The Origin of Miseducation

The concept of “miseducation,” sustained by the “active construction, maintenance, regulation, and diffusion of ignorance,” is relevant to analyzing the content taught in teacher education institutions.Footnote ¹² Two theories came into prominence in the public domain during the last decades of the freedom movement (1920-1947). The first was that modern education was an “alien western imposition, alien to Indian soil and has enslaved millions.”Footnote ¹³ The second was that the British destroyed indigenous education in India. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi first advocated these two theories through his writings and speeches. The opposition to modern Western knowledge was not civilizational opposition to the West; instead, it was a deeply embedded disdain toward the masses, derived from English elites. English elites in the nineteenth century feared that if education was given to the masses, it “would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in agriculture.”Footnote ¹⁴ Questioning Indian education reformers, Gandhi said: “A peasant earns his bread honestly. But he cannot write his own name. What do you propose to do by giving him knowledge of letters? Will you add an inch to his happiness? Do you wish to make him discontented with his cottage or his lot?”Footnote ¹⁵ Gandhi admitted that he had benefited from modern education, but he emphasized that “I make use of the education I have received. And, if I am making good use of it, even then, it is not for the millions.”Footnote ¹⁶

If modern education had helped Gandhi, why was it bad for millions of his fellow countrymen? Gandhi was born into privilege; his father was a prime minister of the princely states of Porbandar and Rajkot. By his own admission, he was an average student and barely managed to pass the examinations, yet family wealth enabled him to go to England for higher education.Footnote ¹⁷ He defended the feudal interests by projecting himself as the leader of the underprivileged sections of the society. On the one hand, Gandhi declared that “untouchability is a sin.”Footnote ¹⁸ On the other, he defended the caste system as scientific and universal. He argued that the caste system is “not a human invention, but an immutable law of nature—the statement of a tendency that is ever-present and at work like Newton's law of gravitation.”Footnote ¹⁹ The castes considered as untouchable were the most marginalized of Indian society (today they are called Dalits). When they were attacked for sending their children to a local primary school in a village in Ahmedabad District, Gandhi suggested that “they go elsewhere.” This attitude has been defended by Krishna Kumar, who stated that it was “incompatible with Gandhi's preference for reform without coercion.”Footnote ²⁰ However, this episode clearly shows Gandhi's dismissive attitude towards the marginalized sections of the society. Gandhi, who had the power to humble the mighty British Empire, did not even attempt to hold a dialogue to convince the attackers to let the Dalit children study in schools.

There is a widespread popular narrative that celebrates Gandhi's uplift of the Dalit communities whom he called Harijans (children of Hari-the Hindu god) and eulogizes the activities of his Harijan Sevak Sangh (an organization for the uplift of Harijans). B.R. Ambedkar, who fought for the rights of the Dalits, keenly contested Gandhi's tokenism, which did not lead to any empowerment. Laura Jenkins, in her comparative study of the Dalit educational institutions in India, the educational institutions established for African-Americans in the United States, and those established for non-whites in South Africa, quotes B. R. Ambedkar's statement that “American whites spent $85,000,000 between 1865 and 1930 on the advancement of the Negroes,” whereas “the Harijan Sevak Sangh spent a few thousand rupees a year on petty and insignificant and insubstantial purposes.”Footnote ²¹ The efforts of writers like Krishna Kumar to present Gandhi's educational ideas as progressive and beneficial to all sections of the society could be considered as the beginning of miseducation in India.

