HOW THE BEAUTIFUL TREE PERISHED….

I thought Indian educational system has been backward or more the less mediocre since time immemorial. But this perspective changed after I browsed through the book ‘The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century’, written by Dharampal (1922–2006), Gandhian thinker, historian and political philosopher from India. Through this book he has enabled the Indian masses to reconsider the conventional views we had about India before its conquest by the British.

In ‘The beautiful tree’, he quotes Mahatma Gandhi as saying….

…………..That does not finish the picture. We have the education of this future state. I say without fear of my figures being challenged successfully, that today India is more illiterate than it was fifty or a hundred years ago, and so is Burma, because the British administrators, when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to root them out. They scratched the soil and began to look at the root, and left the root like that, and the beautiful tree perished. The village schools were not good enough for the British administrator, so he came out with his programme. Every school must have so much paraphernalia, building, and so forth. Well, there were no such schools at all. There are statistics left by a British administrator which show that, in places where they have carried out a survey, ancient schools have gone by the board, because there was no recognition for these schools, and the schools established after the European pattern were too expensive for the people, and therefore they could not possibly overtake the thing. I defy anybody to fulfill a programme of compulsory primary education of these masses inside of a century. This very poor country of mine is ill able to sustain such an expensive method of education. Our state would revive the old village schoolmaster and dot every village with a school both for boys and girls.

(Mahatma Gandhi at Chatham House, London, October 20, 1931)

The beautiful tree written by Dharampal is available on the following link

www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/beautifultree.pdf

More on Dharampal and his work can be found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharampal

So if you thought that India has been reeling with caste system, illiteracy, backwardness and paucity of schools, this book would be an ideal read to remind us  that once upon a time we had our own wonderful indigenous educational system …..the beautiful tree.... which was destroyed by the British because they knew that this destruction would crush India…..we fought against them and won our independence …but we have not yet freed ourselves from the system of education that they have prescribed for us…when will that happen?