From the Bottom Rung

BY K. S. VENKA TARAMANI

WE owe our primacy in the scheme of things to our own daring and enterprise, the courage to tread new paths. But very few show it, and often only when the chances for their full application have passed. The fruits are therefore necessarily poor. Our progress has been very slow and intrinsic development pathetically snail-like. The cause for this terrible waste of a fecund energy is the defective, and almost blind and cruel, training which the young receive in schools and colleges the world over and now particularly in India.

The education of the young, everybody agrees, is vital to our welfare. Theoretically the impulse is to do it on the most liberal lines. But the lower instinct to conventionalise, arising out of Fear, the yet unshed heritage of the jungle, to walk the same path with the blessings of the herd, has yet a very strong hold. In proportion to the great energy put forth, no intrinsic progress is therefore really made, from generation to generation. We take the same track to the water's edge and drink at the same it pool, even though the splendid and vitalising river rolls on majestically, scarcely a yard ahead.

We standardise everything, crushing out individuality, artistic diversity. Success is purely quantitative, and mass production the sole aim of the University. So the chemistry of the nature of man is still a great mystery. There is no refining process going on in his composition, subtly changing him from generation to generation,—no lowering of the bestial and no enhancing of the divine elements in him. The same passion, the same hatred, greed, jealousy, cruelty, love of power and exploitation, still express themselves in the same destructive tendencies, shouts and deeds. All our progress has but implemented better the modes of execution, but the objects and ideals are still as low as ever. A fatal law of eternal recurrence seems to hold humanity in its death-grip.

A drastic change in the methods will alone save us. Allow utmost freedom to the mind of the young. Give its energy the joy of spontaneous movement. Look a little more to the present and the future, and far less to the past.

We now cling like a limpet to the ageless rocks, blind and motionless pinning our faith to a pious treading of the dead past, the mechanical portions of History, to its dates and battles, without ever seeking to convey its emotion for the enrichment of our future. Our schools and colleges are erected on a sandy waste, strewn with the bones and the skeletons of a nightmarish past. And we cheerfully ask our youngmen to draw nourishment from this. Even saw-dust is kinder food.

Only a drastic change in school and college curricula will put us on the way to achieve a future for the race worthy of its own inner prophecies and angelic tendencies.

The science of Agriculture is vastly more important for our well-being than the soul-blasting science of Economics; Geography and Astronomy than History; Biology, Sociology and Eugenics than Mathematics; Philosophy and Poetry than Philology and Indo-Germanic. The pandit-like and pathetic passion for texts, rules and books, chalk and slate, should yield to the subtler and more pervasive joys of inculcating, by the magic word, in the mind of the young, the spirit of love, enquiry and conviction, not for cribs and annotated editions, but for that larger thing called life which includes in one plane the teacher and the taught. The cry everywhere should be for less of books and more of life, the beaming life of the present and the radiant life of the future, rather than the sickly and broken things of the past. And above all, produce the teacher who would or could keep himself younger than the youngest boy in the class.

Then some sure steps would have been taken from the bottom rung of the ladder, which we are now decorating with tinsel and gold, while the God-enshrined top is far a way, invisible to us in the mists of a brilliant and strange sky.