Education as an Empowering Tool

British and Indian liberals viewed education as an empowering tool in a country that had faced devastating famines that killed millions of peasants, agricultural laborers, and others in the rural population. Charles Grant, a Scottish highlander, was the first to suggest the introduction of modern education in India in the late eighteenth century. After witnessing the 1768-70 Bengal famine that killed millions of people, he recommended the government introduce modern education to help the peasants “improve the existing modes of culture, pasturage, of rearing cattle, defence against excess of drought, and rain . . . to the prevention of famine.”Footnote ²² In the 1830s, Robert Shortrede, another Scottish officer, established sixty-five schools in Purandhar Taluka, in Western India, to empower the peasants.Footnote ²³ He suggested the government establish more schools so that the peasants “understand their own affairs and vigilantly observe and scrutinize the conduct of the native functionaries and successfully resist all unauthorized actions by seeing that the sums paid by them to the government were properly entered into their Receipt Books. . . . It would be a powerful and operative check on the native functionaries.”Footnote ²⁴ In Bengal, in 1840, after witnessing the oppressive treatment meted out to the peasantry by Bengal landlords (zamindars), the judge of Jessore, W. Seton-Karr, suggested a system of village schools that would “enable a peasant to write a letter of business, to draw out a bond, to understand the terms of a mortgage, to cast up his accounts to know if his receipts for rent are correctly signed.”Footnote ²⁵ Indian reformers, too, supported the establishment of schools in rural areas. Krishna Rao, Gazulu Lakshminarasu Chetty, C. Narayanaswami Naidu, and C. Srinivasa Pillay, Dadabhai Naoroji, Mahdev Govind Ranade, Narayan Ganesh Chandavarkar, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Jotirao Phule, G. Subramanya Iyer, Heramba Chandra Moitra, and others urged the colonial government to establish more schools to benefit all sections of the society.Footnote ²⁶

However, the feudal backlash was powerful enough to stop the government proposal for rural education in the 1870s. Peary Mohan Mukherjee, the Indian member of the Governor-general's Executive Council and one of the most powerful Indian in India at that time, opposed the proposal, stating that the government should aim to make the masses into useful members of society, such as “servants, shepherds, apprentices and not scholars,” as “the educated mock at all distinctions of caste, wealth and lineage which had enthralled them for centuries.”Footnote ²⁷ In the 1880s Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the leading political leader who opposed colonial rule, told the government, “You take away a farmer's boy from the plough, the blacksmith's boy from the bellows and the cobbler's boy from his awl with the object of giving him liberal education . . . and the boy learns to condemn the profession of his father, . . . the boy looks up to the government for employment: you remove him from a sphere where he would have been contented happy and useful to those who depend upon him and teach him to be discontented with his lot and with the government.”Footnote ²⁸

Proponents of modern education wanted to protect the peasants from feudal oppression by empowering them to read the receipts of their payments to landlords, and moneylenders. They also wanted the peasants to adopt improved methods of agriculture and introduce innovations in rural economy as a protection from floods and drought. However, Gandhi was not in favor of such empowerment. He reduced the importance of education from being a source of empowerment to that of imparting the fashionable skill of writing one's own name. After downplaying the importance of education, Gandhi virulently attacked the existing curriculum and textbooks and called them “harmful to children.” He declared, “If I had the powers of a despot . . . I would certainly destroy the majority of the present textbooks.”Footnote ²⁹ Gandhi promoted his ideas of education with the argument, “I myself was once a teacher. And the claim may be advanced that I am still one. I have experience in education since I have made experiments in that field.”Footnote ³⁰ After facing criticism from leading liberals and educationists like V.S. Srinivasa Sastri, a strong supporter of compulsory education in India, and Madan Mohan Malaviya, who was instrumental in establishing a university at Banaras, Gandhi conceded, “I admit my limitations. I have no university education worth the name. My highschool career was never above average. I was thankful if I could pass my examinations. Distinction in school was beyond my aspiration. Nevertheless, I do hold very strong views on education in general, including what is called higher education.”Footnote ³¹

Gandhi led the successful Non-Cooperation Movement against the British during the years 1920-21. He called on the people to boycott existing schools and colleges, describing modern education as “godless.”Footnote ³² His supporters established “national schools,” which provided little instruction in literacy but did teach how to spin yarn from wheels called charkas. In spite of his persistent advocacy for “national education,” the schools were a failure. Gandhi admitted as much when he said that “out of 30,000 boys and girls, hardly one thousand are spinning on 100 charkhas at the rate of ½ hour per day. Hundreds of charkhas are lying idle and neglected.”Footnote ³³ The attendance of Dalit and Muslim children was also poor. Between 1917 and 1922, the number of modern educational institutions increased from 150,091 to 169,288, and the number of students increased from 7,057,704 to 7,609,519.Footnote ³⁴ These growth figures show that the people who gave massive support to Gandhi's political agitation did not support his educational ideas. Gandhi's intention that the national schools would end the existing modern schools was overwhelmingly rejected by the people.

