EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PHILOSOPHIES, TRADITIONAL AND MODERN

EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND PHILOSOPHIES, TRADITIONAL AND MODERN "Education" comes from the Latin ex (out of) and ducere (to lead, to guide); hence, to lead out of ignorance into knowledge, out of inability into competence. The desired knowledge and competence, however, will be shaped by historical circumstance and by cultural and social conditions. Education reflects the cultural self-understanding of a society and in turn helps both to determine it and to transmit it across countless generations. In India, with its long history and cultural diversity spanning many languages and religions, a comprehensive account of its educational character would require several volumes. The emphasis here, in this brief discussion, will be philosophical, highlighting the cultural and conceptual contexts of India's various educational systems and the values and ideals they attempt to embody. It is obvious that such rigorous selectivity results in some lacunae, for example, the long period of Muslim rule stretching from around the tenth to the eighteenth century. Muslim influence on Hindu culture has undoubtedly been considerable, but its impact on general, as opposed to sectarian educational patterns and policies, is less salient.

The Traditional Period

This period, for the purposes of this entry, extends from the early Vedic period to the coming of the British in the eighteenth century. It is dominated in the early period by the influence of classical Hinduism and Buddhism. The roots of the ancient Indian pattern of education may be traced to the earliest Vedic works, the four Vedas collectively known as Saṃhitās, the Brāhmaṇas, the Āraṇyakas, and the Upanishads. The purport of the hymns and chants that comprise the Vedas was largely to achieve cosmic harmony (ṛta) and the human prosperity it was believed to bring. This cosmic order was sought initially through sacrifices offered to the gods. Increasingly, the sacrifice itself came to carry the powers that had formerly been attributed to the gods, and much effort was expended on coming up with the most efficacious sacrificial rituals. Concurrently with this emphasis on the sacrifice, there was a contemplative turn away from ritualism to philosophical reflections about the nature of reality and the place of humans within it. Now it is knowledge itself that is seen as salvific, and it sets up a pattern of education in which sages reveal the nature of ultimate reality to select students in search of sacred knowledge. That is the etymological connotation of the term "upanishads," signifying a secret or esoteric knowledge that was largely confined to Brahmans. The rest of society, stratified along class lines, was provided the education appropriate to a particular class—the art of warfare in the case of Kshatriyas and agriculture, commerce, arts, and crafts in the case of Vaishyas. The Shudras who performed menial work were, however, deprived of education. The most detailed account of codes and laws, according to the caturvarnāshrama (four varnas) scheme, is provided in the Manusmṛti written by Manu, the lawmaker whose classification of social strata is said to have mirrored the makings of the world.

Buddhist influence was responsible for expanding the Vedic scheme of education beyond the caste restrictions imposed by the latter. Part of the appeal of Buddhist institutions of learning, both in India and abroad, was their ecumenical, inclusive character. The Buddhist approach includes both monasteries concerned with the training of monks and "universities," like Nalanda, involved in more secular education and systematic instruction in grammar, medicine, philosophy, and arts and crafts.

Outside the religious framework, kings and princes were educated in the arts and sciences related to government: politics (daṇḍa-nīti), economics (vārttā), philosophy (ānvīkṣiki), and historical traditions (itihāa). Here the authoritative source was Kautilya's Artha Shāstra, often compared to Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince for its worldly outlook and political scheming.

Principles, values, and goals

Those types of education, though involving different groups, shared at least two characteristics. Religion broadly conceived provided a frame of reference, though to different degrees. Even the Kshatriya prince featured in the Artha Shāstra was made to study trayī (the Vedas and their commentraries), while for Vedic students education was predominantly religious. Secondly, all ancient Indian education emphasized the role of the teacher, who in the Vedic scheme assumed the mantle of the guru (spiritual preceptor), or the ācārya (authoritative teacher), revered and served by his student (shishya).

The goal for the Vedic student might be termed "transcendent," that is, transcending the mundane interests and attractions of life to attain direct experience of Brahman and in the ideal case to reestablish union with it. The institution of brahmacarya (chastity) enjoined on the student served many purposes; on the one hand, it pulled him away from the lures of the world, and on the other, conserved and sublimated the vital force (prāna) for union with the divine. The spiritual character of his education was also marked by the upanayana, or initiatory rite, which he had to undergo before being formally accepted by his teacher and beginning his instruction. This solemn ceremony typically took three days, when as expounded in the Atharva Veda, the teacher held the student within him and gave birth to a dvija, or twice-born student. The first birth from his parents was physical, but the second birth was spiritual. The close bond with the guru was cemented by the student living with the teacher so as to imbibe his inner spirit and in that way facilitate the attainment of vidyā or the highest knowledge leading to mukti (liberation).

