The Beautiful Tree (36 page)

Hartog’s objection to the Madras Presidency data on the quantity of provision was not well-founded. His similar criticisms of the data from Bengal, Bombay, and the Punjab could likewise be questioned. But could Hartog have been on stronger grounds about the
quality
of indigenous private educational provision?

Critics of Indian education brought together some odd bedfellows. Hartog’s criticisms of the low quality of indigenous schools fit in with a prevalent set of criticisms about the low quality of Indian society and culture in general: William Wilberforce reported that Indians were “deeply sunk, and by their religious superstitions fast bound, in the lowest depths of moral and social wretchedness.”
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But it wasn’t just British imperialists who shared such views. Karl Marx, writing in the
New York Daily Tribune
in 1853, opined about the perennial nature of Indian misery, concluding “whatever may have been the crimes of England,” in India, “she was the unconscious tool of history” in bringing about “India’s Westernisation,” including through Western education.

But what does Munro’s evidence say about the quality of indigenous educational provision? When establishing the terms of reference for his research, judgments concerning the quality of education were not something that Munro asked his collectors to report on—he wanted the facts, not opinions. So it is not negligence that led 14 of the 20 collectors whose evidence is usable to give no subjective comments about quality at all. However, six collectors did add brief subjective comments about this matter. Of them,
three
were
positive
in their comments about both quantity
and
quality of the indigenous system: a typical one noted, “Children are sent to school when they are about five years old and their continuance in it depends in a great measure on their mental faculties, but it is generally admitted that before they attain their thirteenth year of Age,
their acquirement in the various branches of Learning are uncommonly great
.”
²⁰

Three collectors noted some problems with quality, although one was disappointed that “nothing more is professed to be taught in these day-schools than reading, writing and arithmetic, just competent for the discharge of the common daily transactions of Society”
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—which, instead of a criticism, could sound like an acknowledgment of what primary school education should realistically aim for.

The other two collectors were more critical, however. One wrote: “For the most part . . . attendance is very irregular. Few of the school masters are acquainted with the grammar of the language which they profess to teach, and neither the master nor scholars understand the meaning of the sentences which they repeat. . . . Education cannot well, in a civilised state, be on a lower scale than it is.”
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And then there is collector A. D. Campbell, from Bellary, who wrote the brief comments quoted earlier.

Given this, we can’t make too much of the evidence of the Madras Presidency survey, either way. Those who write about the deficiencies of the system are equally balanced by those who write about its effectiveness. Both sets may have been influenced by their own prejudices and predilections about what schooling should be like. But certainly there is nothing in the presidency survey to support claims about poor quality.

However, when summarizing the submitted evidence in his March 10, 1826, minute, although sanguine about the
quantity
of schooling, Munro was not quite so upbeat about its quality. I looked in detail at his and others’ major criticisms—particularly those of Sir Philip Hartog in his damning presentation of the low quality of indigenous education. It was quite uncanny to me the way they paralleled the criticisms made today about private schools for the poor. And the ways in which the government intervened to try to solve these “problems” actually seemed to point to the strengths of the indigenous system, rather than its weaknesses. Again, the parallels with the way government and international agency solutions work today seemed quite remarkable. Have we learned so little?

Munro’s only substantive criticism of the quality of indigenous education focused on teachers being underpaid—an exact parallel to the development experts’ criticisms of private schools for the poor today. He wrote that teachers “do not earn more than six or seven rupees monthly, which is not an allowance sufficient to induce men properly qualified to follow the profession.”
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The same criticism emerged from William Adam’s survey in Bengal, whose disparaging assessment of the quality of indigenous education was used to good effect by Hartog (although Hartog did not endorse Adam’s very upbeat assessment of the
quantity
of provision). Adam reported that the benefits of the burgeoning private schools in Bengal “are but small, owing partly to the incompetency of the instructors. . . . The teachers depend entirely upon their scholars for subsistence, and being little respected and poorly rewarded, there is no encouragement for persons of character, talent or learning to engage in the occupation.”
²⁴

Interestingly, Adam conceded a very important point. Teachers’ pay, which he considered inadequate, was not low “in comparison with their qualifications, or with the general rates of similar labour in the district.” No, for Adam it was low compared “with those emoluments to which competent men might be justly considered entitled.”
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In other words, teachers’ pay seemed in line with the market rate, but was low compared with some alternative system to which Adam aspired. This is something I’ll return to in a moment.

Another of the criticisms, raised in particular by William Adam, was of the quality of the school buildings, or the total lack thereof: “There are no school-houses built for, and exclusively appropriated to, these schools.” Scholars, he observed, met in places of religious worship, or festivals, or village recreation places, or private dwellings, or in the open air, with a “small shed of grass and leaves” erected in the rainy season.
²⁶
This was not good, he noted, pointing to the “disadvantages arising from the want of school-houses and from the confined and inappropriate construction of the buildings or apartments used as school-rooms.”
²⁷
Here we have in embryonic form the criticism that would lead, in Gandhi’s view, to the promotion of a system that was not based on what could be afforded or efficiently used, but to something imposed from outside that was too expensive to be practical. Instead of a criticism, such comments about the lack of buildings could be used, as Dharampal does, to suggest that the “conditions under which teaching took place in the Indian schools were less dingy and more natural” than in Britain.
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Again, the parallels with the obsessions of development experts to provide public school buildings that wouldn’t be out of place in the West, and their criticisms of present-day private schools for their inadequate infrastructure, jumped out at me.