Prominent political leaders also opposed Gandhi's idea of rejecting modern education. Aurobindo Ghosh criticized it as “false and narrow patriotism.”Footnote ³⁵ Lajpat Rai declared, “I feel thankful for its being godless. But for this (English/modern) education, there may have been no awakening.”Footnote ³⁶ To quell the opposition to his educational ideas, Gandhi argued that his ideas were rooted in Indian tradition and indigenous educational practices, as “the rishis (sages, or teachers) taught without books. They only gave them a few mantras (sacred chants) which the pupils treasured in their memories and translated into practical life.”Footnote ³⁷ He emphasized, that the entire indigenous education system was oral, and was based in religion. His example of rishis as the only teachers, and his support to caste system created an image that Brahmins controlled knowledge.

There is no historical evidence to support Gandhi's ideas about indigenous education. India had produced five hundred texts in the areas of literature (Kalidasa's Sakuntala), philosophy (the Upanishads), mathematics (Bhaskara's Lilavati), astronomy (Aryabhata's works) and so on, so it was clear that the transmission of knowledge was not fundamentally oral. Moreover, the argument that the Brahmins controlled knowledge is inadmissible, as a large number of great Sanskrit poets—such as Valmiki, the author of Ramayana, and the renowned poet Kalidas came from lower castes, while Vyasa, the author of the epic Mahabharata, was of mixed parentage (a Brahmin and a fisherwoman). One of the most respected sages, Parasara, was the son of a Brahmin father and a Dalit woman.Footnote ³⁸ In the indigenous vernacular schools of the early nineteenth century, nearly 65-70 percent of teachers and students were from non-Brahmin castes. In Bengal and north India, non-Brahmins studied in Sanskrit schools.Footnote ³⁹ Thus we see clearly that Gandhi's ideas about India's historical past were inaccurate.

As Gandhi continued to advocate his ideas, an opportunity came in 1937 to implement them. The British administration introduced an act in 1935 that gave autonomy to the provinces. In the subsequent provincial elections for the respective legislatures, held in 1937, the Indian National Congress won in seven provinces. On October 22-23 of that year, a conference of the newly appointed education ministers of these provinces took place. Gandhi presided over the conference, which endorsed his ideas and adopted them as policy. The scheme has been variously called the “Nai Talim,” the “Wardha Scheme,” “Basic Education,” and the “Self-Supporting School System.” In this scheme, the teaching of the language, literature, history, geography, mathematics, and the sciences was relegated to the background. The children had to spin yarn to contribute toward the salaries of the teachers and the maintenance of schools.Footnote ⁴⁰ These schools operated for five and a half hours a day, of which the children worked for three hours and twenty minutes on charkas. Subjects like music, drawing, and arithmetic were taught within a period of forty minutes, which allotted thirteen minutes for each subject; both social studies and general science were taught thirty minutes, of which teachers devoted fifteen minutes to each subject.Footnote ⁴¹ Clearly, no one could expect the teachers to convey any substantive knowledge in so short a time. These schools were open 288 days per year, or twenty-four days a month, without summer or winter break.

These ideas were acutely opposed by educationists like M.R. Paranjpe, who saw that the attack on English education would strengthen the existing social hierarchies.Footnote ⁴² However, Syed Nurullah and J.P. Naik supported Gandhi's ideas in their book, History of Education in India, published in 1943. They argued that the history of education was “a great drama” between “the non-Indians to impose a cheap imitation of the British educational system on India and the desire of the people of the country to create a new system to meet their own peculiar needs and problems.”Footnote ⁴³ Although their book is eighty years old, many teacher training institutions still use it as a textbook, and thus the teaching of the history of education is frozen in time in such institutions.

