Learning on a Pagdandi
A Call for Bhiksha
Artificial intelligence and universal English education have inaugurated a new era for our education system. Changes in technology and economic structures that took centuries are now happening in decades. It is time to reach for the higher purposes of education. Learning need not be locked up inside buildings and campuses, away from nature and society. The world can be our playground and our classroom. This is the vision with which we are doing programs like the Pagdandi Fellowship. This is an invitation to participate in the gift of unfettered learning.
In 1947, when the British Crown ceded political control of India, the new government inherited the administrative, institutional and economic structure of education from the colonial government. To understand our present education system, it is helpful to look into its colonial origins.
Under British colonial rule, education in India went from being largely organised and patronised by local communities to being largely funded and controlled by a trading company and missionaries. The British did not simply occupy the seat of government and take control of the taxation. A few thousand British men could not have ruled the entire subcontinent by themselves. So they chose to train Indians to govern in imperial interest. To fulfil their goals, they did away with the old ways of learning and went about setting up a new education system. Thomas Babington Macaulay, a key philosopher of the new education stated,
“It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”
Our education system today continues to work towards the same goals. Seeking to co-opt Indians into the imperial project of extracting natural resources, colonial education took its inspiration from a new European philosophy where human progress began to be defined as the conquest of nature. One of the most influential thinkers behind this specific school of thought was Lord Francis Bacon, who expressed this peculiar violent attitude towards nature in his philosophical vision:
“I have come in very truth leading you to nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave.”
According to Bacon his new methods of knowing,
“help us to think about the secrets still locked in nature’s bosom. . . . They do not merely exert a gentle guidance over nature’s course; they have the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.”
An early director of the British East India Company and famous public intellectual, Robert Boyle, expressed that the aim of this new knowledge was to acquire power to exercise ‘the Empire over the Creatures’. He articulated the coloniser’s concern regarding the reverence of nature in the native people,
“the veneration, wherewith men are imbued for what they call Nature, has been a discouraging impediment to the empire of man over the inferior creatures of God.”
Even today, our education system continues to embody the vision of the conquest of nature. The economics taught in our Universities continues to frame nature as a resource to be extracted and exploited. Graduates of architecture and civil engineering know how to build only with materials produced by extractive industries. Agriculture degrees equip students with methods that ravage our soils and our health. This feeds the violence in the modern way of doing things. As a result, today, the way of building our homes, of growing our food, of clothing ourselves, and the provisioning for all our needs are fundamentally violent to nature and to ourselves. Under these conditions, we cannot help but generate ecological damage because that is all we are learning.
The modern education system draws from the priestly-scholarly tradition of learning of Europe where students learned from textbooks inside classrooms. Rabindranath Tagore rebelled against this form of education. He put into words the feelings of so many school going children when he stated,
“The Western education which we have chanced to know is impersonal. Its complexion is also white, but it is the whiteness of the white-washed classroom walls. It dwells in the cold-storage compartments of lessons and the ice-packed minds of the schoolmasters. The effect which it had on my mind when, as a boy, I was compelled to go to school . . .was very much the same as a tree might have, which was not allowed to live its full life, but was cut down to be made into packing-cases.”
Today our education system, whether government or private, is marked by bureaucracy and disconnection from contemporary realities. Those of us who come out of the education system feel like aliens in our own country. The best educated graduates ironically know next to nothing about how food is grown, how goods are produced, or how communities live and work. Yet it is this class that is charged with making policy on everything from agriculture and manufacturing to transportation and energy. Seated across a farmer or an artisan, we find it difficult to have much conversation on common ground. Having little knowledge of the experiences of our own country, we rely on theories and policy formulations of foreign universities without understanding the cultural and political contexts of those theories or the historical experiences that shaped the policy formulations.
Tagore also spoke of the socio-economic crisis brewing as a result of the narrow focus of colonial education:
“We are made to tread the mill of passing examinations, not for learning anything, but for notifying that we are qualified for employments under organisations conducted in English. Our educated community is not a cultured community, but a community of qualified candidates. Meanwhile the proportion of possible employments to the number of claimants has gradually been growing narrower, and the consequent disaffection has been widespread. At last the very authorities who are responsible for this are blaming their victims. Such is the perversity of human nature. It bears its worst grudge against those it has injured.”
