The Usual Suspects

India Today
November 2, 1998

THE USUAL SUSPECTS
More than Saffron

Sonia forgets education is also about good citizenship

Swapan Dasgupta

When "Rab" Butler -- one of Amartya Sen's predecessors as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge -- was given charge of the education portfolio, Prime Minister Winston Churchill offered only one suggestion: "Teach them how Wolfe captured Quebec." That was 44 years ago. Today, if Atal Bihari Vajpayee were to give an Indian variant of Churchillian wisdom to his Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Murli Manohar Joshi, it is almost certain that the West Bengal Government would threaten secession, Sonia Gandhi would warn of the end of civilisation as we know it and the chattering classes would scream xenophobia. If something as innocuous as the invocation to the Goddess Saraswati at a conference of education ministers can prompt walkouts, it is indicative that there is something rotten about our values. After all, who remembers that Netaji Subhas Bose once organised a dharna in a Calcutta college to press for the students' right to observe Saraswati puja?

The hesitation is understandable. Still preoccupied with the spread of and access to primary education, the Government's focus remains narrow. The issue of quality -- of teachers, the curriculum and evaluation -- that is central to the debates on education in modern societies is still on the periphery in India, despite Joshi's attempt to raise it during the teacher's pay dispute. Even 50 years after Independence, our concerns are wonderfully Victorian. Yet, Joshi has made a difference. By linking education with citizenship and nationhood, he has revived popular concern over the moral underpinnings of schooling. It is a laudable objective and really no different from the concerns of conservatives in America who insist that the mandatory oath of allegiance should be complemented by morning prayers. It is also no different from a growing awareness in Britain that the morning assembly in schools -- where the Lord's Prayer was once obligatory -- was a valuable character-building exercise. The HRD minister, of course, goes a step further by advocating the teaching of Sanskrit from Class III, a tradition that was, ironically, upheld by the British and diluted after Nurul Hasan won academia for the Left. Ethics, classicism and patriotism are the pillars on which Joshi's project rests.

As the conference of state education ministers showed, his task is daunting. Apart from education being a state subject, Joshi is burdened by the RSS tag that ensures all his suggestions -- including sensible ones -- are inevitably politicised. But these impediments are nothing compared to the real problem Joshi faces: the challenge of "progressive" education. According to this tradition, education should be value neutral and focus on imparting a "scientific temper" without straying into the complex areas of social personality and good citizenship. The buzzword is being non-judgmental.

Progressive teaching methods have a bizarre attraction for the rootless wonders. These are people whose choice of schools for their children is guided by much more than an institution's examination results. This is why they have traditionally favoured expensive public schools and Christian institutions where studies and cultivation of character are inseparable. Yet, they despise the Saraswati Vandana. Is it an admission that what is good for their own children is inappropriate for the less fortunate who attend government schools? Or is it because Sonia feels that the Indian ethos and modernity are incompatible?

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