After India achieved independence in 1947, attempts to introduce Gandhi's Nai Talim faced severe opposition. The people who supported his agitation against the British rule did not support his educational views. In the view of the National Planning Committee of 1948, “the idea that the output of children's work at school should financially sustain the school was unacceptable.” The committee believed that “such a system will mean the existence of child labour in schools.”Footnote ⁴⁴ However, Gandhi's supporters, such as Vinoba Bhave, J.P. Naik, and others, were prominent figures and acted as a pressure group to influence government education policy. As a result, the government decided to divide its resources between promoting modern education and supporting Nai Talim. It established numerous Nai Talim schools, and when they did not successfully enroll students, they were quietly closed down.Footnote ⁴⁵ C. Rajagopalachari, the chief minister of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, introduced a similar scheme in 1953. It was called kula kalvithittam, or “caste-based education system.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Rajagopalachari argued, like Gandhi before him, that this new education scheme would “revolutionise the education system,” because in the current system of modern education, children were alienated from their family and environment, and it was necessary to reorient them to their natural environment.Footnote ⁴⁷ According to this scheme, the school hours were reduced and the children had to spend half a day helping their parents in their traditional occupations.Footnote ⁴⁸ Because the scheme was essentially a strategy to reproduce caste differences and social inequalities, it faced a massive backlash. Rajagopalachari resigned and the scheme was dropped.Footnote ⁴⁹

Feeding the Myth

A Gandhian activist, who went by the sole name of Dharmapal, wrote The Beautiful Tree to defend a statement Gandhi made in 1931, in which he said that “the British administrators, when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to root them out. They scratched the soil and began to look at the root, and left the root like that, and the beautiful tree perished.”Footnote ⁵⁰ To prove Gandhi's argument, Dharmapal relied on the data collected by British administrators while still condemning “the writings of foreigners,” including the data for South India collected by Thomas Munro in 1822-23 and for East India by William Adam in 1837-39.Footnote ⁵¹ By this point, the period of British rule over those two regions had extended over sixty-two years and eighty years, respectively, and Dharmapal could conveniently argue that the British officers had destroyed indigenous education in India. He deliberately ignored the data of the Ratnagiri district, collected by Thomas Best Jervis within two years of the establishment of the British administration in 1820, and the subsequent data collected in 1823-24 for Western India.Footnote ⁵² All three provinces saw a similar trend with regard to the condition of schools, learning access, teacher's salaries, curriculum, and textbooks. Dharmapal also ignored post-1840s data, because it would have proved Gandhi wrong, as the British had adopted thousands of indigenous schools by providing regular salaries, pensions, blackboards, and printed books while continuing the indigenous curriculum, textbooks, and method of teaching. As a result, the government saved nearly seventy thousand schools across British India.Footnote ⁵³ The Beautiful Tree remains highly influential in both the academic and public domain, and a wide range of people still believe that the British destroyed indigenous education.

