Source: Speeches and Writings of Eminent Indians, MacMillan And Co Limited, 1952
Delivered by M R Jayakar at the Patna University in November 1943.
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How best can Universities help to promote plans of national education ? It is obvious that any system of national education, in a country like ours, must possess certain characteristics before it can hope to succeed. On a little reflection, the following will appear to be some of these characteristics:—
(1) It must be based on the actual needs of the entire nation in all its stages and give an opportunity to every man, woman and child to develop personality to the utmost extent and to live a full life,
(2) Its objectives, method and standards of performance must have relation to the facts of the complete life of the people, and to their economic, social and cultural needs, so that it touches society in all its various sections and cross- sections.
(3) It must be based on a new conception of citizenship, the requirements of which will have to be carefully formulated by the State and the people meeting together in a spirit of co-operation. It is obvious that the proper basis of a sound system of education must be a conception of citizenship suited to the stage at which the State has arrived, and this, in its turn, will require us to decide what kind of society we wish to have, what ideology to create, whether we shall continue the present acquisitive or competitive system, where one man’s loss is another man’s gain, or replace it by a co-operative one, which secures the common good of various classes. Let me warn you that this is a job not for the politician, but for the thinkers and the educationists of the nation connected with the Universities of India. The Universities must take up this work. The danger of leaving it to the politician is that, as experience has proved, , he will create citizens in the sense of ‘good haters and lusty flag-wavers’, as somebody said recently.
(4) It must aim at creating a new type of administrator fitted to work the new constitution. He must be an Indian who has made the fullest use of the opportunities at the University in the manner mentioned below and who has, as a result, acquired characteristics which make him, by the breadth of his sympathies, a truly representative Indian— a man of calm judgment, infinite tolerance, inflexible impartiality, combining with these a gift of leadership, able to rise superior to excitement and to quiet it in others by his toleration and readiness to appreciate the opposite point of view.
(5) It must at every stage of school and college life inculcate the necessity of national unity and peace, and adopt practical methods to bring them about. Forces have already been at work to aid this process of unification, and it should be the business of educationists to take it in hand.
I propose to offer a few practical suggestions as to how our Universities could help this process; what enquiries they could undertake, what atmosphere they could provide for their pupils, what ideologies they could create amongst them. It is obvious that post-war reconstruction must be an all-nation effort, and the Universities must bear their respective share. Our Universities would have to take up the work, which some of the younger Universities of America have partially accomplished. For instance, the University of Wisconsin made an experiment in finding out what was best suited to the American mind in relation to the contents of study and methods of teaching, so as to determine the proper conditions for the undergraduate in receiving liberal education. The National Society for the Study of Education in America made no less than 128 attempts to determine the proper conditions of college life, and a veritable tide of self-criticism swept over the educational world in that country, with a view to discovering what sort of University life was best suited to local conditions. As a result of enquiries and experiments made by several experts, they have come to adopt the following definition of liberal education, which may prove partially useful to us in India. Negatively, it is not training in technical skill, for instance, preparing one for a vocation, nor is it instruction in knowledge. The latter is only the means but not the end, which must be kept absolutely distinct. The means must always be subordinated to the end. The end is to use the means, called liberal teaching, to produce the ‘liberal mind’, through the cultivation of the faculty called ‘intelligence’. By that term, modem educationists mean a power of self-direction in the affairs of life. An educationist of great eminence describes it as “intelligence capable of being applied in any field; ability to do what you have never done before”. The attempt is to build up in the student the power of taking into his own hand the direction of his own affairs. The whole endeavour rests upon the assumption that as against the specialized teaching of men, for instance, in Banking, Scholarship, Industry, Art, Medicine, Law or the like, there is a general liberal teaching of men for ‘intelligence’ in the conduct of their lives as human individuals. ‘Intelligence’ is thus equivalent to readiness for any human situation. It is the power, wherever one goes, of being able to see the best response which a, human being can make to any set of circumstances; and the two constituents of that power would seem to be (1) a sense of human values and (2) a capacity for judging a situation as furnishing possibilities for the realising of those values.
