The Balkanisation Of Education

Is the centre’s move to set up foreign varsities an attempt to create a global secretariat class? Education is not treated as a culture of learning but as a way to quick and instrumental certification

Universities in India have been read within a genealogical context. We always date the creation myth of the university to Lord Thomas Macaulay, who was desperate to create the Indian mind as a clerical system. Looking back, I find it odd that the origins of the university system go back to Macaulay because what he created in India, in the presidency towns of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, was the London University of the time, a dour examination system, a conglomerate of colleges committed to certification. London University was intellectually distant from Germa nic universities of the time which combined the functions of teaching and research. One has to read Gandhi’s autobiography to understand the inanity of London as a system. What was profound was the way India mimicked it, creating the kunji as a catechism of knowledge. If one uses Macaulay as genealogy, then the university was always a site for the secondary and the imitative, an annex to the imperial apparatus. Macaulay created the colonial imprimatur in education.

To look at Macaulay critically one has to examine the nationalist dream of education. For this, one has read the essays of Patrick Geddes (a noted Scots educationist, sociologist and town planner), Rabindranath Tagore and JC Bose. Geddes, in his town planning report on Indore, read the university as a cosmopolitan system always in dialogue with the dissenting academies. Tagore read the university as a dialogue between the city university of the West, hostile to nature and the forest universities. This is where the mind of India goes back to the sage in the forest who lived in harmony with nature. The nationalist dream of a dialogic university always incorporates the other, while it retained a sense of its plural creative self.