A closer view of the Intellectual "Demolition Drive"...

Coming to the details of our schooling system and onwards, lets see the method followed and the immediate effect.

In school there are basically two or three languages, history, geography,maths and science.Later on it becomes algebra,geometry, physics,chemistry, biology and the like.

1)Languages i.e English, Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit etc

First the alphabets or "vyanjans" are learnt by heart.Then comes the grammer with vocabulary along the way.And then, it is the Reign of the prose (lessons) and poetry.All along the journey from 1st to 10th standard lessons are "taught". We have to read the lessons and learn the questions and their answers by heart.When the questions are asked in the exams we have to write the answers as taught in class.Here, proverbial correctness is given importance over grammatical correctness and beauty of expression.Essentially memory training.When I was in school, I always heard from everyone that language papers are "tough", you can never get full marks
and it is difficult to score in languages.This thing is projected with quite some pride and an air of proverbial superiority. But then I realised that in a language paper of 3 hours a lot of things have to be solved i.e answer in brief, answer in one sentence, reference to context, essay writing, letter writing (formal and informal), precis writing etc.The tight schedule DURING the 3 hours of the exam
that makes it tough. Question answers are essentially cramming work. But it doesnt stop there.You get, say approximately 10 mins for essay writing and letter writing and similar activities in the end. There is hardly any time to show your creativity and hence even essays and letters are memorised by students. Also, consider this: Does it ever happen in practical life that you give yourself 10 mins to draft a formal letter, say an application for LPG connection, and after 10 mins keep your pen down and whatever you have managed to write is sent as it is to its destination? In that case what is the relevance of the format followed in the language exams?

In my opinion, in language, beauty of expression or efficient conveying of ideas should be given importance.Proverbial correctness should be given least importance.Something like, in the paper even if students answer wrongly to the question but the answer is grammatically correct and the way of expression is good then the student should be given close to max marks even if the answer is wrong in context of the lesson.Lets say, for a 5 mark question reserve just 1 mark for correctness and the remaining 3.5 marks for beauty of expression, grammer and ah! yes, reserve the remaing half mark unconditionally according to the language
paper ideology and never give it away even if China joins the NATO or the earth turns upside down. All the while remember that the students are NOT going to ALWAYS write grammatically correct, gracefully expressed, proverbially "wrong" answers if given such an opportunity. This kind of assesment is only to ensure that the importance of language does not get compromised for "correctness".

And offcourse there is alot to be said about Sanskrit. Till now I have only heard from people (that includes teachers) that Sanskrit is "the most perfect language." There has been no further acknowledgement or utilisation beyond that. Offcourse it is indeed the most "mathematically" perfect language and structurally unambiguous.It is just perfect.But it has never been used beyond academic barriers. Let me share something I have read in the newspapers.

There is an Irish school in which Sanskrit is taught right since lower standards i.e our equivalent of Jr, Sr. KG. The Principal of the school says that it being phonetically unambiguous the children learn it very easily. Since the building blocks or "vyanjans"(in Devnagri script) consist of curved figures e.g ka, kha,ga etc it leads to faster development of the motor neuron skills of the children
while writing such curved figures. Learning Sanskrit right from the start also helps the children to grasp mathematics faster.There are a lot many benefits of learning this language from a very young age.

We had Sanskrit since 8th standard.And what was our point of view toward Sanskrit? : A highly Scoring subject!
What a pity we never realised the MASSIVE potential of this divine language. When I think about it now, I just wonder how immaculate the language is.And we Indians have been blending mathematics and poetry since antiquity!.. Remember Siddhanta
Shiromani by Bhaskaracharya. And we never had use of any punctuation in Sansrit, it has been borrowed from western languages.It is the sheer beauty of this language that it could take a compact form and yet convey a thousand meanings that too without ambiguity!!!!

2)History and Geography:

Truly speaking we never learnt the essence of history. It was just a collection of events arranged chronologically with perfectly fabricated reasons behind them and resulting consequences. All I have heard from my teachers is "We need to study history so that we can learn from our past mistakes". Thats a cliche'.

We never felt the spirit of the struggle. The significance of events never reached our hearts. History was the subject with the worst "cramming" requirement. We coudn't even reason out ourselves like in science; the reasons were already written down for us. Hitlers atrocities were summarized in just one word - Anti-semitism.What would have happened if we were told in detail what holocaust
means - what is it that hatred causes.Now when I read about concentration camps, about Russian 'Gulag' camps,about invasion by Timur Lenk do I get some idea what it would have been like... Thus, History was reduced to nothing more than a subject of academics.