A primary defect of our scheme of education is that, in its broad outlines, it resembles an educational ladder, commencing with the primary school, passing through the middle and the secondary school and terminating in the apex of a college degree or post-graduate studies. Millions enter, but few reach the top or even approach it. The intermediate stages are regarded as merely preparatory for the final stage and not as a preparation in themselves. Large masses of students who never expect even to approach the final stage and who would by reason of their training and environments, be incapable of taking any interest in concerns at the top, obtain no benefit from the training during the intermediate stages. Speaking of such a wasteful system of education, an American author (Alexander Meiklejohn) remarks: “The teaching enterprise, which at its final stage is the Graduate School dealing with only thousands of pupils, begins at the bottom of the ladder— the primary school—with millions. At every step in the ascent, after the age of compulsory attendance is passed, multitudes of pupils disappear from the class-room, until, at the end, a chosen and favoured few remain…. For the great majority who, at various stages of the process, leave the school to go into the ‘practical’ activities, the scholarly pursuits of the Graduate School, which they will never reach nor even approach, must be vague and meaningless.”
This author then proceeds to make an observation which is particularly true of India. “We must remember”, he says, “that in the main people climb the first stages of the educational ladder, not with the purpose of making their way to the top, but in the expectation of finding, beside the ladder, here and there, landing-places, from which they may climb by other ladders in other directions and towards quite different goals, and if these other goals and directions are not clearly seen in their relation to those of the school, then the whole scheme of teaching becomes unintelligible—a chaos of divergent and irrelevant activities.”
This defect of education, which is partially inherent in all schemes where the primary and secondary stages are regarded as preparatory for the last, is more particularly operative in the Indian system, because of many political and social drawbacks which it is unnecessary to detail here. It is enough to observe that no system of education can be suitable for a vast and poor country like India, with its teeming millions and varying grades of culture, with different economic and industrial needs, social conceptions and religious beliefs, unless it takes note of two requisites: (1) the creation of many ‘landing-places’ where the student may appropriately leave the main educational ladder and climb up another in a different direction, leading to a different goal. Many such intermediate and subsidiary ladders can be imagined. They would teach skill in some limited field of activity, in which the subject is similar to a higher branch of study, but the aim is to cultivate the ability to ply a trade or profession, to develop practical skill and not to teach in the higher and general sense. (2) The subsidiary ladders should not be interdependent or interconnected. Each should go its own way and attempt to prepare the student in his own special interest or vocation, The pupil being drawn into it comparatively young, the teaching is not expected to be so fundamental, far-reaching or scholarly, as that in the post-graduate school for the same branch of knowledge.
We must keep in view the fact that the bulk of India’s population lives in villages and there are about seven lakhs of these awaiting development. A nexus has to be created between the University and the villages. Experience has shown that village regeneration cannot proceed from uneducated or ill-educated men. It must be taken in hand by young men, whose instincts arc sympathetic, training adequate and modern. The primary object of devising the ‘subsidiary ladders’ will be to meet the wants of the country at large; but the incidental effect will be to relieve the pressure at the top, to weed out the unfit, to provide employment for less ambitious and less gifted men, and to establish a close affinity between town and country, which is lacking at present owing to the location of Universities in capital towns.
Another vital factor to be kept in view in post-war reconstruction is, as I stated above, the essential unity of India. We have amongst us various communities, but their cultures must meet on a common platform of corporate effort. Various languages are spoken, and a conflict has arisen between their claims to be the universal medium of expression. Each of these languages is an expression of the culture of its people, and a mere substitution of one language for another, as the general medium of expression, is not likely to succeed but may, on the contrary, engender antipathies unforeseen at present, until a fair acquaintance with the culture behind the language is created during a University career. It will, therefore, be necessary to have at the University a faculty of study, aiming at what may be called the ‘intellectual nation-building of the people’. I am speaking here from my own experience which is more or less that of every graduate of my time.
How often have I felt that, though calling myself educated, I knew so little of the intellectual achievements of Indians outside my own race, community or province! How little do I know, for instance, of Urdu poets past or present! What do I understand of Tamil literature the delicate beauty of which is far-famed ? How ignorant am I of Bengali literature, the treasure-house of charm and beauty, enriched by the achievements of Bankim Chandra Ghatterjee, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar and Rabindranath Tagore! Coming nearer home, what do I know of Narsey Mehta or of Govardhanram Tripathi of Gujarat? Telugu conferences leave me cold. Tamil verses please my ear, but do not affect my understanding. It must be a very defective system indeed which has not awakened in me quick centres of response to what my countrymen in other parts of India devoutly honour and adore. I am ignorant, like an unlettered man, of all that is great in other literatures and histories in my own country. I am intimate with no colossal intellects beyond those produced in my own little environment, and yet I claim to belong to an ‘Indian Nation’.