While Dharmapal's book succeeded in terms of defending a dominant idea of Gandhi, he wrote as an activist, so his writing and his treatment of the subject were non-academic. Thus, there remained a need for sophisticated academic work that could be used in the universities and colleges for teaching the history of education. Krishna Kumar's Political Agenda of Education addressed this need by bringing together the myths created by Gandhi, backed up by a couple of Hindu mythological stories and sustained by a few stray facts. The book is a collection of essays, probably written at different times, as there are repetitions and contradictory statements. For instance, at one point, it asserts that Gandhi's approach to education is “modernist” and, at another, calls opponents of Gandhi “modernists.”Footnote ⁵⁴ It identifies the liberal insistence on children's literacy as a colonial legacy, asserting that “the educated Indian was now socialised to regard this illiteracy as an aspect of their moral and intellectual decadence.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Kumar's contradictory approach seeks to both disparage modern and Western education and yet situate Gandhi's educational ideas within the core of modern Western educational thought. He argues that “to Gandhi, Western education, even in the emaciated form it had taken in India, was a negation of the principles of non-violence and truth, the two values he regarded as crucial.” At the same time, and indeed on the same page, he places Gandhi's educational ideas “in the tradition of western radical humanists like Pestalozzi, Owen, Tolstoy and Dewey.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Elsewhere, Kumar declares, “the stance Gandhi took appears to be most radical of all.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Another essential feature of the Political Agenda of Education is the complete absence of primary archival sources to support the arguments. For instance, Kumar claims that “colonial rule permitted no possibility of the inclusion of indigenous knowledge and cultural forms in the curricula of ordinary schools . . . The life of the local community found no reflection in the school's curriculum.” He asserts that “the rejection of indigenous knowledge was the central issue in the development of colonial education,” and “tradition lost its hold when prescribed syllabi and textbooks came into being.”Footnote ⁵⁸ However, in reality, the colonial state kept the texts that were used in the indigenous schools to teach modern Indian languages, moral stories, and arithmetic across India, and simply introduced new textbooks for geography and history because they were new disciplines. Additionally, most of the textbook writers were Indians.Footnote ⁵⁹ In each province, private publishers and textbook writers submitted a copy of their books to be reviewed by a committee of teachers appointed by the province's director of public instruction. The committees received nearly 1,000 books a year. From 1912 to 1917, one province received 5,050 books, and the committee recommended 1,474 titles.Footnote ⁶⁰ The headmasters and teachers had the autonomy to choose textbooks for first grade to ninth grade. For tenth grade, the year students completed their secondary schooling, culminating with the Matriculation Examination, the universities suggested a set of textbooks. Gandhi's supporters began the process of imposing a single textbook with complete disregard for India's cultural and linguistic diversity, only after India gained independence.Footnote ⁶¹ It is ahistorical, therefore, to assume that “the curriculum and textbooks introduced by the colonial administration reflected an alien epistemology, and the teacher had no autonomy to organise or represent the ‘truth’ of the new knowledge.”Footnote ⁶²

Contradictions continue throughout the Political Agenda of Education. On the one hand, Kumar quotes the claim of William Adam's report, prepared between 1837 and 1839, that in the indigenous schools, “writing of letters inevitably came first; the child was introduced to letters of the alphabet in a formal, ceremonial manner.”Footnote ⁶³ On the other hand, he also quotes William Arnold, an arrogant director of public instruction in Punjab, who stated, “We found a population, with their own idea of the meaning of education, and to that idea thoroughly attached; and to whom our idea of education, being inconsistent with their own, as thoroughly distasteful; as to an Asiatic everything is distasteful which is new.” Kumar argues that “the ‘points of inconsistency’ Arnold noticed between the Indian and the English concepts of education” owed to “the post-Reformation perception of texts and reading.” This overlooks the fact that Arnold imposed Urdu language in Arabic script as a medium of instruction on a population that spoke Punjabi and wrote in Nagari and Gurumukhi scripts. It was not, as Kumar argues, that “written language invites contention”; rather, when a government changes the language of administration and instruction and the script it is written in, there is bound to be opposition. People's resistance cannot be construed as their opposition to the concept of writing itself.Footnote ⁶⁴ Most importantly, in Punjab province, where the text of Gurugranth Saheb is virtually worshipped more than God, how can anyone claim that the written language invites contention there?

The Political Agenda of Education errs not just in its interpretations, but even on basic facts. It states incorrectly that the teacher training institutions were introduced after 1854, and that there were only 104 such institutions in India.Footnote ⁶⁵ In reality, there were 691 teacher training institutions with 348,500 trained teachers.Footnote ⁶⁶ The first teacher training institution was established in 1820 at Ratnagiri. Some of the teacher training institutions were huge and supplied trained teachers to the entire province and beyond. For instance, the Native Education Society of Bombay from 1824 onwards supplied trained Marathi and Gujarati teachers to the entire province and neighboring provinces as well.Footnote ⁶⁷

