Credit: A native school in Madras, 1837, painted by a British-Indian portrait painter, Simon Fonceca (Source: biblio.com)
Read the previous parts,
Indianisation
The emerging industrial economy in the late 1700s required workers to develop new skills and traits, such as punctuality, the ability to perform repetitive tasks, technical knowledge, and unwavering obedience. In response, schools quickly became institutions designed to train and prepare individuals for this new workforce.1 Alvin Toffler gives a detailed description of the Factory model school in his 1970 book Future Shock:
“The problem was inordinately complex. How to pre-adapt children for a new world – a world of repetitive indoor toil, smoke, noise, machines, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a world in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the factory whistle and the clock. The solution was an educational system that, in its very structure, simulated this new world. Even today it retains throw-back elements from pre-industrial society. Yet the whole idea of assembling masses of students (raw material) to be processed by teachers (workers) in a centrally located school (factory) was a stroke of industrial genius. The whole administrative hierarchy of education, as it grew up, followed the model of industrial bureaucracy. The very organization of knowledge into permanent disciplines was grounded on industrial assumptions. Children marched from place to place and sat in assigned stations. Bells rang to announce changes of time.”
Reformers such as Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster founded the famous ‘monitorial school’ model (an offshoot of the Factory model), focusing on repetitive teaching methods for reading, writing, and arithmetic, under the close supervision of a monitor. Soon, this model took the centre stage of ‘Popular Education’ back in England. That eventually arrived in India as an imperial educational movement.
(Figure 1: Credit: British Library – An internal view of Clapham school. Conducted on the system of the Madras School, invented by Andrew Bell, this school was erected in 1810 for the education of 200 boys)
(Figure 2: Credit: Wikimedia Commons – 1839, a school under Joseph Lancaster’s Monitorial System in the East End of London)
There are two parts to this inquiry into the new educational model that established itself in the colony: the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ is being taught as part of education? (The ‘why’; that is, the political agenda is well known already.) Let us begin by addressing the ‘how’, for which the analysis needs to delve into the organisational, structural, and pedagogical changes effected as a system.
Birth of ‘rote-learning’- a colonial genesis?
In the entire reconstruction phase, the ‘monitorial system’ played a very pivotal role, marking the intermediary step in the transition from the individual method of instruction towards the modern classroom system. In terms of general structure, its history reflects a shift from a varied, informal system of household and community-based learning to a more centralised and standardised education system in India.3 Now, what is this Monitorial system? So, here goes the story of knowledge that originated in India, became a key method for promoting elementary education in England, and then returned to India, undergoing continuous modifications and improvements along the way.4 This system was known as the Bell-Lancaster system, or occasionally the Madras System of Education.
Rev. Andrew Bell, who was a Company chaplain, served at the Egmore Male Asylum in Madras, South India, from 1789 to 1796. It was during this time that he came across the memory-centric pedagogy in a native school, while out on one of his morning rides. Immensely impressed by what he had found, the memory-based learning approach along with the mutual instruction technique, was adapted to focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic – the three R’s – as understood in England. Bell practised his experiments in the Egmore asylum till he left for England in 1797, where he published his book on the Madras system in the same year.4 In the subsequent years, after being developed as a standardised model, it was re-imported back to India.
Let me juxtapose two foreign traveller accounts reflecting what Rev. Bell ‘found’ and what he ‘created’. There have been many earlier European narrations on the native teaching technique that Bell chanced upon. Around 400 years ago, Pietro Della Valle documented this method of instruction, writing from Hukkeri on November 22, 1623:
(Figure 3: Excerpt from the book The Travels of Pietro Della Valle in India)
In 1820, James Cordiner in his book, details the operation of the Madras system, which he observed during his visit to the Military Male Orphan Asylum in Egmore:
(Figure 4: Excerpt from the book A Voyage to India)
In essence, the monitorial system functioned much like a factory. The term ‘industry’ here refers not just to manufacturing or production, but to the idea of productivity, standing in contrast to idleness. To prevent idleness, students were taught to work, and the classroom itself was designed to operate in a manner similar to a well-oiled machine. They took place in large warehouse-like schoolrooms where hundreds of students were taught by one teacher. Instead of grouping students by age, they were organised based on their reading levels. More proficient students, known as ‘monitors’ were tasked with teaching and guiding their peers.5
To gain further understanding, let me try to compare and contrast the monitorial system pedagogy (created) against the ‘tinnai school’ pedagogy (found), as Senthil Babu addresses it.4 Specifically zooming in on how arithmetic was taught in the two schools:
Scanning the ‘monitorial school’ column above, do we exactly land upon what we infamously call today ‘rote-learning’? So, the investigation of the above system reveals who gave us this rote-learning and how it dominated the entire pedagogical framework for (not just arithmetic) all subjects and for all the coming years, to this day, in fact. Because, it is this monitorial system (that served the Industrial Revolution) that was reframed over the years to the pupil-teacher system (that served the colonial bureaucracy) and eventually culminated to the modern classroom system (that serves the corporate workforce) today.