The goal of Buddhist education, by contrast, was less transcendent and "vertical" and more immanent and "horizontal," in accord with the humanistic character of Buddhism. Within the Buddhist scheme, there were two types of institutions, the monasteries concerned with the training of monks and general universities imparting a more secular education. The goals of the two institutions varied accordingly. The monks were required to follow Buddhist teachings in a strict manner, begging for their food and keeping to the monastic disciplines, so as to bring about an inner renunciation or emptiness (sunyatā) and to awaken universal compassion. The students at the universities, on the other hand, while being instructed in the Buddhist teachings were trained to apply them in the world, as, for example, in the field of medicine, as mentioned in a canonical Pali work, Mahāvagga.

The goals of princely education were more secular. Mention was made earlier of the Artha Shāstra, a work concerned with the imperatives of royal or imperial power. Even though Kautilya describes the work as a species of rāja-nīti, the ethics of government, there was far more Machiavellianism in it, designed to make the king an absolute monarch and the state he ruled absolutely dominant.

Agencies and institutions

Ancient Indian educational institutions tended to be located in forests rather than in towns or cities, in an atmosphere of quiet and of natural beauty conducive to mental and spiritual concentration. The Āraṇyakas, or forest books, constitute a significant category of Sanskrit sacred literature. Radha Kumud Mookerji, the eminent Indian historian, says "India's civilization through the ages has been very largely the product of her woods and forests. It started as a rural and not as an urban civilization," and he goes on to cite Rabindranath Tagore: "a most wonderful thing we notice in India is that here the forest, not the town, is the fountain-head of all its civilization" (Mookerji, pp. 640–641).

The home of the teacher served often as the school in the guru-shisya relationship that constituted the most important educational pattern of the Vedic system. The intimate bond that thus tied a student to his teacher was familial and sacred. After the upanayana ceremony that marked the formal acceptance of student by teacher, a student was expected to live in his master's house and serve his needs, while the teacher was expected to be of high moral character and to teach as much by his life as by his explicit instruction. The Upanishads make frequent reference to pupils bringing firewood to their guru's house, signaling their readiness to serve their teacher and also their desire to keep alive the flame of their own devotion and concentration (tapas). These homes of learning, known as ạshramas, served as places of rest and spiritual focus, removed as they were from the din and bustle of the city.

However, as population and human needs increased and as the division of labor to meet those needs grew more complex, education moved from these sylvan settings into the cities. The period from around 200 b.c. to the rise of the Guptas in the fourth and fifth centuries a.d. saw the emergence of many great urban centers of learning. The Jatakas (folk tales from the lives of the Buddha) provide us with detailed accounts of Takṣashila, capital of the Gandhara kingdom in West Punjab, one of the first such centers where students flocked from all parts of the country, as they did also later to Benares (Varanasi). But without question the most famous such center was the Buddhist monastery Nalanda in Magadha (present-day Bihar). We owe the most meticulous accounts of the eminence of Nalanda, which drew students from all over India and beyond, to two seventh-century Chinese Buddhists pilgrims, Hsieun Tsang and I-Tsing. According to their reports, the curriculum included not only the works of all the eighteen Buddhist schools but also the Vedas, logic, grammar, medicine, metaphysics, arts and crafts, and a great deal more. Knowledge was thus systematized, and methods for imparting it were devised in ancient India long before universities were established in Europe.

The Modern Period

This period spans the interval between Lord Macaulay's Minute on Education of February 1835 to modern India, reflecting the tensions between traditions and modernity. Macaulay's Minute was introduced to the British company's education committee planning the course and general direction of education in British India. On one side were ranged the "Orientalists," who favored the support of Arabic and Sanskrit and the knowledge opened up through these languages. On the other side were the "Anglicists," who championed the cause of learning English and western textbooks. This debate was much more than a quarrel about the desired medium of instruction. Macaulay with his statement that "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia," came down firmly on the Anglicist side. His intention was to produce a cadre of Indians who could help the British run the empire by mastering modern Western knowledge. He considered India's education archaic and moribund. Macaulay's ideas carried the company and Parliament, and with the introduction of modern English instruction, Indian education was brought into the Western world.

