise above our little-selves, and help to create the India of our dreams, where there is no exploitation of class by class, of group by group, of caste by caste, of man by man.

Graduates of the years, you are the future citizens of the India of our dreams. Do not fail the dream! May God bless you!

Sahanaa vavatu
Sahanau bhunaktu
Shaveeryam karavaavahai
Tejaswinaava vadheetamastu
Maavidwishaavahai
Om Shaantih, Shaantih, Shaantih

“May the Brahman protect us; May he sustain us;
May we acquire the capacity for learning;
Effective may our study prove;
Let us not hate each of her;
Om, Shantih! Shantih! Shantih!