Education in India

Profiles of eminent educationists from around the world

In 1993 and 1994, UNESCO's Prospects: Quarterly review of comparative education published a series of profiles of 100 famous educators-philosophers, statesmen, politicians, journalists, psychologists, poets, men of religion-drawn from many parts of the world. The complete list is available.

The 100 who figure are in the list (below) include many whom I have never heard of, let alone read about their  views on education. Over time, I hope to go through the profiles and time permitting, summarise their life and contributions in separate posts - it should be very interesting. (If you have the inclination and the time, please do go through the profiles too and write about them. It may help us all go through the entire list sooner than later)

Adiseshiah, Alain, Aristotle, Aurobindo, Avicenna, 
Beeby, Bello, Bernstein, Bettelheim, Binet, Bloom, Blonsky, Al-Boustani, Brunsvick Yves, Buber,
Cai Yuanpei, Calasanz, Claparède, Comenius, Comte, Condorcet, Confucius, Cousinet,
Dawid, Debesse, Decroly, Dewey, Diesterweg, Dolto, Durkheim,
Eötvös, Erasmus,
Fafunwa, Al-Farabi, Ferrière, Freinet, Freire, Freud, Fröbel, Fukuzawa,
Gandhi, Al-Ghazali, Giner de los Rios, Glinos, Goodman, Gramsci, Grundtvig, Grzegorzewska,
Hegel, Herbart, Humboldt, Husén, Hussein,
Illich, 
Jaspers, Jovellanos, Jullien de Paris, Kandel,
Kant, Kerschensteiner, Key, Ibn Khaldun, Kilpatrick, Ki-Zerbo, Kold, Korczak, Krishnamurti, Krupskaya, 
Locke,
Makarenko, Mao Zedong, Mann Jonathan, Martí, Mead, Melanchthon, Mencius, Mercante, Miskawayh, Montaigne, Montessori, More,
Naik, Neill, Niemeyer, Nightingale, Noikov, Nyerere,
Ortega y Gasset, Owen,
Pestalozzi, Piaget, Plato, Priestley,
Al-Qabbani, 
Read, Rogers, Rousseau, Rudenschöld,
Sadler, Salomon, Sarmiento, Sérgio, Skinner, Spencer, Steiner, Suchodolski, Sun Yat-sen,
Tagore, Al-Tahtawi, Teixeira, Tolstoy, Trefort, Trstenjak,
Ushinsky, Uznadze,
Varela, Vasconcelos, Vico, Vivekananda, Vives, Vygotsky and
Wallon.

The following Indians figure in the list.

Adiseshiah, Malcolm
Aurobindo (Sri)
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand
Krishnamurti, J.
Naik, J.P.
Tagore, Rabindranath
Vivekananda Swami

Extracts from a book on Ramesh Pai of Manipal

I came across an article on Ramesh Pai of the Manipal Group which provided some extracts from a book on him titled  Ramesh Pai, The Man and His Mission. The book throws light on the Pai family of whom the three most well known Pais are:

• T. Madhava A. Pai, a.k.a. Dr. T.M.A. Pai, a doctor who went on to set up the Canara Industrial and Banking Syndicate, become the managing director of Syndicate Bank and founded the Manipal Group's educational institutions.
• T. Anant Pai, a.k.a T.A. Pai, (who was a member of the Madras Legislative Assembly from 1952-57 and later headed the Food Corporation of India and the Life Insurance Corporation of India and went on to become the Railway Minister and also held other minsterial portfolios). T.A. Pai was the nephew of Dr. T.M.A. Pai
• T. Ramesh U. Pai, a.k.a Ramesh Pai, (who was instrumental in turning many of Dr. T.M.A. Pai's ideas and initiatives into reality and making them what they are today). Ramesh Pai was the nephew of Dr. T.M.A. Pai and the brother of T.A. Pai

Extracts from the book make interesting reading (but the editing seems to be poor). One episode describes what the Pais had to contend with when the got started on the education front.

It took six years after the formation of the academy (in 1942) to start the first educational institution, the Manipal Secondary School. Then came the real acid test: starting of the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial College, Udupi. It was with great strain that finance could be arranged. Finally it materialised and started functioning in June 1949.