Traditional Hindu culture, largely hierarchical, was averse to change, caste-based, status-oriented, religious in character, and generally accepted authority in the form of scriptures, teachers, or family or community elders. Modern Western culture, by contrast, was on the whole egalitarian, meritocratic, cosmopolitan in outlook, democratic in spirit, secular, reason-based, and oriented toward change and material advancement. It would be no exaggeration to say that the tensions between tradition and modernity brought into prominence by Macaulay are still unresolved today, with significant repercussions for the course of Indian education.

An example from the field of philosophy might illustrate the point. While there was a vibrant philosophical climate until around the time of the Mughals in the sixteenth century, Indian philosophy in the modern period has by and large languished. This is not at all to say that there have not been outstanding thinkers in this time frame because there certainly have been a few. It is rather to claim that these few have been somewhat isolated figures whose work has not on the whole generated the schools of thought or the vigorous debate between them that characterized earlier periods. Contemporary Indian philosophers trained largely in a Western idiom are not able to draw creatively on ancient traditions. Part of the problem is linguistic: the ability to plumb the depths of the tradition requires a deep and sophisticated knowledge of Sanskrit and Pali in order to appreciate the subtleties of traditional philosophical argument, and not many contemporary Indian philosophers possess the requisite linguistic and philological skills. In the limited time at their disposal, young scholars prefer to focus on Western philosophy where the academic prestige lies. On the other hand, there are still great Sanskrit scholars whose mode of expression and style of argument is not the modern one, and so one finds two groups of scholars, the traditional pandits and the modern Western-trained philosophers, who ideally should communicate with each other but who unfortunately do not. As a result, a subject that was once the wellspring and foundation of the culture has today fallen on hard times.

This tension between tradition and modernity has generated two responses. On the one side are revivalists, who want to return to a supposedly pure Hinduism and a purportedly golden age of the past. In a globalized and modern world such a simple return to the past is unviable. On the other side are those who tend to equate modernization with Westernization and turn their backs on tradition. This inevitably results in rootlessness and alienation. By far the most creative Indian educational thinkers have been those who have attempted both in their thought in general and in their educational philosophy in particular to effect a creative dialogue between past and present. It is instructive to consider two of them, Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, before examining the actual situation prevailing in Indian education by way of considering the values and goals at play in education today.

Principles, values, and goals

Both Gandhi and Tagore were sympathetic to and deeply appreciative of India's philosophical and spiritual traditions, though they drew on different parts of them in crafting their views on education. Gandhi was attracted to the moral and didactic parts of the tradition and to the Bhagavad Gītā in particular. Tagore by contrast was drawn more to the speculative and metaphysical richness of the Vedas and the Upanishads and developed an aesthetic philosophy of ānandā (joy). These temperamental and philosophical differences were reflected in their respective philosophies of education. While they agreed that education should have a social orientation and be situated in close proximity to nature, and while they also agreed that education should be holistic and integrative, encompassing the head, the heart, and the hands, they disagreed about the main goal of education. For Gandhi the chief purpose of education was moral and social; the focus should be on the building of character within a framework of service to the community. To that end he insisted that intellectual instruction be imparted through a craft and that manual labor be coordinated with academic pursuits. For Tagore, this was too restrictive a goal: for him the main purpose of education was to develop the creative potential of a student and through that creativity to achieve a unity with nature and with his fellow humans. "Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight" (Collected Poems, p. 34).

Whatever their differences, Tagore and Gandhi were idealistic thinkers seeing the purpose of education as disciplining and elevating the spirit and as the balanced development of intellect, imagination, and will. Of the two, it was Mahatma Gandhi who had greater influence on actual educational policies. After many years of preparation, he came up with a plan that became known as the Wardha Scheme of Basic National Education, whose salient features were free compulsory education, instruction in one's mother tongue, handicrafts as an essential instrument of learning, self-supporting education, and training in nonviolence. The plan was tried for a few years but met with fundamental criticism, namely that it concentrated on primary education to the detriment of secondary and higher education and that it was largely village-based and too decentralized to allow for much operational coherence or development in towns and cities where employment opportunities attracted a swelling population.