Tagore was not alone in his concerns about the education system. British officer GW Leitner, who had extensively studied the colonial and pre-colonial education system, had warned way back in 1882 that the colonial education project would create
“... a pretentious and shallow system of preparation for office-hunters; the trades and traditional professions of the pupils will be abandoned; what there is left of the religious feeling will be destroyed ; and the country will be overrun by a hundred thousand semi-educated and needy men, for whom it will be impossible to provide, and who will have been rendered unfit for their own occupations.”
Even today our education system is producing a mass of graduates who are exam aspirants. But the number of jobs available is only a fraction of the number of applicants. In fact, according to some of the latest employment figures, the largest number of unemployed is not among those who have not attended school or college, but among graduates.
Today, the imagination of education remains within the same colonial framework — sold at a high price, focused on ideologically tinged textbooks, limited to the four walls of the classroom, and often undermining our mother tongues. To break out of that mould, as Tagore said, we will need to look at reality with our own eyes and think with our own minds,
“Once upon a time we were in possession of such a thing as our own mind in India. It was living. It thought, it felt, it expressed itself. It was receptive as well as productive. That this mind could be of any use in the process, or in the end, of our education was overlooked by our modern educational dispensation. We are provided with buildings and books and other magnificent burdens calculated to suppress our mind. The latter was treated like a library-shelf solidly made of wood, to be loaded with leather-bound volumes of second-hand information. In consequence, it has lost its own colour and character, and has borrowed polish from the carpenter's shop. All this has cost us money, and also our finer ideas, while our intellectual vacancy has been crammed with what is described in official reports as Education. In fact, we have bought our spectacles at the expense of our eyesight.”
It has become amply clear by now that today’s realities demand a different basis of knowledge. Tagore expressed a vision that seems all too relevant today:
“India’s best ideas have come where man was in communion with trees and rivers and lakes, away from the crowds. The peace of the forest has helped the intellectual evolution of man … The culture that has arisen from the forest has been influenced by the diverse processes of renewal of life, which are always at play in the forest, varying from species to species, from season to season, in sight and sound and smell. The unifying principle of life in diversity, of democratic pluralism, thus became the principle of Indian civilization.”
We have in our own country and among our own people the essential ingredients of the new knowledge we need to face the challenges of the present—waiting for us to apply our minds to them. For example, Albert Howard, the pioneer of the international organic food movement, famously learned his principles of sustainable agriculture from the farmers of Western UP. Similarly, sustainable architecture, which is seeing a stunning resurgence globally, and heritage restoration projects across India are seeking people who can build with mud, lime, bamboo, and stone—and a variety of natural materials that are known not to university professors but artisans.
Since the time of independence, artisanship has been the second largest employment of our people after agriculture. Yet, countless artisans are now sitting idle or working in informal labour, not because their skills are obsolete, but because their knowledge and work have been devalued by the education and economic systems. Again, Tagore reminds us:
“We must not imagine that we are one of these disinherited peoples of the world. The time has come for us to break open the treasure-trove of our ancestors, and use it for our commerce of life. Let us, with its help, make our future our own, and not continue our existence as the eternal rag-pickers in other people's dustbins.”
By taking education outside the dead walls and guarded gates of institutions, our learning paradigm can access, in addition to scholarly knowledge, the vast tapestry of artisanal knowledges. Taking such a holistic view of knowledge will allow us to discover that every village and every neighbourhood has an elder carrying civilisational knowledge that has become rare in most parts of the world, whether it is about the preservation of our forests or the recharge of our groundwater or the manufacture of clothes without fossil fuels or producing hand-crafted custom made leather shoes for all. We need a design of education that can learn from oral and embodied knowledge systems and channelise them towards fruitful enterprises. Such an education can inaugurate a new phase in our national life marked by a deep collaboration between engineers and artisans, doctors and vaids, therapists and shamans, professors and organic intellectuals. Tagore describes such an education:
“Our centre of culture should not only be the centre of the intellectual life of India, but the centre of her economic life also. It must cooperate with the villages around it, cultivate land, breed cattle, spin cloths, press oil from oil-seeds; it must produce all the necessaries, devising the best means, using the best materials, and calling science to its aid. Its very existence should depend upon the success of its industrial activities carried out on the co-operative principle, which will unite the teachers and students and villagers of the neighbourhood in a living and active bond of necessity. This will also give us practical industrial training, whose motive force is not the greed of profit.”
