Abstract
Indian civilization has a long tradition of education, creativity and innovation. Though there are debates surrounding the scholarship, Ifrah (1999, 2000) traces the root of the modern system of numbers to India. Nevertheless, it is widely accepted that, some of the oldest institutions of higher learning such as Nalanda, Ujjain, (in India), Taxila (now in Pakistan), dating back to the 5th century BC, were located within the Indian subcontinent. 1 These institutions of higher learning declined and disappeared in modern times over several thousands of years of history, with waves of military invasions and internal political conflicts. There was also a rich tradition of free residential education in Gurukuls (schools) within the household of the Gurus (teachers). Instead of paying school fees the students would live a humble, celibate life, providing their service within the household of the Guru, and well-off students would voluntarily pay “Guru dakshina” after completion of their education, in the form of land or cattle etc. as marker of respect for the teacher.
However, the rich philosophical tradition of the Brahminical Gurukul system degenerated and became a tool of social class oppression in a society which became divided into the narrow boundaries of the hierarchical caste system 2 in the later Vedic period. Though it originated from within the indigenous Hindu society, later this caste system of social hierarchy and discrimination became a distinct phenomenon of Indian society, which later prevailed even among non-Hindus (Singh, 1977). The Islamic Madrasa system of schooling became prevalent within the Indian subcontinent with the Persian Mughal rulers settling in the country from the early 16th century. By the time the British Empire established within India in the mid-19th century, education was primarily delivered to men belonging to certain privileged sections of society through these Gurukul and Madrasa systems.
A scholar and authority of Indian culture, history and identity, Amartya Sen (2005) cite in his book “The Argumentative Indian”, instances of scholarly argumentative Indian women such as Maitryei and Gargi in ancient times, persuasive political characters from the famous Indian epic Mahabharata such as Draupadi, and historical characters such as Rani of Jhansi and Sorojini Naidu from recent Indian history of the freedom movement against the British colonial rulers. However, in spite of these affirmative appraisals, feminist Indian scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) raised questions of gender discrimination by asking “Can the subaltern speak?” within the deeply rooted hierarchical patriarchal society. In fact, Dreze & Sen (2013) and Sen’s (1989, 1990, 1992) work on the “missing women” also provides evidence for the appalling condition of women in contemporary India, where sex-selective feticide and infanticide of girls are rampant. It is a proof of the fact that all those glorious Indian women, about whom Sen (2005) writes, were standing up against many odds to pursue scholarship, participate in public life and to speak up within a larger context where women’s voices have been historically marginalized, similar to the situation in Europe until the 16th century, when formal education was the sole privilege of aristocratic men.
Spivak’s (1988) feminist cultural critique emphasized the role colonialism might have played in further subjugation of subaltern Indian women without much agency caught between “patriarchal subject formation and imperialist object construction”. 3 However, feminist social scientist Kumari Jayawardena’s (1995) work with regards to the role of diverse groups of Western women in India during British colonial times is significant in understanding the historical trajectory of girls’ formal education in modern India. Going beyond the popular binary of foreign women as “Devils” or “Goddesses” and beginning with a universalist perspective of the subordinate status of women globally, Jayawardena (1995) argued that female missionaries, social reformers, theosophists and orientalists in search of “black gods” considered education as key for the emancipation of Indian women, and often took key roles in furthering the cause, driven by a sense of “global sisterhood”. Quite interestingly, the first formal girls’ school was set up in British India on 1 January 1848 by Savitribai Phule, wife of an indigenous Hindu outcaste social reformer, Jyotirao Govindrao Phule, from the western part of the Indian subcontinent. Her interest in education and ideas were shaped by the influence of Christian missionaries, who ignited the interest of this outcaste Indian woman to read and learn more (Wolf and Andrade, 2008).
