AN unlikely revolution is in the offing in the realm of Indian higher education. The contemporary design of increasing the number of colleges, universities and other institutes combined with the emphasis on an economically relevant education might just be able to wrench our system of education out of its present torpor. There is a catch, however. This is not the first time that efforts are being made to either enlarge the demographic canvass of education, or to make education economically relevant, practical and directly related to social concerns. Nevertheless, while we create new patterns of future oriented education, care needs be taken that the mistakes of the past are not repeated – or at least not substantially. Otherwise it is possible that the more we try to change the more we will remain where we are.

After all, it is worth remembering that despite the creative thinking and numerous recommendations from over ten commissions concerned with reforming education, our schools, colleges and universities have, so far, contributed little to the task of either making us a knowledge society or an economically powerful one. The change that has taken place, it is widely believed, has been despite our system of education and not because of it. Come to think of it, as we shall see below, our efforts at reform even today are not very different from what was envisaged in the early nineteenth century. Could the end results be virtually the same: that change happens; the country grows and prospers despite education and not because of it?

By the 19th century when universities of a western provenance came to be founded in India, the idea of a university such as Oxford and Cambridge in England had fallen into disrepute. It was too costly, too oriented towards religious learning, and with too little attention paid to the learning of science and technology. It did not train people in subjects like law, medicine and engineering that were increasing in importance. Moreover, it did not have any place for the irreligious, non-religious and those from other religions. Above all, with its emphasis on residential requirements, it had become the resting ground for young gentlemen of good breeding whose fathers were willing to provide hefty subventions to them, their tutors and the college, without demanding from the college and university any particular increment in the formal knowledge of their sons and wards.

It was partly as a critique of the older model of university and college education that Thomas Babington Macaulay penned the widely known minute in 1835. That minute, along with its intense criticism of traditional education, became the touchstone for the new kind of education that was to be imparted in India. The minute itself was a part of the disputations that had gone on in England over the nature of the new kind of university. It soon became the basis of the education system in India and remained so, in various forms, right up till recent times.

Even the New Education Policy of 1986 and the recommendations of the current Knowledge Commission resonate with many of Macaulay’s concerns. Macaulay’s minute also was the first among the numerous recommendations from various education commissions, which have always found it wanting from a practical point of view and have made recommendations that have only desultorily translated into action.

 

Macaulay was one of those who were supremely sure of the inexorable progress that science and western reason had conferred on mankind and firmly of the belief that it was the newly emerging middle class which would be in the forefront of making a better society. Confident of the correctness of the English way of life and politics, he was of the unambiguous opinion that during the last hundred and sixty years the history of England had been ‘eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement.’ In a famous essay, ‘Southey’s Colloquies on Society’ (1830), he had praised England for being ‘the richest and most highly civilised spot in the world.’ Modern science and technology was credited with all this growth. ‘People live longer because they are better fed, better lodged, better clothed, and better attended in sickness, and… these improvements are, owing to that increase of national wealth which the manufacturing system has produced.’

On appointment as a member of the Council for India in 1834, Macaulay got the opportunity to analyse the Indian system of education and make strenuous suggestions. It was also his opportunity to use the Indian case to suggest a critique of the privileged Oxbridge model of learning that was biased in favour of the rich and the existing conservative interests in England. Now was the possibility to promote a more utilitarian system of education, free of religious encumbrances, strongly inclined towards scientific learning as opposed to learning of the languages and classics.

This system of education was to be financed by the state and hence available freely to all rather than a privileged few. The experiment could be carried out in India, but with the hope that it might be fit for England as well. If in the process the entire corpus of Indian learning needed to be trashed, without any sympathy, as far as Macaulay and his cohorts were concerned, it should be done without remorse. Concerning a civilization that even in those days was regarded with some wonder, Macaulay had little hesitation. ‘All the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit (sic) language,’ he asserted, ‘is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England.’

 

The minute on Indian education, dated 2 February 1835, was written as a prelude to his taking up the work of educational reform in India as a nominee to the Board of Public Instruction. The board itself was evenly divided amongst those who favoured traditional Indian learning and those in favour of a western kind of scientific learning. Macaulay, however, laid down his agenda in no uncertain terms, almost giving an ultimatum to his employers and fellow members of the board to accept his recommendations for a complete overhaul of the educational system of India.

