I came across the latest book by James Tooley called the “Beautiful Tree” wherein Tooley advocates private participation in public education . Tooley claims that he was inspired by the book by the same name , by another famous Indian , the Gandhian , Dharmapal .
In chapter 11 he discusses the history of the present education system in India . This is the crux of his book and a very interesting essay in itself :
Tooley starts by quoting Dharmapal’s quotation from Gandhiji , where Gandhiji came down heavily upon the Government schools and said that universal education was not possible in the said method and said that the only way possible for universal education in India was through the “old model” of the village schools and school master .
In a very lengthy chapter he discusses as to how the British carried out a survey of schools in the 19th Century and were surprised to find that instead of having very little education , India had a large number of schools and very large parts of the Indian population was being educated in the said schools and these schools catered to all sections of the society . The British were so surprised that they undertook a study of the funding of these schools and found out to their surprise that the funding was completely private . He says however the said statistics were criticized by some other Britishers and he names Phillp Hartog and William Willberforce who thought that the quality of these schools were very low since they were responsible for the Indians being “deeply sunk , and by their religious superstitions fast bound , in the lowest depth of moral and social wretchedness” . Tooley says that Karl Marx believed that the biggest tool of history was the English education of India . As for payment the British believed that the schools were bad because the teachers were badly paid and there was no adequate” school houses” , thereby leading to laying down of specific regulations as to what constitutes schools and the guidelines that it may have to follow . The British acknowledged clearly that the courses in the schools were more practical applicable than even the schools in Scotland and even recommended the use of the methodology in England itself . The method was brought into Britain under the name of the Madras Method , wherein senior students were given responsibility to educate junior students and was a stupendous success . He says that Dharmapal mentioned the man who took the system to England in his book, a certain Dr.Andrew Bell . He said the British in response tried to reform the indigenous schools by getting some teachers educated in formalized westernized education and setting up westernized schools and failed . He says that the reasons for the failure were (i) there were never adequate people interested to teach in village schools from outside the village (ii) it was apparent that in the new schools of the British ,closeness to the bosses mattered and not teaching capability , (iii) the new schools deliberately contrary to the intention of the scheme were only concentrating on the education of Brahmins and the elites (iv) there was no adequate supervision of the schools , and (v) the schools were designed for much larger group than the inadequate and inefficient private schools and hence there were very few of them making it very difficult for the students from distant villages from attending them .
Then came Macaulay : who came in initially as President of General Committee of Public Instruction for the British Presidency at Calcuta . He was of the view that the indigenous education system and education itself was worthless and the object of the education in India was to “promote European literature and sciences amongst the natives of India and all funds to be dedicated to English education alone” . He then went on to devise the extensive public education system which exists in India till the present date . This resulted in reducing education amongst the people in general as apparent from even statistics available from that time . Tooley says that evidence of this has parallels from England of the same time which was dominated by private schools and it was that what got most people educated and not public / government schools . He also quotes Gandhi who specifically mentions that the Government School system would not be able to attain universal education in India and advocated a return to the village school master model .
Tooley then calls the modern educationists “Modern Macaulays” who believe what suited the European elites best suited the rest of the world also .He says that this is not only true for India and be examples he illustrates that how it is true for the rest of the world . Tooley ends this chapter be stating “private education” for the poor means championing a return to the cultural roots of the people .
The reason I recommend a reading of this book is not to endorse the ideology or the content what Tooley may be saying though that may well be true , but I find it interesting as it shows how the British used law to destroy the older system of education so as to impose their own and how that system still continues to the present day .
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