Religion may divide, but it is possible for us to meet and unite on the platform of a common veneration of one another’s culture and civilization in India. Politics and culture have an affinity not often recognised. History records not a few instances of a nation being built out of elements uniting in a common endeavour to understand, appreciate and revere the culture and civilization of the component sections. That furnishes the adhesive element which ultimately clasps them together in bonds of steel. Our Universities must therefore lay the foundations of a general acquaintance with the history and intellectual achievements of the important communities inhabiting India. In ancient India, they had an excellent ritual, the spirit of which, with proper modification, might with advantage be revived in these times. They used to call it ‘Upakarma‘. Though seemingly religious, the ritual had a high educational value. Once a year, at the beginning of the term, all the students of a college would meet together, invoke the names of the celebrities of the past, recall their achievements and pay tributes to their memory. The celebration of this ceremony served a double purpose. It created a close acquaintance with the past heroes of the nation and thus whetted the ambition of the youthful students. With the celebration of this function, the student would commence his annual labours with zest and vigour, hoping some day to emulate the past heroes by his own achievements. It also helped to keep the student’s knowledge up-to-date in his own branch of learning. A popular writer on Indian education remarks that it is a pity that modern educational systems have not made provision for any festive functions of such a character.
I would, therefore, recommend the creation of a Faculty in every University, which would facilitate the compulsory study of Indian culture. Experience has proved that there are many points of affinity between the culture and the literature of the important communities inhabiting India. There is something very assimilative in art and culture, something contagious, with a tendency to blend itself with similarities surrounding it. Such assimilative processes operated freely in ancient India, and I am only making out a plea for a close study of these processes as a regular subject at the University. By this means, we shall eventually rear up a race of Indians in complete affinity with one another’s modes of life and thought. We may thus succeed in neutralising the conflict which political ambitions and pacts often create.
An important feature of our educational reconstruction will relate to the vital question—how is the University preparing its alumni to participate in the moral and political life of the country? University distinctions are an admirable achievement in their own way. But they can be no substitute for the spirit of sacrifice, the capacity to bear each other’s burdens, which are so needed in the outer world. This is a task to the accomplishment of which every teacher and student must make his contribution. He can help or hinder the maintenance of that ‘generous community of love’, the fellowship of friends who have no aims which they hide from one another. University education must deliberately aim at the creation of a tradition, so that the college years of the pupil will prove a permanent treasure of happy memories, sustaining him in the toils of the outer life with strength and sweetness. But, whatever you do, let every care be taken to see that when you look back on your college life in the years to come, you will be able to regard it as a happy period, full of persistent effort to develop all the powers that God has given you—a time of mutual service and brotherly fellowship when mind and character grow up side by side. We must never forget what a great Oxonian (Jowett) said to his pupils: “The change from the school to the University is the greatest event which happens in your lives, greater perhaps formerly than now. We are making a new start. We are full of hope and ambitions. The world that is opening upon us has a great charm and awakens a feeling of romance in our minds. We are independent as we have never been before. We sit down in our rooms and invite our friends. We are our own masters and can do as we please,…. a new and more liberal style of teaching and learning succeeds to the narrower regime of the school. The characters of some of us grow as much in a term as they had grown in a year before. We delight in the society of our fellows. Here is an opportunity of forming friendships such as never recurs in after life. We are not confined in the choice of them to our own college, but from all colleges men arc drawn together by common tastes and pursuits.”
These observations are singularly appropriate in modern India; perhaps in no country are they so significant as in ours. Our college life furnishes ideal conditions for enlarging the bounds of our sympathy, knowledge and understanding. When minds are plastic and generous, when the spirit of accommodation is abundant and the capacity for reverence is infinite, youthful and energetic men of different communities are drawn together in intimate contact. At a time when ideals are not like the distant peaks of a misty mountain, but are like beacons illuminating from near the darkness of blurred judgments and faulty selection, we are thrown into contact with different types of young men, each representing, in miniature as it were, the history and culture of his own race. There sit the Bengali, Mahratta, Madrasi, Punjabi and the like—each bringing into the common output of college life and thought, his own ideal of Hindu life and meditative detachment. By his side sits the Muslim, with rooted ideas of a simple scheme of life, unfettered by irrational restraints and having a more human sense of all that makes life pleasant and enjoyable. Next to him is the Parsi, blending inextricably the reposeful culture of his ancestors with the intrepidity of modem commercialism. Next is the Christian, interpreting an old-world religion by casting it into modem thought form intelligible to his own race. I can go on multiplying instances making up a delectable mosaic. It is these surroundings which our college life provides, and it will be our fault—in fact our misfortune—if we fail to make use of them to develop a sense of unity and fellowship.