The transition of the education system under colonial rule was not only at the cognitive level, but also effected a sea change in the political economy of education. In the Indian system, the local community took care of its learned scholars, complete with remuneration, social security, healthcare and housing. Thus taken care of, these scholars shared their knowledge widely and did not need to charge a fee to provide an education to students. This ensured a wide social diversity in the indigenous schools, as recorded in the surveys by British colonial officials. But things changed quickly under British rule. The confiscation of rent-free lands and discontinuation of endowments, along with exploitative taxation on people to increase revenue collection, struck a heavy blow to the community management of indigenous institutions of learning. On the other hand, state controlled education was not only under-provisioned, but required the payment of fees. The contrast is exposed by Leitner,
“Above all, was the effort of both wealthy individuals and of communities directed towards the emancipation of all teachers, especially those of religion, from worldly cares, on the tacit or express assumption of their imparting instruction gratuitously, for nothing so degrades education in the native mind...as the imposition of a regular fee.
… Indeed, I am not acquainted with any Native, Hindu, Muhammadan or Sikh, who, if at all proficient in any branch of indigenous learning or science, does not consider it to be a proud duty to teach others.
… It is only those who have benefited exclusively by our system of education that have not contributed to educational endowments of any kind…”
A reorientation of our education will need to take a deeper look at how education is organised. Today education is largely organised by the government or by corporations. The fundamental design of government is oriented towards the maintenance of order, whereas the fundamental design of corporations is in accordance with the purpose of making profit. These are values that these institutions bring inevitably to everything they organise, and education is no exception. To a great extent, this can potentially bring benefits to the cause of learning, but there is more to education than motivations of order and profit. For instance, the pursuit of truth, beauty and a fulfilling life are important principles of a good education. But with the State and the Market having their hands full, they cannot be expected to carry out such objectives.
Here, the model of autonomous organisation of education by society offers a recourse. Such an education system can have its own institutional and philosophical framework driven by the contextualised educational needs of society. Seventy five years after independence, it is time that the Indian people should be able to stand on their own feet and organise their own education without being dependent on charity of the State and the corporations. A hundred experiments can bloom—easily replicated and quickly iterated, without the baggage of big institutions. Every neighbourhood, every village has the capacity to offer residencies to scholars from far and wide, in the subjects that they wish to learn and teach.
This is the faith with which we are organising our courses, dialogues and other programs, including the Pagdandi Fellowship. With three full time organisers, three part time organisers and a number of volunteering members, we are already working at capacity and there is still so much more to do. We currently offer our programs in four places—a hamlet, a village, a town and a city across North India. Many more places hold promise for such educational programs.
In our country, we have been taught from an early age the importance of daan, whether for the temple or for community programs or for the mendicant. This seemingly mystical form of economics can produce the most colourful festivities in the poorest neighbourhood and make a wealthy godman out of an ordinary village intellectual. Today this enormous source of wealth has been monopolised by ossified and decaying institutions. This practice when directed towards a robust and dynamic system of knowledge has the potential to transform the cultural landscape of the country. With such a fresh turn in the intellectual culture, we have the opportunity to reinvigorate the economy by generating meaningful work for millions of people in their homes without crowding our already overpopulated cities and reorganising society to dignify those who suffer from dogmatic social discriminations.
It is this economic model of social provisioning which supports the Pagdandi Collective. In the economic tradition of the Buddha, we take our bhiksha from those who, like us, are thinking about the new direction our education must take. As we inaugurate the first edition of the Pagdandi Fellowship, we invite you to participate in the gift of daan. If you share our vision, we welcome you to support our livelihood so we may continue our work. To contribute to the Pagdandi Fund, you may send money on our UPI number, 9310545026 (Aryaman) or 8056219285 (Shyam). To discuss other ways you can support us, please write to us at pagdandi.collective@gmail.com
