Schooling in British India
When faced with a system rife with dysfunction, we should ask why it evolved to be this way. The people of the past who built these institutions likely made rational decisions given their incentives and the world they inhabited.
Knowing why the people of the past designed things to be a certain way serves two paradoxical purposes:
The first is precautionary. Let's be careful when dealing with systems we don't understand.
The second is emboldening. Once we understand better, we may use our newfound wisdom in redesigning systems that don't work anymore. Now we have the gift (or curse) of knowing all the ways in which things can go wrong. Or we may discover that we do not know enough, and decide to not make things worse.
The question
If we seek to understand contemporary education in India, we should start with its roots:
The education system in India evolved from two separate traditions: British schooling, and indigenous schools that predated colonial rule. What's the effect of this history?
I discussed this question with a friend who recommended I read a book titled 'The Beautiful Tree' by Dharampal, about education before and during the Raj. The remainder of this post describes what I learnt reading it.
Co-evolution of schooling
Universal schooling is a recent phenomena, one brought about by the rise of the nation state, usually to meet its ends.
England in the early 1800s didn't have universal schooling. While it had some of the best elite schools and universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Eton, and Edinburgh, the vast majority of children weren't attending school until the late 19th century, well after colonization.
This isn't to say that the colonial administrators themselves never went to school. Usually members of an aristocratic class, they were alumni of the best of English schools.
But there was no blueprint for universal schooling. The colonial administrators were not implementing a system they were familiar with. Universal schooling in England and British-India co-evolved, albeit under very different constraints.
The force driving universal schooling in Britain was the harshness of industrial jobs for children. Before that, it was perfectly acceptable for children to be apprentices to their parents' line of work.
Imagine America implementing democracy and capitalism in Iraq, but they define democracy as every household owning a Tesla.
In this environment, a group that had strong opinions about what schooling should look like were the missionaries. A lot of schools set up during the mid 19th century were missionary schools. I attended a British era Christian Missionary school for a few years. Its Victorian heritage is immediately apparent, in hindsight. Ever since kindergarten, my knuckles have never been the same.
Innovations in education often happened in the colonies due to their resource constraints. The Monitorial System, also called the Madras System, is a great example. The teachers were few, and had the crucial task of educating large numbers of children. Thus, children who understood the material faster were expected to teach their peers, as teacher attention was limited.
Back to the future
Why is this relevant now?
This historical happenstance tells us that some answers to our questions about education in India may be found in English history, and that of other countries in the Commonwealth. And with this mirror, we may spot the more subtle features of our education that we are otherwise doomed to overlook.
For clues, we may have to read the writings of the British Educationists, who were a prominent movement at the time.
Modern educational institutions in India are successors of systems set up during the Raj. Often, they are literally the same organizations, perhaps rebranded after the end of British rule. The Board of High School and Intermediate Education, created under the Raj in 1929, persists to this day. It's now known to tens of millions of schoolgoers as the Central Board of Secondary Education. The UP board was created in 1921, and served as a template for boards all across the country.
Now consider Conway's Law:
Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.
These bureaucracies were built during very different times, for very different reasons. Without having gone through a major refounding, it's hard for me to believe that they are now set up to do any better.
Further reading
- Philip Hartog's works. Hartog was an educationist who wrote about schooling in England and India.