After independence and Gandhi's death, the direction of India's educational planning was much more pragmatic. The Constitution of India declared India a secular, socialist, and democratic republic, and much of the educational thinking swayed by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's vision of India as a modern developing industrial nation moved in directions quite different from those of Gandhi's plan. Five national goals were highlighted to guide the course of education: the promotion of democracy; secularism, given the multireligious character of the country; the elimination of poverty through economic and technological development; the creation of a socialistic pattern of society; and national integration. To that end some of the prominent features of the educational planning of the 1950s and 1960s were universal, compulsory, and free education for children up to the age of fourteen, a stress on the education of illiterate adults, an emphasis on science and technology, enlarged and equalized opportunities for Dalits and other "backward" sections of the population, and finally an emphasis on vocational training in technical skills. In general, education was linked closely and directly to the economic growth of the country. As J. P. Naik, member-secretary of India's Education Commission, in the mid-1960s put it: "The main justification for the larger outlay on educational reconstruction . . . is the hypothesis that education is the most important single factor that leads to economic growth . . . [based on] the development of science and technology" (p. 35).

Modern Indian education is thus seen in terms of economic growth and material advancement rather than the acquisition of timeless spiritual knowledge. In its reliance on science and experimental reason, it calls into question traditional emphasis on authority. In its stress on equality of opportunity, it negates the old caste-based system of privilege. In its valorizing of productivity, it moves firmly in the direction of a meritocratic and egalitarian rather than a hierarchical order.

It is thus no exaggeration to say that India suffers from what the English scientist C. P. Snow once called the problem of two cultures. Snow was referring to the opposition between scientific and humanistic cultures, which to some extent troubles modern India as well. But there is a deeper gulf that is yet to be satisfactorily bridged: the gulf between two different mind-sets and outlooks, the traditional and the modern.

Agencies and institutions

Emphasis on technological development and economic growth in post-independence India has almost reversed the traditional and Gandhian emphasis on rural education. India's major cities have all embraced universities, institutes of science and technology, and centers for advanced studies, many of them highly regarded. These institutions, especially the technical ones, have produced a cadre of engineers and computer scientists who both in terms of quality and quantity are world-renowned. The success of the Silicon Valley in California, of German software production, and of firms like Infosys and Wipro in India is based to a large extent on the excellence and technical skill of a pool of computer personnel produced by Indian technical institutes. At the other end of the scale, however, basic education for the poor has been largely stagnant, so that problems of illiteracy and endemic poverty still remain for the most part unsolved. This imbalance has created what India's preeminent sociologist, the late M. N. Srinivas, called the dual cultures of independent India, the urban middle class and the rural poor. The country's professional classes are drawn largely from the former, which comprises chiefly the high and middle castes and the top strata of minority groups. Those living in villages, except for the middle and large landowners and a few successful traders and artisans, constitute the rural poor. In spite of the egalitarian goals that national education set itself soon after independence, the gap between these two groups has increased precipitously.

India's urban middle class and its intellectuals have thus for the most part adopted a modern Western mindset. This creates a reaction on the part of chauvinist and revivalist groups rendered queasy by what they view as deracination, and consequently raises shrill invocations of a "pristine," mythic Hindu past. This is at times a political ploy to win mass allegiance or votes. The deeper Hindu values and ideals championed by Gandhi and Tagore, among others, are largely unheeded. At the other end of the scale, the rural poor, illiterate and uneducated, remain at the mercy of large- and middle-scale landowners in whose economic interests they work,.

These dualities highlight at least four problems that Indian education continues to face: the increasing politicization of Indian schools and universities which compromises freedom of thought and inquiry; the lack of creative integration of tradition and modernity; an increasing religious polarization, especially in the form of Hindu-Muslim tensions, which calls into question the goals of national integration and a secular society invoked by the Constitution; and finally, the daunting inequalities between rich and poor and between higher and lower castes. Indian education still faces a formidable set of challenges as it attempts to meet the demands of a steadily growing population in a globalized world.

Joseph Prabhu

See alsoArtha Shāstra ; Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) ; Information and Other Technology Development

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kabir, Humayun. Education in New India. London: Allen & Unwin, 1956.

Mookerji, Radha Kumud. "Ancient Indian Education." In The Cultural Heritage of India, vol. II. Kolkata: Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, 1962.

Munshi, K. M., ed. The History and Culture of the Indian Peoples. 11 vols. Mumbai: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1951–1969.

Naik, J. P. Educational Planning in India. Mumbai: Allied Publishers, 1965.

Shills, Edward. The Intellectual between Tradition and Modernity: The Indian Situation. The Hague: Mouton, 1961.

Srinivas, M. N. "The Dual Cultures of Independent India." In Collected Essays. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Tagore, Rabindranath. Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore. London: Allen & Unwin, 1958.