Following the advocacy of educated native elites such as Rammohan Roy 4 for Western knowledge to raise questions in the minds of the indigenous population to eradicate prejudices, superstitions and ritualistic malpractices like “sutee/sati” (widow burning), modern systems of education were set up in India during British colonial times by the colonial government and diverse groups of European and American Christian missionaries. In his historical study, Seth (2007) argued how modern Western knowledge was received and consumed by the colonized subjects of India during British colonial times and was transformed in the process. Locating himself within the Western knowledge system, diasporic Indian historian Seth (2007: 7) takes a Foucauldian approach and writes, “As a study of western knowledge in colonial India, this is also a work about subjectivities. It is about how Western education in India posited and served to create—and sometimes failed to fully create—certain sorts of subjects.” Utilizing interdisciplinary approaches to analyze historical evidence, Seth’s (2007) study shows how the intervention of Western knowledge produced diverse kinds of subjectivities within the Indian subcontinent. One of the major concerns expressed in the study is that many Indians were learning Western knowledge through rote memorization for the instrumental materialistic purpose of Western knowledge-systems within colonial India, without acquiring the questioning and critical faculty such knowledge was supposed to have ignited. Moreover, since Western epistemologies often contradicted with indigenous ways of knowing, this gave rise to an anxiety about moral crisis among the population—a concern which was echoed by both Indian elite nationalists and the British rulers of colonial India.
Nation states are imagined communities, as Benedict Anderson (1983) would say. However, unlike the major European nation states, there was no Indian Nation prior to British colonialism. Indian historian Ramachandra Guha (2008) quotes from British colonialist Sir John Strachey, who stated, “Scotland is more like Spain than Bengal is like Punjab” (p. 3) to highlight the diversity of the various linguistic and cultural groups within India. However, these diverse people of the Indian subcontinent were brought together by the political activism of the Indian National Congress to form a sense of what Guha (2008) called, “unnatural nation”—unified in its fight against British colonialism. In the postcolonial era, nation-building through education thus became a key objective for schooling, along with expansion of access to education. Schools run by government, missionaries, and the private sector became important institutions to facilitate the process of national identity formation through ritual recital of the national anthem every day in school and other ritual activities to reinforce a national identity based on the principle of “unity in diversity”. Despite such efforts, since independence in 1947 the modern Indian Nation State has been struggling to build Indian national identity through schooling as argued by Yadav (1974), especially since the population of the Indian subcontinent has been so divided for centuries according to linguistic, ethnic, gender, religious, social class, and caste groups. Moreover, as Elder (1999: 219) concluded after studying Tamil and Hindi textbooks, even these vernacular language Indian textbooks transmitted to “their students an awareness of a West that is still technologically superior, still to be blamed, still to be emulated, and still to be sought for approval.”
Access to education has improved in recent years under the Indian Government’s Education for All (Srava Sikshya Abhiyan) program. However, even after 3 years of implementation of the Right to Education Act (2010), universal access to elementary education is still a far cry from reality. In spite of a comparative increase in access and improvement in school infrastructural facilities, the school drop-out rate and quality of education are major problems for the Indian system according to reports published by UN agencies as well as the Indian Government. Moreover, the Annual Status of Education (ASER) reports, published by an independent NGO called Pratham from 2005 onwards to the latest in 2014, show evidence of the abysmal state of student learning in Indian schools, though the 12th 5-year plan of the Government of India (2012–2017) places learning for all children as the utmost priority for the country. Drawing on data and analysis from their prior work and several other scholarly sources, Dreze and Sen (2013) argues about the centrality of education for development in India among several other issues by quoting early 20th century indigenous education reformer and Indian Nobel Laureate in Literature, Rabindranath Tagore. They end the book with a chapter entitled “The Need for Impatience” and quote from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (1906) to emphasize that “patience is a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue” and that the Indian masses have been extraordinarily tolerant towards various kinds of inequalities, stratification, and social class divisions for too long. Increase in inequality is taking its toll on sustainability of development globally, and if this indigenous trend of tolerance towards inequality continues within India, the development goals of the country will remain unachievable. Therefore, they call for the relatively privileged middle classes of Indian society to raise their voice for social equity across the population for sustainable future development.