Kumar's Political Agenda of Education erroneously claims, “In the indigenous tradition, the teacher was remunerated by the community he served. Under the new system, he became a paid servant of the colonial government. This switching over of the teacher from the charge of the local population to that of the government triggered a process of estrangement of the school from the local community.”Footnote ⁶⁸ However, the indigenous school teacher was not in charge of the local population, nor was he paid by the village community.Footnote ⁶⁹ He was a paid professional who charged a fee forteaching his students.Footnote ⁷⁰ After adopting indigenous schools, by giving salaries and pensions to teachers, the British administration established school boards consisting of important local individuals. In doing so, it was the British who actually brought the community closer to the schools. Kumar also asserts that “Gandhi wanted to free the Indian teacher from the slavery of bureaucracy.”Footnote ⁷¹ However, research has shown that in a regular school, the teacher's administrative responsibilities were solely to maintain an attendance register and prepare annual reports. In contrast, in Nai Talim schools the teacher was burdened with excess work, required not only to record details about students but also the cotton procured and the amount of yarn spun, as well as the revenue from sales of the yarn.Footnote ⁷²

The Political Agenda of Education argues that in the Indian tradition, the teacher was revered as a “quasi-divine” figure and “an object of worship” and criticizes the “order of impersonal bonds” imposed by the colonial administration. Kumar evokes a couple of stories in ancient Hindu mythologies to support this theory. In these stories, punishments at the hand of authoritarian teachers caused one student named Upamanyu to lose his eyesight and another, named Ekalavya, to lose his thumb. Kumar claims these two examples demonstrate that in the Indian tradition, there was:

In actuality, the Hindu tradition has given little importance to such stories and has upheld the right of a student to question the teacher.Footnote ⁷⁴ Moreover, such mythological stories cannot be superimposed upon the nineteenth-century indigenous schools, where a majority—65-70 percent—of teachers came from non-Brahmin castes. Bengal also had Dalit teachers teaching upper castes.Footnote ⁷⁵ Given the lack of support for the book's assumptions, it's not surprising that teacher education institutions fail to encourage the history of education research based on archival documents and other primary sources.

Given the various shortcomings of Kumar's book, and its continuing dominance in teacher training institutions and public debates, a serious critique of the educational policies of the colonial era is very much needed. The colonial administration actively diverted funds earmarked for education from 1813 to 1859.It followed the guidance of the feudal interests and not educated reformist Indians and British liberals in the expansion of educational infrastructure. T.B. Macaulay had raised the monthly salaries of Indian teachers from 5-10 rupees to 30-50 rupees in 1836. Macaulay during his short stay (1834-38) established a series of schools in rural hinterland to empower of all sections of the society.Footnote ⁷⁶ However, after his departure in 1838, the colonial administration closed all the schools he had established and reverted back to paying a salary of 5-10 rupees. The salaries did not increase during the next eight decades, a development that many people criticized in 1911 and the Sadler Commission faulted in 1918.Footnote ⁷⁷ The British administration spent only one percent of its revenue on education and was adamant about providing vernacular education throughout the primary school years, which denied the poor and the marginalized segments of the population the opportunity to pursue secondary and higher education, as only English was taught at these levels. It also consistently refused to directly support girls’ education throughout the nineteenth century and opposed a common curriculum for boys and girls. Numerous such issues require serious historical investigation. Students of teacher education need to be familiarized with archival research, so that they can begin to write a more accurate and verifiable history of education in India.

Towards a New Beginning?

The New Education Policy adopted by the government of India in 2020 aims to improve teacher education, making it less insular and, potentially, more historically grounded. By 2030, it aims to streamline the entire system through standardized admission tests, which will also take into account the linguistic and cultural diversity of the country. To expand students’ horizons, the insular, two-year bachelor of education program that currently exists will be replaced by “a 4-year integrated B.Ed. dual-major holistic Bachelor's degree, in Education” with a compulsory study of a social science like history or a natural science like physics.Footnote ⁷⁸ The New Education Policy emphatically states that teacher education institutions should be strengthened through multidisciplinary programs and places a high priority on appointing “faculty trained in social sciences.”Footnote ⁷⁹ If properly implemented, these measures will likely break down barriers between teacher education on the one hand and social sciences and natural sciences on the other. They might also overturn the tradition of miseducation in India and provide a path forward for the history of education field in the country.