So, this rote-learning methodology, especially for the colonisers, enabled a way to prevent social disorder. School routines — following schedules, marching in lines, asking permission — all reinforced discipline. The entire system shaped around this core pedagogy, from teacher training to school inspections/examinations to constant dependency on the state for employment(as discussed in the previous article), aimed to create citizens who wouldn’t question authority, by quashing independent critical thinking. That, even in the present day we have failed to question the system. James Farish, the acting governor of Bombay presidency in mid 19th century, wrote in a letter7:
“This supremacy can only be maintained by arms, or by opinions. The natives of India must be kept down by a sense of our power, or they must willingly submit from a conviction that we are more wise, more just, and more humane and more anxious to improve their conditions than any other rulers they could have. If well-directed, the progress of education would undoubtedly increase our moral hold over India, but, by leading the natives to a consciousness of their own strength, it will as surely weaken our physical means of keeping them in subjection.”
This colonial-gifted pedagogy prioritised literacy to fit the framework of ‘text’-book and ‘written’-examination design. Hence illiteracy, a social issue that a lot of activists and politicians rally for even today, is in actuality only addressing the symptom of the problem. Education largely being misinterpreted as a good command and writing fluency over the language of the foreign- is in itself a ‘created’ problem by the foreign? In the end, all they required a bunch of clerks to read and write letters. And, it is this desperation for literacy that is keeping the people of the heartland sidelined, labelled ‘illiterate’ and their wisdom neglected as ‘local’.
(Figure 5: Excerpt from the essay Memory in Education, written by Anand Coomarswamy, 1909)
As Indumati ji emphasises as part of this resurrection journey- it’s high time we tap into this treasure-hold of indigenous wisdom by reconnecting with our countryfolk, because they are the true ‘folks of the country’, who hold intact our native insight in the smallest of forms like household manners and everyday maxims.
Also, it is this marred replacement of ‘memory-based learning’ by ‘rote-learning’, that has obscured the true profoundness of our Bharatiya education system. In the nineteenth century, memory was seen as opposing modern ideas of a ‘good education.’ It became associated with rote memorisation—learning without true comprehension—and this led to the perception that indigenous education was outdated and mechanical.6
The tinnai schools described above represented a local elementary school in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, also called as ‘paadasaalai’ or ‘paathshala’. The social context was such that people from various walks of life were involved in various types of measurements of grain, land, money etc. Work-related activities required mental calculations, including handling quantities, making estimates, and performing related computations. Hence they instituted a tinnai school, whose primal requisite became memory-based learning and spontaneous mathematical skills. But, this ‘learning to enhance memory’ pedagogy, was reappropriated through the Bell system to ‘memorising to learn’ pedagogy, where you actually don’t learn but only cram your brains with literary information.
Yet again, paathshala schools represented only one system of elementary learning in Bharat. There was a rich network of varied forms of institutions- the Gurukulas, Acharyakulas, Agaraharams, Vidyapeeths, etc; where some of them transcended from the physical to the spiritual, with more deeper realms of metaphysics being taught. That is, the knowledge of the material world (aparavidya) to the knowledge acquired through self-realisation (paravidya). Clearly, the colonisers have failed to even skim the surface properly.