‘If,’ Macaulay concluded his minute, ‘it be the opinion of the Government that the present system ought to remain unchanged, I beg that I may be permitted to retire from the chair of the Committee. I feel that I could not be of the smallest use there – I feel, also, that I should be lending my countenance to what I firmly believe to be a mere delusion. I believe that the present system tends, not to accelerate the progress of truth, but to delay the natural death of expiring errors.

‘I conceive that we have at present no right to the respectable name of a Board of Public Instruction. We are a Board for wasting public money, for printing books which are of less value than the paper on which they are printed was while it was blank; for giving artificial encouragement to absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, absurd theology; for raising up a breed of scholars who find their scholarship an encumbrance and a blemish, who live on the public while they are receiving their education, and whose education is so utterly useless to them that when they have received it they must either starve or live on the public all the rest of their lives. Entertaining these opinions, I am naturally desirous to decline all share in the responsibility of a body, which unless it alters its whole mode of proceeding, I must consider not merely as useless, but as positively noxious.’

 

He began with averring that the British in India had erred in presuming that the one lakh rupees sanctioned by the British Parliament to be spent on Indian education through the Act of 1813 was supposed to be spent on Arabic and Sanskrit learning. ‘We have a fund to be employed as Government shall direct for the intellectual improvement of the people of this country. The simple question is, what is the most useful way of employing it?’

Macaulay contended that the existing system of education did not even equip the people to find work for themselves. In a phrase that has been much reviled by nationalist Indians for many decades, he said, ‘a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.’ His contention was that even the money spent on printing books in the classical languages was just so much money wasted. Even Indians did not want this kind of learning.

He pointed out that in the past three years the Committee for Public Instruction had spent Rs 60,000 on publishing books in Sanskrit and Arabic. Books worth less than Rs 1,000 were sold. The Schoolbook Society that published English language books without any governmental support, on the other hand, routinely sold over 7,000 books and made a profit of 20 per cent on the sales. The implications to him were clear. Any official support to that kind of learning was ‘but to delay the(ir) natural death.’

The existing educational policy, Macaulay criticized ‘for raising up a breed of scholars who find their scholarship an encumbrance and a blemish, who live on the public while they are receiving their education, and whose education is so utterly useless to them that when they have received it they must either starve or live on the public all the rest of their lives.’ The alternative was to introduce a completely utilitarian education system. Much like that was being done in London. It is one of the ironies of history that the reforms produced entirely contrary results.

 

The proposed model of education hoped to provide training in medicine and law, both of which were absent in the curriculum of the traditional university. It was also to provide enhanced training in the natural sciences that had lost their rigour in the Oxbridge system. The new education sought inspiration from the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. Subsequently, the ideas of men of high ability and public spirit like Henry Brougham, James Mill, Zachary Macaulay, Thomas Campbell and Joseph Hume became the active advocates of the new kind of education. All of them were actively involved in the administration of colonies and hence had some interaction with non-Christian, non-White civilizations, but always in the superordinate role of a colonial ruler.

In the four years following 1824, when for the first time the idea to begin an institution along the new lines was mooted, these men were able to collect enough money from the public to enable the incorporation of a new institution. The self-styled ‘University of London’ began work on 1 October 1828. It essentially consisted of one college, the University College in London. Immediately the new idea came under attack for being subversive of the English way of life, the British constitution, the religion of the people and much more. In 1829 the critics of the new kind of education obtained a royal charter for the establishment of another college in London to counter the teachings and philosophy of the University College. This began to function in 1831 as the King’s College.

 

In 1836, the government granted a Charter to a Board of Examiners. This board came to be known as the University of London. They were only empowered to conduct examinations. Teaching was delegated to the colleges. As yet this meant just two, the University College and the King’s College. And the government retained for itself the right to nominate institutions the students of which would be examined by the new university.

Over the years the University of London concerned itself with the development and perfecting of a system of examination. The affiliated colleges on their part began to concern themselves with teaching new subjects that hitherto had not been part of the traditional university curriculum. The students for these colleges came from the city, and the colleges assiduously maintained a non-residential character thereby enabling those students who had a meagre budget to continue with university education.

 

Soon, however, criticism came to be voiced at the manner in which the University of London system was functioning. Under the garb of the spread of education, the government had allowed affiliation to a large number of colleges. Not all were suitable for preparing students for a university degree. The proliferation of colleges was phenomenal. In 1836, in the faculties of Arts and Laws there were only two, in 1844 there were 22, in 1858 the number had grown to 49. No academic or administrative principle was created to award affiliation, thus creating a doubt that affiliation to colleges was given for non-academic considerations.

