Origins of India's 'Textbook Culture'
One way to think about systems of education is the role that textbooks play in the classroom.
In one system, teachers have the autonomy to design their own curriculum, and decide what books to use in the classroom. In many cases, this is not only a freedom, but one of the responsibilities of the teacher.
In another system, teachers teach from textbooks mandated by a board, which is also responsible for deciding a curriculum and setting an exam. Teachers often don't even have the authority to decide the pacing or the order of topics. Exams in this system test the student's ability to write answers without seeing the text.
The Indian system is of the latter type. Teachers have very little autonomy in the classroom. State authorities design the textbook. A teacher's task is to complete the prescribed syllabus with the prescribed book. End of year assessments are coupled to these books.
Bureaucratizing education
In 1854, Sir Charles Wood (A British official tasked with regulating the East India Company) made some calls regarding education in India.
- A bureaucracy would govern education at every stage. Government departments were set up to regulate textbooks, syllabus, and to ensure teachers were trained.
- One of the major goals of this education system would be to supply the colonial bureaucracy with civil servants, especially at the lower and middle levels.
- To acculture the youth to serve the administration, they would receive instruction in English, and English attitudes
- Indigenous schools would need to conform to the new syllabi if they wanted to seek the government's aid.
- Centralized exams will assess students for promotion and scholarship.
This had massive implications for teachers. Their classroom autonomy all but disappeared. Teachers no longer designed curriculum, picked textbooks, and evaluated their students personally. Instead, a significant part of their job now involved maintaining attendance registers, daily diaries, records of expenditure, and testing.
Teachers were now unspecialized bureaucrats. Their lack of autonomy, combined with the low pay, made teaching a low-status profession. Teachers had lost their social power in shaping society. The average teacher's role became to help students memorize the text prescribed by the new education bureaucracy.
For a long time, maintaining carefully recorded stocks of prescribed textbooks and dispensing them for a small commission were among the official responsibilities of the teacher in several parts of British India
The records that teachers maintained helped their administrators punish and penalize teachers when student performance was poor. The state apparatus involved district inspectors, who wielded an insane amount of power over teachers. They could promote teachers at will, transfer them to other schools, or fire them.
The inspectors were paid a lot more, and had a higher status. A primary school teacher was paid 1/10th of what a "Provincial Education Service officer" was, and 1/4 of a "Subordinate Education Service officer". Their job was to visit schools for spot testing and invigilate written exams.
How Exams and Textbooks came to be coupled
The exam system was developed to staff the colonial bureaucracy. It was thus important for the colonial administrators to instill the idea that the exams were fair and free from prejudice. This impartiality was accomplished by making exams impersonal. At the end of every phase of schooling, inspectors conducted spot testing and public exams. These exams were conducted with secrecy: the student and the examiner had to have no contact with each other.
Success in these exams became important. They gated opportunities for both future education and employment. But opportunities beyond employment in the bureaucracy were very limited. Most graduates could not be accommodated in government jobs, creating a cause for unrest. The colonial government worked to prevent this by making exams more difficult
The exams and the textbooks became the devices by which educational norms were maintained, rather than teachers. Whatever could not be examined in a written essay-type answer was kept out of the curriculum. As a consequence, theoretical and literary knowledge came to dominate. Practical and vocational skills were ignored. This included science education, which was ignored.
As Chatterjee has mentioned, an important difference between the views of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Macaulay, both influential theoreticians of early nineteenth-century colonial policies, was that Mill considered both European literature and science necessary for the education of Indian children whereas Macaulay favored literature alone. It is Macaulay's view that prevailed, even though Mill's position had its supporters among influential Indians like Raja Rammohun Roy. Emphasis on literary study set the stage for the textbook culture, and once the textbook culture was born it reinforced the dominance of literary study and skills in the curriculum
As work opportunities contracted, and the need for exams to be more selective expanded, exams and textbooks became more inherently linked. When the fear of failure became the main concern for both the teacher and the students, it became the best possible use of classroom time to avoid exam failure. Teachers and students prepared for the examination event over all else. This meant that they tended to stay within the bounds of the textbook. For students, the skill of memorizing text became extremely valuable.
