Poor Saraswati

Poor Saraswati *

There has been in recent years much mischievous talk against our present system of education. People as widely apart as Mahatma Gandhi and Sir K. V. Reddi, as Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru and Mr. K. S. Ramaswami Sastri, have been busy and loud, preaching against this system. What value are we, teachers and students, to attach to these outbursts?

There is an instinct in every human being to criticise something or other, and the more reckless and the more extreme your criticism of a thing, the more courageous you are taken to be. Any criticism, whether mild or violent, of the army, the navy, the police force, the revenue system, or the judicial system, is fraught with danger. If Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru or Sir K. V. Reddi or Mr. Ramaswami Sastri talked of the waste of money or the misdirection of energy in any of these other ways, they would be silenced with prompt and condign punishment. But education, alas, everyone can criticise with impunity, and almost every one wanders up and down the land, heaping abuse on all schools, colleges and universities.

Not only is there no legal restraint on irresponsible criticism of education, but there is not even a social or academic demand for some knowledge on the part of the critics of education. While a teacher is wisely silent on the antics of our Judges, the absurdities of our legal system, and the selfish jealousy and mediaeval obscurantism of the medical profession, while our civil engineers know nothing, and say nothing, of any waste or inefficiency in our military organization, every Judge and Councilor and Advocate and Doctor and Journalist thrusts his interfering and unwanted finger into the pie of education and makes the sorriest of trades also the most ignoble of professions.

Leaving Gandhi on one side (for his is ‘the holy madness of the pure in heart crusading through a comfortable world’), one is tempted to wonder at the ingratitude and inconsistency of the other crusaders against modern Indian education.

Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, shouting obstreperous abuse at our schools and colleges, still sends his own children to these very schools and colleges. Even Sir K. V. Reddi does not keep his sons at home and safe from the contamination of modern education. In fact, the sons of Sapru and Sir K. V. Reddi have all of them had brilliant academic careers and are all the better for them. We who know the facts cannot take very seriously the Saprus, the Reddis and the Ramaswami Sastris, who loudly condemn education but send their own children to schools and colleges. We shall do what they do, not what they tell us to do.

But not everybody knows the facts or stops to weigh them. The damage that is done to the boys and girls at school by these highly-spiced and widely-advertised tirades against education, is incalculable. That the standards of attainment of school and college students have gone terribly down during the last 20 years, no one can deny; and one of the chief causes, if not the chief cause, of this deterioration is the undeserved contempt into which the system of education has been brought by the unbridled talk of intemperate politicians.

When we were boys, people like Chandavarkar, Mani Aiyar, Krishnaswami Aiyar, Gokhale and Sivaswamy Aiyer, men who were not only politicians but scholars, encouraged us to work hard, to pursue knowledge and to approach our schools with the reverence due to a temple or a church. Saraswati was then considered a goddess worthy of worship. To us, teachers like A. Panchapagesa Aiyar and A. S. Kasturiranga Aiyar were indeed prophets and priests, not mere underpaid hirelings. Now all that has changed. In convocation address after convocation address, graduates are told that they have wasted their time, that knowledge is an unnecessary evil, and that their teachers are selfish fools who dole out their folly in exchange for fodder and stabling. The students at school and college naturally take these estimates of the ‘Brahmacharya Ashrama’ at their face value, and without hope or enthusiasm on the part of pupil or teacher the process of education drags miserably on to its barren conclusion.

What exactly do these critics expect from any system of education, no matter how perfect? And what exactly are the benefits that our system has failed to yield? Even on the meanest utilitarian basis, the education which has thrown up, willy-nilly, Gandhi, Nehru, Sapru himself, Srinivasa Sastri, C. V. Raman and Radhakrishhan, this system has not failed. Education isa wasteful process. There is no proportion between the labour and the result. In this it is like Nature herself, ‘who has no law, but wastes the myriad spawn to hatch a single fish.’ And from the point of view of the country it is worthwhile that a million students should each fail thrice in the Intermediate Examination, if out of these failures a Gokhale, a Raman, a Radhakrishnan or a Nehru could spring. In addition to the production of outstanding men, our education has certainly given us all a sense of our rights and duties as citizens, and brought us from a mediaeval to a modern outlook on life. If courage and self-respect are slowly replacing fear and superstition, if freedom and equality are driving away the hideous nightmare of caste, have we not reason to be thankful?

But this testing by general results is unfair in its application to education. Education is to be judged, not by the faulty and mischievous standards of its social or political utility, but by its results on the individual educated. Is or is not any given young man the better, clearly and by much, in intellect, in emotion and in physique, for taking full advantage of the facilities offered by his school? If you are going to judge the system by its effect on a young man who refused to take advantage of the facilities it offered, who pursued it half-heartedly and against his will, you are not being fair to the system. To be fair to it, you must judge it by its effect on one who followed it whole-heartedly, enthusiastically and with full-blooded vigour, enlarging and strengthening his intellect, refining and enriching his emotions, and making his body taut and supple like a sword of tempered steel. To the man who shuts himself up throughout the day inside his windowless hovel, there is no brightness and no kindly healing in the sun.