The colleges began to compete for students by relaxing the conditions they had to fulfil before being allowed by college authorities to appear for the university examination. By 1858, with the exception of the subjects of medicine and surgery, the government had abolished all attendance requirements in order to please both the students and the colleges. Many of those with a degree from the University of London had never attended any classes or obtained instruction from teachers. All that they excelled in was preparation for the examination.

A regular and liberal education, such as the university originally intended, had become a fiction. Yet, the same system was hastily implemented in many British colonies. Canadian colleges and universities, those in Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand and India implemented the system of external examination and uniform syllabi, as exemplified by the University of London, along with all its drawbacks.

 

The Wood’s Despatch of 1854, explicitly recommended the adoption of the London pattern for setting up universities in India. Many advantages could be seen at that time in such a plan of action. A purely examining university would cost very little. The existing colleges and schools could easily be provided affiliation. If the university were non-denominational, it would not interfere with the mission schools and colleges that had established a considerable reputation in the educational field in India.

It would also solve a major dilemma for policy-makers in India who, while asserting their commitment to secularism in public and hence official neutrality towards religion, continued to have a soft corner for the Christian religion. The missionaries could now be provided government assistance without seeming to compromise on the policy of secularism that was overtly preferred by these public figures. It was on this basis that the first three universities were established in 1857 in the presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. Later the same model was replicated in the two other provincial universities – at Lahore in 1882 and Allahabad in 1887.

The new universities in India were primarily examining bodies. Very little teaching and even less research was undertaken. The universities were so organized as to do nothing – either for the advancement of learning or the provision of efficient teaching. They also did nothing directly to help the colleges, to which these functions were left, in dealing fairly with their students. The colleges were virtually free to administer themselves.

A huge body of students, spread over the entire province, were subjected to the same syllabus, books and examinations. The University of Calcutta, for example, at the turn of the century, became the largest university in the world with almost 27,000 students taking its examinations annually and its jurisdiction ranged from Punjab in the West to Burma in the East. Little thought was paid to the problems that such forced uniformity might cause.

Knowledge and learning increasingly became divorced from the university degree. Passing the examination became the most dominant feature of the new system of education. The coeval comments of one historian of the education system of colonial Britain are noteworthy on the establishment of many private colleges in India that professed to give training for university degrees.

‘They made a profit for their proprietors by the payment of exiguous salaries to their teachers and by the avoidance of subjects of study that necessitated costly equipment. One of the outstanding features of all these colleges was that, while, like all the well-run missionary and government colleges, they gave English education, unlike them, they gave it without the aid of Englishmen, and their students rarely or never had any contact with any one who spoke as his native tongue the language in which all their studies were conducted. The work was the cramming of the pupils with unappreciated information, and could not properly be called education at all.’¹

 

At least two facts continued to be of help in perpetuating the value of an examination-centred education system that had been copied from London. One, the Government of India was the most important employer for the educated during colonial times and even later. It paid the best salaries, awarded the maximum perquisites, and ensured the maximum job security. Two, for some curious reason, never stated explicitly, the Government of India also insisted that its employees have a university degree. Not knowledge of a university level, just a degree even though it was widely known that a degree in itself did not always imply the existence of knowledge among its holders. Correspondingly, obtaining a degree remained the supreme good from which all other goods derived.

 

Even later day reformers did not question the centrality of the degree examination. The modification of the Indian university system through the Universities Act of 1904 went off on a tangent when it presumed that the errors within the system were a consequence of too much interference by Indians into the system of university governance. It was thought that Indians irresponsibly provided affiliations to colleges without properly ascertaining their credentials for sending up candidates for the degree examination.

The Universities Act of 1904, therefore, aimed at strengthening government control over the body corporate of the university by appointing a senate that was dominated by nominees of the government. That control continues with us till today. No effort was spared to keep the teacher ‘reduced’. They were to teach what they had not created and examine those whom they had not taught. The distrust of the teacher remains so deep-rooted that even the contemporary recommendations for reform emanating from the University Grants Commission and the National Knowledge Commission shy away from addressing these issues.

 

Footnote:

1. Arthur Percival Newton, The Universities and Educational Systems of the British Empire, W. Collins, London, 1924, p. 77.