Metaphors of bodily storage of knowledge became a part of children's culture. Storage of knowledge for guaranteed reproduction in the examination notebook at the end of the year would hardly have been possible without the construction of a strong symbolic association between knowledge and the prescribed textbooks. In the biographical account of his Punjabi ancestry since the middle of the nineteenth century, Prakash Tandon recalls how, in his grandfather's days, "the boys had coined a Punjabi expression, remembered even in our days, wishing that they could grind the texts into a pulp and extract knowledge out of them and drink it."
Many commissions were organized in the late 1800s which described the stultifying role of these examinations
Writing in 1910, Alston drew attention to his feeling that colleges had become rival cramming institutions, and he pointed out how absurd it was that politics, history, and economics were taught from single texts. "Books and not subjects are prescribed," he wrote, expressing his impatience with the narrowness of the curriculum and with the tendency among both students and teachers to identify the curriculum with the textbook.' Alston's irritation over the absurdity of the situation and the impossibility of reform is just one example of what was to become the perpetual mood of educational discourse in India
The English language
Another factor contributing to the link between exams and textbooks was the English language. Students needed to become fluent in English despite not having access to any native speakers. Their sole resources were grammar textbooks and dictionaries. And if that wasn't challenging enough, other subjects were taught via English. In this environment, textbooks and rote-learning became even more linked to success in examinations.
Learning English under such circumstances could only mean an enormous and continuous effort, on a scale that would leave no time or energy to grapple with the subject matter of other school disciplines. Memorization of the textbooks of these other subjects was the only convenient way to avoid failure at the examination. As Annie Besant explained, the students "were struggling to follow the language while they should have been grasping the facts. Their only resource was to utilise their extraordinary power of memorising by learning text-books by heart and reproducing them in the examination.'"
The English subject of the era was full of cultural reference points inaccessible to the Indian student, further setting the ground for rote learning
Stories in one-syllabled words that English children enjoy, tales of domestic life, of cars, of faithful dogs, of snow and skating, only muddled the minds of those who had never seen ice nor felt cold, who were trained never to let a dog, which ate filth, come near them. As for the pictures which accompany two syllableworded stories about kettles and tea pots, puddings and turkeys and cosy fireplaces in the cottage kitchens where a table is spread for Sunday dinner, and chairs are drawn up while everyone bows the head to listen to the father asking the blessing, it seemed a mad, if not immoral, world that was being presented. The only thing to do was to learn it all by heart and repeat it rapidly when called upon.
After 1947
It is difficult to change a system with this amount of momentum. Post independence, the model of education has remained bureaucratized and centralized. Colonial pedagogy outlasted colonial rule.
One major change, since the 60s, is that state corporations have replaced British textbook companies. The state no longer simply choses and prescribes suitable texts, it authors them. The NCERT was established in the 60s, with authority over school textbooks for most students in the country. Private companies involved in the textbook business still exist but their sphere of influence is limited to private schools.
Most discussion around textbooks is about improving their quality, including the quality of production, accuracy, delivery of content, and pedagogical soundness.
But this does not weaken the 'textbook culture' we have. This culture did not arise out of the quality of textbooks being good or bad. There were always good and bad textbooks, but they did not transcend the teacher-student relationship. Textbook culture emerged out of the need for bureaucracies to make sense of student performance, and make teachers and students fungible.
This article is based on Krishna Kumar's paper "Origins of India's 'Textbook Culture'".
Kumar, Krishna. “Origins of India's ‘Textbook Culture.’” Comparative Education Review, vol. 32, no. 4, 1988, pp. 452–464. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1188251. Accessed 19 July 2021.