Perhaps the most revealing of all of the criticisms is of the teaching methods found in the village schools. Adam began his criticism thus: “Poverty still more than ignorance leads to the adoption of modes of instruction and economical arrangements which, under more favourable circumstances, would be readily abandoned.”
²⁹
Curiously, the potential strengths of these very same teaching methods are then elaborated at length: Scholars, Adam wrote, are taught effectively to read and write, to learn by rote tables up to 20, and to do commercial and agricultural accounts. Indeed, regarding the method of teaching reading, he says that it is superior to the methods of teaching reading back in Scotland!: “In the matter of instruction there are some grounds for
commendation
for the course I have described has a direct practical tendency . . . well adapted to qualify the scholar for engaging in the actual business of native society. My recollections of the village schools of Scotland do not enable me to pronounce that the instructions given in them has a more direct bearing upon the daily interests of life than that which I find given . . . in the humbler village schools of Bengal.” So what was offered was better than that in Scotland for equipping young people with the skills and knowledge needed for everyday life. That seemed an odd basis for criticism to me.

Other British observers, however, were entirely positive about these “economical” teaching methods: A report from the Bombay Presidency in the 1820s held that “young natives are taught reading, writing and arithmetic, upon a system so economical . . . and at the same time so simple and effectual, that there is hardly a cultivator or petty dealer who is not competent to keep his own accounts with a degree of accuracy, in my opinion,
beyond
what we meet with among the lower orders in our own country; whilst the more splendid dealers and bankers keep their books with a degree of ease, conciseness, and clearness I rather think fully equal to those of any British merchants.”
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And, indeed, the supposedly critical Campbell, collector for Bellary, himself seemed to approve of the teaching methods. (He was also appreciative of the rather stern disciplinary methods in the village schools: “The idle scholar is flogged, and often suspended by both hands, and a Pulley, to the roof, or obliged to kneel down and rise incessantly, which is a most painful and fatiguing, but
perhaps a healthy mode of punishment
.”
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) Campbell provided quite a bit of detail, ending with the following
commendation:
“The economy with which children are taught to write in the native schools, and the system by which the more advanced scholars are caused to teach the less advanced, and at the same time to confirm their own knowledge is certainly admirable,
and well deserved the imitation it has received in England
.” What’s this? The “economical” teaching method in the indigenous Indian schools was so much to be praised that
it had been imitated in England
?

What was this teaching method? And how had it been “imitated” in England? This seemed to be another very exciting avenue of exploration opening up to me. Collector Campbell had given a very thorough description of the method itself: “When the whole are assembled, the scholars according to their numbers and attainments, are divided into several classes. The lower ones of which are placed partly under the care of monitors, whilst the higher ones are more immediately under the superintendence of the Master, who at the same time has his eye upon the whole schools. The number of classes is generally four; and a scholar rises from one to the other, according to his capacity and progress.”

What Campbell was describing is a peer-learning process combined with flexible performance-based grouping of students. The teacher instructs the brighter or older children, who then convey the lesson to their younger or less accomplished peers, so that all are taught. Campbell saw this method in action in Bellary, near the border between present-day Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Precisely the same method is described for the Malabar Coast—that part of India stretching from Goa down to its southernmost tip—by Peter Della Valle
in 1623
, some 200 years earlier! The explorer wrote how he “entertained himself in the porch of the Temple, beholding little boys learning arithmetic after a strange manner.” The method used a combination of four children gathered together “singing musically” to help them remember their lessons, and writing number bonds in the sand, “not to spend paper in vain . . . the pavement being for that purpose strewed all over with fine sand.”

In the same way, they were taught reading and writing. Peter Della Valle asked them, “If they happen to forget or be mistaken in any part of the lesson, who corrected them and taught them?” They said they all taught each other, “without the assistance of any Master.” For, “
it was not possible for all four to forget or mistake in the same part, and that they thus exercised together, to the end, that if one happened to be out, the other might correct him
.” It was, wrote the explorer, “indeed a pretty, easy and secure way of learning.”
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But how did it come to be imitated in England? Dharampal gave a small hint in
The Beautiful Tree
that it had something to do with a Rev. Dr. Andrew Bell. I ordered his books and his biography from the British Library collection at Boston Spa. The beautiful slim, bound folios that arrived carried the exuberant titles so beloved by Regency period writers: his first book was entitled
An Experiment in Education, made at the Male Asylum at Madras; suggesting a System, by which a School or Family may teach itself, under the Superintendence of the Master or Parent
. The title to his magnum opus of 1823 was even more impressive:
Mutual Tuition and Moral Discipline; or Manual of Instructions for Conducting Schools Through the Agency of the Scholars Themselves, For the Use of Schools and Families, with an introductory essay on the object and importance of the Madras System of Education; a brief exposition of the principle on which it is founded; and a historical sketch of its rise, progress, and results.

Bell’s biographer, however, went for the less flamboyant:
An Old Educational Reformer: Dr Andrew Bell
. It’s a curiously unfavorable biography, written by an author who oddly had little sympathy for his subject. The first page begins, “Andrew Bell was born in the city of St Andrews on the 27th of March 1753.” And that is the last we hear of Bell until page 6, when it is noted, “It is to golf that Andrew Bell most probably owes his moral education.” But this is the prelude to pages and pages about the virtues of the golf course at St. Andrew’s, not to Andrew Bell’s moral education. And it’s not very flattering about the poor reverend doctor either: “The fact is, that Dr Bell wrote in a terribly lumbering and painful style, and
no one now can read his books
; but then no one can speak for another as well as the man himself—however clumsily and stupidly he may speak.” Or again: “Dr Bell was, at no time of his life, a clear or methodical writer. He said the same thing—
he had only one or two ideas altogether in his head
—over and over again in different ways, in long lumbering sentences, and with a ponderosity of manner that repelled and disenchanted.”
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