The benefit to the individual educated is many-sided and important. A modern scientific training gives one a critical spirit, inductive reasoning, reliance on one’s own observation, experience and judgment, freedom from blind faith and a desire for justice and equality. These things are the gifts of modern education. I say modern education, and not western education, because, till the time of Bacon and Hobbes and Montesquieu the ideas of Europe were not very different in their absurdity from the ideas of Manu himself. It was not the fault of our ancient philosophers, as it was not the fault of Aristotle and Plato, of Aquinas and Duns Scotus, that they had not read Rousseau, Karl Marx and Bertrand Russel. If to the temper and spirit of the ancient Rishis we bring the knowledge and exactitude of modern science, we shall be evolving the synthetic civilisation for which the world has been waiting. And no other means is available for bringing about this grand consummation than the dull, dry, day-to-day drudgery of our schools and colleges.

Socially, politically and culturally, our education is producing benefits but not in the required degree or with the required rapidity. The remedy is in intensifying and widening the system, not in scrapping it. The filtration of modern knowledge to the masses is painfully slow. The liquidation of illiteracy is still an ideal. If with vernacularization we combine a passionate faith in the virtue of modern scientific education and replace the Pandit and Moulana tradition by a genuine love and reverence for children and a relentless pursuit of truth, free from authoritarianism, this system will yield better results than any other that the world has conceived. One does not tear a whole tree by its roots because some of its leaves or some of its fruits are rotten. This system of education has yielded much good and is capable of yielding more; it deserves mending here and there by people who love children and who know their subjects, but not at all the rough handling it now gets from all and sundry.

The complaint that there is unemployment in the land is no argument at all against education. In this country at any rate education has always been considered not as a means to an end but as an end itself. To give food and training to the minds and hearts of our children is as much a duty and a necessity as to give food and training to their bodies. No doubt there are people who feed their children only because this will fit them for employment, people who would starve their children to death if there were no chances of employment; such people will refuse education to their children. But others, who feed the body irrespective of chances of employment, must feed the mind also. Education should provide, not only a means of livelihood, but a way of living. It is not the business of education, it is the business of other forces, Industry, for example, and population control, to make livelihood possible for all.

People who talk of the waste involved in education do not stop to calculate what proportion of the nation’s human and material resources are spent on education and what proportion on other things; for example, on drink, or tobacco, or motor-cars, or preparations for war. We count carefully the pence spent on our children, while we squander pounds on evil and unnecessary things.

The complaint is sometimes made that modern Indian education has not resulted in any important discovery or invention. This is not wholly true. But even so, there is a time and place for the increase of knowledge and a time and place for the dissemination of it. In the affairs of this world, our people are more or less in the stage of the people of England about the year 1530, and if we can make all the knowledge gathered by Europe in the last 400 years available to our own people within the next generation or two, that will be work enough for a hundred times the number of schools and colleges in this country.

But apart from this duty of disseminating modern knowledge to the masses, the great problem of education here as elsewhere is the problem of how to make good our losses. These losses are enormous and unceasing. We should bequeath to the young generation the House of Knowledge in good repair, not tumbled down and ruined. Learned men die off as rapidly as the unlearned, and the race for knowledge, for the maintenance not the progress of knowledge, is a race against ‘the steady and on-coming tide of destruction and oblivion.’ Every school has to fill a little of the emptiness caused by that unwearied worker, Death. Every thirty years or less, we have to replace all the knowledge and all the skill in the world. ‘We have to provide that the infants and the children of today shall know all the secrets and wield all the powers of the best and wisest men now living.’ If we slacken, the fate which overtook the great civilisations of the past will overtake the slowly growing, rich and complex civilisation of modern India. We must work hard if we wish to stay where we are.

Education is a struggle against the deep and treacherous river of time. Whether in the process of the years we are to become an A1 nation or a C3 nation, depends almost entirely on the way we treat the body, mind and spirit of the young generation, in other words, on the way we value, and establish, and provide for their education.

Short-sighted greed and immediate utility will paralyse and kill any system of education that accepts these standards. Germany and America may perhaps encourage such knowledge only as is useful, but we in this land have learnt during some three thousand years to look upon knowledge as the tree of life. We cannot ‘cultivate its branches for profit and neglect the root; we cannot apply the test of utility to knowledge that is living and growing.’ The cry for vocational training and applied science is the cry of specialised and over- practical men and has little relevance to the broad basis of national culture. The knowledge that can be used is knowledge that has ceased to live; it is the timber, not the growing tree, out of which you make doors and windows and furniture.

To the individual the spirit rather than the use of education is everything; it is ‘the opening of fresh eyes on the world, the exhilarating trial of new powers against the forces of the world.’ It is the making of men and women, not of bread-winners or cannon-fodder or industrial units. Let us make men and women of our children and the State can well take care of itself.

Let it not be concluded that we resent all criticism; far from it. Raman and Radhakrishnan, V. S. Sastri and Ratnaswami, have in their addresses on education, shown a wholly admirable spirit and temper and tendered advice which is welcome and helpful. What we deplore is the thoughtless and mischievous invective heaped on education by those who, in education alone, clamour for an impossible perfection. To them we may say, adapting a Persian proverb: -

He who would have only a faultless friend
Must, friendless, live his life, and, friendless, end;
He who would be from every error free
Must seek in death his sole security;
He who would go but to a perfect school
Was born, and must remain perforce, a fool!

* This article first appeared in ‘TRIVENI’ of Jan-Feb, 1935 issue. Prof. K. Swaminathan was a reputed professor of Madras University.