Geography was just a collection of facts and "fractal" figures.Which region has what characteristics, what minerals,climate,natural resources, what capital, human population etc. etc. We had everything starting from Bombay, Maharashtra, India, Asia, Europe,Tundra, Taiga,Mediterranean to the not-so-Mediterranean in our geography. But even today I cannot say with confidence which road goes to Goa, when I have to make use of it. Also, I always keep highlighting that Mumbai is famous for its textile industry even after all the mills have shut down. Seems that I might have taken too much effort to by-heart that Mumbai is well-known for its textiles...
So basically the purpose for teaching geography has failed miserably.(I don't blame myself.)

3)Maths and Science.

Mathematics was purely learning of numbers and techniques. The process can be described in entirety thus :"THIS is the technique.THIS is WHERE you use it and THIS is HOW you use it" The domain of applicability, the condition of applicability of the technique is not conveyed to the students. i .e The "Knowledge of Structure" is not imparted to students. That is why they can use the technique ONLY where they have been taught it can be used.

I myself have always had this nagging feeling from inside that I have learnt lot many techniques like Laplace transform,Fourier transform, vector calculus, Beta-Gamma functions etc. but I am not able to use them in an original way to an entirely NEW problem.

Coming to science, it also has a limited scope for the students to think or reason out themselves. It consists of facts,techniques, reasons to be crammed. What we perceive as the component of "understanding" in science can in reality be described thus: the phenomenon is explained, the reasons are told and also the reasons for reasons if possible.There is this "Phenomenon" and there are "Reasons". There are arrows pointing from the "Phenomenon" to the "Reasons". Associating those arrows in our minds is what we perceive as "Understanding". This process genuinely has no contribution from the "thinker" i.e the student and hence cannot be classified as "understanding".

If we consider experiments in science, then those are stereotyped. The aim is given and the result is expected. The emphasis of students and teachers or professors for that matter is on getting "correct" results (there's that word "Correct" again...) Honest results are not appreciated and therefore people resort to manipulation. The spirit of exploration is missing.Experiments are truly not experiments at all.(One far reaching implication is that we Indians have been reduced to nothing but manipulators, with unique "Jugaad" technology)

(One thing I would like to add, I always get the feeling that no matter how interesting or fascinating the subject maybe, when it enters the academic syllabus it loses all its "juice" and becomes drab and uninteresting.And this thing is applicable right from the school level to even engineering undergraduate course. Do you think this is a coincidence? Or there a deeper sinister reason?

In short, all subjects have been reduced to more or less the same thing in the given Academic framework.The boundaries are set.We have to work always within those academic boundaries.We never need to think about those boundaries and what is beyond.We have to memorize facts, techniques, and fool around with reasoning in between all the time perceiving that we are "understanding". And as a result
an average Indian has been reduced to the typical example of a carriage horse with those blinds on its eyes. This has imbibed in Indians what can be called "Compartmentalized Thinking". We always tend to think in categories. We try
to put all of our experiences in one of those compartments. For e.g something is good or bad...conventionally studying is good, TV is bad, computer games are bad, "working" is good, story books are bad. In reality nothing is good or bad,everything has both the aspects and depends on what the thing is used for. It is the use which makes it good or bad. Or other instance is something is considered as "right" or ideal and the rest are plainly "wrong". The truth - there are many different ways of doing things, some are more efficient than the others. This distortion in thinking can best be described using the classic Bushism :"Either you are with US or the TERRORISTS" We Indians find it difficult to think fuzzy, to see things as they are and not as we perceive them to be.

The British in essence wanted to create clerks when they started this education system - people who can do only as much as been taught and nothing more. Our schools are essentially massive assembly lines for "clerks".

Students are discouraged from reading anything other than texbooks out of the fear that they will get distracted from studies.As a result, they are not introduced to new ideas. Their minds remain closed to anything other than academics. As they grow up they develop aversion to reading, even otherwise. Thus the channels of introducing new ideas are closed. See, the everything fits so nicely to the same theme and scheme of things. I remember when I was in school I always hoped that I would get a nice storybook or novel as a competition-prize but what I got was some General Knowledge book or maybe a book of experiments. When I stood 2nd in 7th standard, I thought THIS time I will get something interesting but it turned out to be the same old story. To this day I keep on brooding over this disappointment...

As we can see, each and every detail of this picture fits so beautifully into the scheme. The British "Indian" education system has turned us Indians into accounting machines with fixed ideas and "Crisp" logic. The worst part is that such a mindset reflects in each and every sphere of activity down to personal life and personal decisions. It has affected the personal,professional, social, political and every other sphere that you can think of.

In the light of this realization, think about what has been going on in this country for the past 60 years.. (and observe the pattern that emerges!)

In the next blog, I will discuss traits observed in the Indian psyche as a result of being conditioned by this system for decades.(I should say centuries)