It is useful to investigate the gradual development of the content of courses of study that exist in universities and schools today. The structure of the university system easily tells us that it is the boards of studies, which are appointed by higher authorities of a university, which decide the contents that are necessary for a course of study. The levels of knowledge, the understanding of the progress of the subject of study year-wise or semester-wise and the type of testing and evaluating processes adopted will decide the honour that will be bestowed on a scholar who may work for a period decided by the university. So is the case with contents decided by different boards as far as school education is concerned. It will be interesting to take a walk through the way the support of content came to or grew up to what it is today in the universities.
In the history of human progress, it must have happened as a course of organising a band of people, including hunter-gatherers, that one person among them commanded a greater amount of respect, or it could be even an assertion of leadership, because of her knowledge about the world around them. She had to pass it on to the next generation, and therefore, people would have gathered around her to hear her stories which could have had plenty of history in them. This person could have turned out to be the most knowledgeable and equally dependable in whatever she would have passed on to the others. There could also be some sort of sainthood that would have been bestowed on her by the remaining people. As the humans progressed, there emerged among them some genius or one who made some type of masterpiece which might have been particularly useful to people. As humans multiplied and made different societies, there became a need for diverse types of geniuses and their masterpieces. One may refer to Alejo Carpenter, the author of The Last Steps, the Cuban writer who said that if people look at the world for geniuses and masterpieces, they may not find many. Therefore, naturally, and automatically, very few people came up on whom sainthood was conferred and they became the centres of knowledge, most of which could be superstitions in the earlier years. Gradually, the most knowledgeable person in a community became some sort of a holy person and she started passing on her knowledge to others.
The dissemination of knowledge that happened before the Common Era is to be considered first. Every Indian can feel immensely proud that the Indian subcontinent produced the first institutional centre at Nalanda and Takshashila, the latter in the Punjab province of Pakistan now, starting sometime between the fifth and sixth centuries before the Common Era. They are supposed to have existed till the twelfth century CE. The government of India and the Government of Bihar together instituted an international university at Nalanda, and it is functioning despite the mire and melee that had been created within a decade of its establishment. The next could have been Plato’s Academia started in Athens sometime in the fourth century before the Common Era. Here, mathematics, natural sciences, and statesmanship were the subjects taught. Aristotle is supposed to have studied here for twenty years under Plato himself. By the start of the sixth century Common Era, elected scholarchs started administering the Academia. It will be interesting to note that there was plenty of literature in India written by Vyasa and Valmiki and in Greece by writers like Sophocles and Euripides. Books by Grecian, Roman, and Indian mythologists, and that too a few though large in bulk, were available for the learners. It is still intriguing for researchers why for several centuries there were no products from the knowledgeable people after the then Grecians and Indians, except a few.
Nalanda, Takshashila, and Athens could not sustain themselves for long. It is only in the Islamic Golden Age in the ninth and tenth centuries that one notices the establishment of yet another learning centre at Cairo, the forerunner of the present-day Cairo University. The establishment of the University of Bologna established in 1088 in Italy is supposed to be the first established university in its true name as this had several units of learning centres for teaching different subjects. Today, Bologna has 232 degree programmes and 87,000 students. It is said that Copernicus, Dante, and Marconi were students at this university during their times. Quickly followed the University of Oxford, University of Paris, and University of Cambridge in the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth century.
By the time Bologna University was established, Indian education had started its roots in the temple schools and hundreds of them were administered attached to the temples in various parts of the country, mostly in the northern parts, largely in the areas of present-day Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal. Simultaneously, there were also plenty of Madrasas which were imparting education. If temple schools taught Sanskrit as a language, the Madrasas taught Persian or Urdu. Tragedy struck these schools after the East India Company and the British kingdom established themselves in India. The sword of the tragedy struck in the form of Thomas Macaulay who published his Minutes on Education in 1835 through which it was decided that English would be the medium of instruction in India and a prototype of a design of English medium institution was also brought up. Sanskrit, Persian, and Urdu were removed, and teaching was done using only English as a language through English literature and European science. Macaulay with his condemnable arrogance and despicable ignorance even made a statement that a single shelf of a European library was worth the literature of India and Arabia. Thus, English as a language became the most vital component of any education and the theory that language is learned through literature was firmly established. The theory, better literature better language, was followed even when no locals spoke the language as an everyday usage.
Came Sir Charles Wood who created a major shift in Indian education in 1854 through another set of minutes, the Woods Dispatch. He recommended that the lower classes would be using the medium of the vernacular and higher classes, meaning collegiate education, should be in English. He also recommended that students in some schools in India should be taught in English so that the upper classes and the children of the English who worked in India could join such schools. Thus, Sir Charles Wood established the eternal divide between the two types of education, the English medium and the vernacular medium.
In India, two colleges were established at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to be precise in 1807. They are CMS College at Kottayam in Kerala and Hindu College at Calcutta in West Bengal. It looks like a strange coincidence, and it is yet to be established which is senior among them. There were also several learning centres which were administered by distinct groups of people which started sprouting in various parts of the country and the British East India Company was concerned about it. Therefore, they decided to bring some control over them. Their idea was to provide some models for these institutions to follow.
1857 is a year that is specially mentioned in history classes in schools and colleges across the country for the Sepoy Mutiny. But educators remember the year for the establishment of the three universities of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras; immediately followed by the establishment of Aligarh Muslim University and Allahabad University. By 1900 there were these five universities under which 145 colleges offered degree courses. When India became independent, there were 20 universities and 496 colleges. Today, there are more than 40,000 colleges under around 1100 universities. All these universities followed the dictum of Macaulay. They believed everything has to be taught through the available literature which could have also been substandard. Written matter became the centre of the course content, and this content-centric education continues even though many have pointed out that this is absurd, and things have to change.
School and university education is content-centric. It does not bother about other abilities and qualities that are needed for a learner. Written content and associated examinations to measure the knowledge of such contents are the hallmarks that dominate the disaster, in higher education particularly. Competence or skill development does not exist in the descriptions of the boards of studies of the universities. Students are led into classrooms as per the sounds of the bells and they remain there like sheepish individuals the teachers pass on knowledge from the printed texts to them mechanically and both are highly satisfied when the students score plenty of scores for what they would have memorised.
It has to be remembered that the Elphinstone Minutes of 1823 had introduced the teaching of English, much before the establishment of universities and by receiving guidance from British universities. An Inter University Board was established in 1925 though there was no specific plan of interlinking all universities. The Sargent Report of 1944 recommended the formation of a UGC committee. After the establishment of the University Education Committee in 1945, there was a University Education Commission appointed in 1948 under the chairmanship of Dr. S. Radhakrishnan which recommended the formation of UGC on the UK Model. To maintain standards of university education in India, the University Grants Commission was started in 1953. It was formally established in 1956. It has the largest number of higher education institutions in the world. The ‘content-centeredness’ of university education was born through the establishment of UGC which was supposed to take over the supervision of the quality of higher education in India. They did it by avoiding any mention of content support for developing spoken languages and several types of skills and competencies in different fields of study. One does not know when the universities will start using syllabi that will develop skills, competencies, and qualities.
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About the Author
Prof. Sunney Tharappan is Director of the College for Leadership and HRD, Mangaluru. He trains, writes, and lives in Mangaluru.