Existing research on the contemporary Indian school education system has explored the issue of exclusion within the system as a major barrier in achieving the goals of universal elementary education (Govinda, 2011; Nambissan, 2010; Center for Equity Studies, 2014). Both school education and Higher Education in India are now facing crucial challenges in terms of rising demand against short supply of education, poor infrastructure, and lack of well-trained professionals (Agarwal, 2010; Tilak, 2005). Moreover, globalization and economic liberalization in recent years pose additional challenges for Indian education to train a globally competitive workforce and empower them as citizens of a modern democracy as well as citizens of the world. Taking into consideration the fact that it has one of the largest growing youth population of the world, will the Indian education system be able to harness its rich tradition and its demographic dividend to meet the needs of its population in the 21st century knowledge economy, when employment and economic opportunities have become globally interconnected even as politics has remained nation-centric? Can Indian schools reconcile the postcolonial mission of nation-building and national identity formation with the contemporary needs of educating for globally conscious citizens of the world? This two-part speculative special issue of Policy Futures in Education has been designed to provide a preliminary investigation of these historical crossroads—their role and trajectory. Each part contains eight articles for publication.
India Special Issue part 1 begins with Deepanwita Dasgupta’s philosophical article on scientific reasoning in a peripheral colonial context in India by investigating the work of Nobel-winning Indian physicist CV Raman’s work, showing how this extraordinary man educated himself to enhance the epistemological boundaries of scientific knowledge, receiving the highest achievement award, in spite of all the colonial concerns about moral corruption and rote memorization. This study highlights the diversity of effects Western knowledge had on the native population, and challenges universalist assumptions about the effects of Western education on indigenous population of India. Rashmi Diwan’s article traces the historical trajectory of “exclusion” and “inequity” within the Indian context, and also presents contemporary data from the field to argue about the significance of a rights-based approach towards school education within the Indian context. Shivali Tukdeo’s article analyzes the various global and local tensions in framing education policy in contemporary India. Kamlesh Narwana’s case study exemplifies these tensions within a specific location in India. Erik Byker’s case study in another location in India portrays a promising future for a separate but “equal opportunity” community school built by an elite private school to meet the mandate of the recent “Right to Education Act” of educating 25% underprivileged children under clause 12 of the Act, which authorizes a “public provision private management” model of education. However, it still reinforces the issues of “exclusion” and “inequity” within the Indian system raised by Diwan.
Within the Indian context, where public investment for education is very poor less than 4% of GDP (Srivastava and Noronha 2014; Dreze & Sen 2013, Jha, 2008), Madhur Chandra’s article brings to the forefront the issue of contract teachers within the system, which is directly related to the delivery of quality education. She argues how poor salary, poor working conditions, and lack of training affects the motivation, morale, and long-term commitment of these teachers. Amita Gupta’s article attempts a creative synthesis to propose a new hybrid postcolonial pedagogic model for the early childhood curriculum within urban Indian context, and recommends developing a teacher education curriculum for “pedagogy of the third space”. Finally, within the context of increasing global pressure for higher education policy geared towards preparing Indian students to join the global workforce of the 21st century knowledge economy, Supriya Baily’s article raises an important question “Who gets left behind?” in the wake of US–India Higher Education partnerships. This article once again explores the issues of “exclusion” and “inequity”, not just within the Indian system but within the global hierarchy of higher education.
These articles have been carefully selected from a large pool of submissions to open up future dialogue on critical issues affecting Indian education in transition. Part 2 of this special issue will further open up debates on women’s education and empowerment, issues of quality and inclusion, issues of teachers’ beliefs, teacher professionalism, occupational choices of students, and issues of building research collaboration among scholars across borders. The aim of this two-part special issue is not to draw any conclusions about Indian education, but to encourage further research to deepen scholarly understanding about issues affecting one of the largest student populations of the world. As a guest editor, I would like to thank Prof. Michael Peters for providing this opportunity to compile these special issues, and Prof. Fazal Rizvi for writing a preface to the special issues based on extensive scholarly research on Indian higher education as well as on elite schools in India. Finally, I would like to thank all authors for their scholarly contributions and diligence in working through the review process.