Dr. R.V. Vaidyanatha Ayyar
Additional Secretary
Tel: 3383202

Dated 12th August, 1997

Discourse on Indian education is, almost always, conducted without a historical perspective. Like King Charles' head, the infamous Minute of McCaulay keeps popping up again and again obfuscating the discourse. Conventional wisdom has a sure and ready scapegoat for all the ailments that afflict Indian education - the continuation of the colonial education, a McCaulay legacy. The scapegoat obviates the need for hard thinking, for a critical assessment of what has been attempted and achieved in post-Independent India.

A respectable tradition of historiography holds that the past has an integrity of its own, that one ought not to look at the past in terms of the values and needs of the present, accepting what has gone on before if it was in conformity with the contemporary scheme of things and rejecting if it is not so conforming. McCaulay's Minutes should therefore be judged in its proper contemporaneous historical context. However, conventional wisdom cannot be faulted on this score. If common sense itself is uncommon is it any wonder that historiography is esoteric? But where conventional wisdom can indeed be faulted is its ignoring the fact that since Independence some of the finest Indian minds - Zakir Hussain, Radhakrishnan, Mudaliar, D.C. Kothari, J.P. Naik, just to name a few - have contributed to Indian education and earnest attempts were indeed made to reform the Indian education system based on their contribution. If still Indian education retains vestiges of the colonial legacy it is not because of not trying but perhaps of not trying enough. Educationists are fond of quoting the Chinese proverb that if you want yield in a year you should plant rice, yield in ten years timber and yield in hundred years education. The logical corollary of the proverb is that for taking roots educational reform needs to be pursued steadfastly with adequate and sustained resource support and more importantly with unremitting commitment, despatch and resolve. As the National Council of Educational Research and Training's (NCERT) comments on Towards an Enlightened and Humane Society: A Perspective Paper on Education (October 1990) puts it:

....On matters like education there should be a broad national consensus on the direction in which education has to be used as an instrument for national development and, as far as possible it should not be subjected to frequent reviews at short intervals. Such approach may not be conducive to tangible growth and development, particularly in the field of education which require a longer gestation period; a minimum of 8 to 10 years, for programmes to get developed.

Another very important reason why vestiges of the McCaulay legacy still linger is the nature of social change itself. Social forms persist even after they lose their rationale. As Schumpeter puts it:

Social structures, types and attitudes are coins that do not readily melt. Once they are formed they persist, possibly for centuries, and since different structures and types display different degrees of their ability to survive, we almost find that actual group and national behaviour more or less departs from what we expect it to be if we tried to infer it from the dominant forms of productive process.

It is an optical illusion to identify and equate the coin still in the process of melting with the milieu as a whole. It is time to give up facile scapegoats.

Newton was deified in the eighteenth century, a deification best captured by the verse of Alexander Pope:

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night God said, let Newton be! And all was light.

Newton himself was humble enough and wise to admit that if he had seen further it is by standing upon the shoulders of Giants. Human progress, particularly in the field of thought, is cumulative. To the extent that the objective of education is altering the human condition education is akin to philosophy. There are perennial questions; there are at best awkward answers. Old soldiers may die but not ideas. They fade away, hibernate only to emerge when the season turns opportune. As Jacques Delors said in connection with the work of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century which was chaired by him:

(The Commission) was well aware that everything about the principles of education has been said by thinkers who have made their mark during the centuries - long history of mankind. Therefore our aim, indeed our ambition, was not to add a philosopher's store to what has already been done but to seek inspiration from the thinkers who have preceded us and set the principles they expressed against the real world of today and tomorrow.

Seek inspiration and stand on the shoulders of Giants, that sums up the central objective of this publication.

It is often stated, almost as an axiom, that there are few academic inputs into the functioning of the governmental system. Like most axioms it is only partially true. In education itself the countless reports - of CABE (Central Advisory Board of Education), CABE Committees, Commissions like those headed by Sergeant, Radhakrishnan, Mudaliar and Kothari - embody the collective reflection and wisdom of academics and educational administrators. The quintessential tragedy in government is the lack of institutional memory arising from poor, if not non-existent, documentation of the process underlying the trajectories of policies and programmes. The Third Law of Thermodynamics of sorts operates. While entropy ever increases information and knowledge ever get dissipated within the system; they soon acquire the status of dark matter. Consequently every initiative comes to be a voyage of adventure, a voyage without the guidance of the compass of institutional memory. To mix the metaphor, proven blind alleys emerge as promising avenues. Shorn of historical connectivity and the benefit of learning experience, initiatives get stultified.

There is often much motion without movement. This publication is a step towards the building up of institutional memory, it seeks to harness new information technologies to stem the operation of entropy, the dissipation of information and knowledge. It was conceived during the 28th General Conference (October 1995) when UNESCO presented a pre-view of the documentation being developed on CD-ROMs. This documentation is offered as part of the celebrations of 50th Anniversary of India's Independence with the fond expectation and hope that historical experience would guide the nation in meeting the new educational challenges, with assurance and wisdom.

Dr. R. V. Vaidyanatha Ayyar

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