Compartmentalisation
Education today is largely limited within the school. Even within a school, we have limited it within the classroom. Within the classroom, it has been further limited to the subject periods. Again, within the subjects, it has been limited further to the textbooks. Yet again, within the textbooks, it has been limited only to that syllabus portion that’ll be assessed in the examination. This narrowed knowledge aids the rote-memorisation methodology. However, the focal figure here is not just the pedagogy, but also the structural and organisational changes implemented. The boxing up of knowledge into tight quarters.
Starting with the content being broken down into many parts called subjects- math, science, literature, social science etc. – without explicitly defining how these pieces relate to each other, naturally implies that they are unrelated. The disconnection between these parts becomes further pronounced by organising them into separate periods in a day. So, this irrelevance and disassociation is structured in the name of separate subjects, textbooks, chapters, syllabi etc. and organised in the name of separate periods, classes, departments, stages of schooling etc. Widening the cracks, the content in the books have been impersonalised further by feeding the colonial literature, sciences and perspective to the children(‘content’ part will be addressed in the following article). It is this process, that has led to the desensitisation of the children to their surroundings, families, culture and finally their homeland. We are unable to connect the dots and piece ourselves together, because the reductionist view has seeped in so much.
So just ‘rewriting textbooks’ or ‘teaching beyond classrooms’ won’t help much. Because we are still clinging onto the detached parts – ‘textbooks’ and ‘classrooms’. Replacing the parts with new parts like new approaches, processes and tools, is only building on the existing system, which is very much broken. It is only further riddling education with reductionism. This reductionism prevents individuals from understanding the bigger picture and recognising how the various parts are interconnected and influence one another. It leads children to work in isolation, no wonder leaving them unaware (later in life) of how their expertise contributes to a broader network of specialisations.8 Another reason for unemployment.
Interconnectedness
However, this reductionist view arises from the Newtonian notion of looking at it as a ‘system’ of parts. Which is polar opposite to the Bharatiya Drishti, that believes in Brahman – ‘the totality of being’. In Bharat, we believed education was lifelong and universal. Life goes through many stages- womb stage, infanthood, childhood, teenage, adolescence, young age, mature age and old age. Each stage has its own objective, behavioural/mental patterns and capacities. Hence, requires different treatment of education. As Indumati ji highlights, primary school and high school shouldn’t differ or be disconnected in terms of the knowledge being taught, rather the same stream of knowledge garbed in Indian ethos, should have an evolutionary treatment of teaching across the stages.
This treatment of education is beautifully theorised in Aurobindo’s Five Phases of Integral Education (a recomprehension of the Bharatiya concept of Panchkosha system for modern times)- as the physical, vital, mental, psychic and spiritual education. These five stages of education are not limited to the school, but happen continuously across- the home(by parents), the school(by teachers), the society (by dharmacharyas) and finally the country (by leaders). Therefore, it speaks of (the integration of not just concepts, subjects, departments etc) but a bigger picture of, i) integrating the individual with the society and the world, ii) connecting the material with the spiritual world, iii) establishing harmony between human thoughts, feelings and actions.
And, that is the foundational structure upon which the new building of the Bharatiya education system should be erected.
To be continued…
Read the previous article: Part 1: Uprooting Done! Now, onto the Re-Rooting of the ‘Beautiful Tree
References:
- George, A. S., & Pandey, D. (2024). The Evolution of Education as a Tool for Corporate Utility: From Industrial Revolution to Present-Day Vocational Preparation. Partners Universal International Innovation Journal, 2(4), 01-12.
- Toffler, A. (1970). Future shock, 1970. Sydney. Pan.
- Tschurenev, J. (2019). Empire, civil society, and the beginnings of colonial education in India. Cambridge University Press.
- Babu, D. S. (2012). Indigenous traditions and the colonial encounter: A historical perspective on Mathematics education in India. Mathematics education in India: Status and outlook, 37-62.
- Watters, A. (2015). The invented history of ‘the factory model of education’. Hack education: The history of the future of education technology, 25.
- Babu, S. (2007). Memory and mathematics in the Tamil tinnai schools of South India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The International Journal for the History of Mathematics Education, 2(1), 15-32.
- Drysdale, R. S. (1975). Education as Cultural Imperialism.
- France, P. E. (2023). Make Teaching Sustainable: Six Shifts that Teachers Want and Students Need. ASCD.
- Kāṭadare, I. (1995). पश्चिमीकरण से भारतीय शिक्षा की मुक्ति
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