As we get along, we shall discover that our points of contact are more numerous than the points of difference. As a great collegian said on an important occasion, “We may find that the ties that unite us are greater than the oppositions which separate us. I do not mean to say that these differences are unimportant, but in this place (college) may we not find a practical solution of them in common work? May we not then turn from the points of difference which are so few to the points of agreement which are so numerous? …. Have we not enough in common to carry on the war against evil? The question that a young man has really to answer is not what the true nature of his religious dogmas or sacrament is, but how he should make the best use of his time, order his expenses, control his passions (that they may not, like harpies, be pursuing him through life) and live to God and the Truth, instead of living to pleasure and himself. Can we not find the common ground in the need which we all feel?”
Our college life provides a society “where no one does anything simply for himself but only as a servant of the society It is there that we must learn to reconcile the seemingly divergent ideas of social unity and individual independence. The college atmosphere is usually most receptive. Its capacity for reverence and admiration is almost pristine in its abundance and simplicity. Its heroes are speedily made and perhaps equally speedily destroyed. This sense of reverence and hero-worship should in no way be allowed to be prostituted for low political or party purpose. The capacity to be easily influenced by strong and invigorating forces is an admirable feature of college life. It should be carefully preserved to enrich the corporate life in the service of truth and beauty. Timid and cautious ways do sometimes have a foothold there, and calculating and hasty moods have occasionally found a place. But the qualities that have always thriven in that atmosphere are those of the opposite description. Men seem to be continually shedding of some part of their personality into the society which surrounds them, and it is generally that part which can easily be rubbed off in the hard contact of equals. There is no conscious attempt to influence one another. But there are the unconscious action and reaction of character. Looking back on one’s college life, it is not always easy to measure one’s contribution to the good or the evil of the corporate life which one lived there. It is perhaps easier to recall the debt we have owed to those with whom we were thrown into contact.
Youth is the best gift of the gods, says an old Upanishad. Let us rejoice in it while we have it. It is the great formative period of our life, brief but powerful. We’ are then able to face the world with feelings pure and with ambitions unworldly. The bounds of our friendship, sympathy and fellow-feeling are not then set. We can push them as widely as we like until they encompass all that is worth knowing amongst our fellows. It is good to find a friend in a student born in a community widely removed from our own. To know him and through him to understand the feelings, hopes and even the prejudices that make him so dissimilar to us, is often a great experience. In acquiring it, we discover the human elements lying underneath all that, on casual examination, seemed so different and unintelligible. Through the mists of religious controversies and political antipathies, we discover points of contact and fellowship untouched by the infection of religious or social prejudices so powerful at a later age. Where religion divides, the common possession of youth and its generous instincts may unite, with its miraculous power of rooting itself deep in the affections of our companions. It is the difficulty of discovering the human element in our opponent’s life that constitutes the main obstacle at a later age. The contact is then absent, as also the generous spirit of sympathetic understanding. Our college life provides us with both in an ample measure. If we so wish it, we can pass out of college proud in the feeling that amongst our intimate friends we have a Muslim, a Hindu, a Christian or a Parsi, and that we can, on that account, instinctively appreciate and respect the discordant features that make them seem so different from us. One such friendship formed at college will save us in later life from the extremes of racial or communal antipathy which are always the result of ignorance and prejudice. Let us remember that, in all such matters, it is the first step that counts and that “one step in youth is worth ten in later years”. Once we break through such barriers in early years, we lay down the lines of character which, in later life, will assert itself as the guiding principle of our relations with our fellow men.
I cannot do better than conclude this address by quoting the wise words of a great seer, one of the composers of a Vedic hymn centuries ago. Enshrined in it is immortal wisdom reflected in the ideal of corporate educational life, as conceived in ancient India. We must not imagine that such corporate life was unknown in ancient India. We have had, time after time, especially in the recent excavations of old ruins, increasing evidence of the existence of Universities and seminaries of learning, where from 2000 to 10,000 students assembled and carried on their search for truth. This is no place for going further into this interesting branch of study. It is sufficient to say that the extract I am quoting is from what was a Convocation address of those days delivered to students who had finished their long course of instruction. Before their departure home, they met in conclave with their fellows, and were addressed by the head of the Institution. There is a great deal in this address which, though centuries old, is of perennial importance :
“Meet together, talk together; may your minds comprehend alike; common be your action and achievement; common be your thoughts and intentions; common be the wishes of your hearts; so there may be thorough union among you.”
Nationalist Speeches 