There was another hitch: among the first batch of 97 students, 10 were girls. The Madras University authorities remonstrated that girl students should not have been allowed to register and it also warned that the girl students should not be enrolled in future. Dr. T M A Pai discussed the matter with Ramesh Pai who was a member of the Madras University senate. "What is this?" he mused. "Why should girls not be given as much opportunity to attend college as boys? Why should we have to get special permission in advance from the University to admit a girl student?" After this discussion Ramesh Pai made an appeal against this ruling which was responded to by the University with an unconvincing alibi that the age between 16 and 18 was dangerous period for the morals of the young girls!

Ramesh Pai was determined to take up the cudgels on behalf of girl students because he like his uncle believed not in the subjugation but in the education and empowerment of women. Soon a women's committee headed by Mrs. P.S. Achary was formed and the women campaigned from door to door. They called upon any girl to come forward and to fight the issue in the court of law. Miss Shanta Shenoy came forward and filed a writ in the Madras High Court. When Justice Subbarao of Madras High Court gave a verdict in favour of Shantha, the University of Madras when filed an appeal to the Division Bench. Since Ramesh thought it is a long drawn legal battle which may entail lot of financial expenses, he sent Shantha's appeal to the Prime Minster Jawaharlal Nehru, Vice President of India Dr. Radhakrishnan, and Health Minister Rajkumari Amrit Kaur.

Ultimately, it was Smt. Indira Gandhi who was responsible in making the Prime Minister write to the Governor of Madras, Shri Sriprakasha, to intervene with the university who gave his historic decision that girls may be admitted till separate Womens college came up.

Another episode describes how the Pais responded to the nationalisation of Syndicate Bank.

When the Indira Gandhi government nationalized 14 scheduled banks in 1969, Syndicate Bank was one of them. As compensation to the stockholders of Syndicate Bank the government has paid Rs.36 million in bonds redeemable at par after 30 years carrying 5 1/2 percent interest. They had two options: either they could keep those bonds at a relatively low rate of interest or they could sell them and pay high capital gains taxes to the government. Both these options were disadvantageous but a way-out was soon found.

Let me quote Selden Menfee again: "With typical Pai shrewdness and insight Dr.T.M.A. Pai and his nephew T.Ramesh U Pai offered the stockholders a third way out….They proposed to the shareholders that they keep their organization intact but change its name and functions to concentrate on industrial development". It was thus that Ramesh Pai became the Founder Chairman of the Industrial Credit and Development Syndicate. One of the new company's first acts was to invest in the modern office building, five storeys high, called 'Syndicate House'. Ramesh Pai built up the ICDS Limited working for the first 12 years without getting any remuneration and the next 10 years as the Managing Director and made it one of the outstanding, non-banking financial companies during which period he was responsible in building up one the finest shopping-cum-office complexes know as 'Manipal Center' at Bangalore.

The article mentions a couple of other books written on the Pai family.

Two famous biographers have researched and written books on this family which give insights into its origin and evolution as well as the story of their endeavors and contributions for the betterment of Mnipal and the country at large: first is THE PAI'S OF MAIPAL by Selden Menefee, an American professor and writer and the second THE INNOVATIVE BANKER by veteran journalist M.V. Kamath, a former Editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India and author of biographies on many colorful personalities of the country. The first book mentioned revolves primarily around Dr. T.M.A. Pai and the second focuses on T.A.Pai. A full-fledged biography of Ramesh Pai is yet to be written.

I have not been able to find any of these books listed in any of the online bookshops. If you know where I can get a copy of these books, do let me know.

Tagore wanted to turn work into play, while Gandhi found the spirit of play in work

Ramachandra Guha writing in the Hindustan Times (March 31, 2005) quotes the historian of education, Poromesh Acharya, who said "Tagore wanted to turn work into play, while Gandhi found the spirit of play in work." Guha adds "Where Tagore wished to make school a vehicle for learning about nature and culture, Gandhi wanted to use it to break down the barriers between mental and manual labour."

While bemoaning the lack of attention paid to reforming and improving school education, which Guha says doesn't excite our leaders, he points to the National Curriculum Framework Review initiated by the NCERT as a positive step.

The spirit of Tagore and Gandhi, so long submerged, makes a sort of comeback in an ongoing exercise of the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT).  The NCERT has initiated a National Curriculum Framework Review, a wide-ranging examination of pedagogy in the school system.  Twentyone 'focus groups' have been formed, each dealing with a specific subject, and each headed by a scholar or practitioner of distinction.  The 'standard' subjects-science, mathematics, social science, etc.-are, of course, represented, but among the more innovative themes included are art, music, dance and culture, headed by Shubha Mudgal; heritage crafts, headed by Laila Tyabji; and habitat, headed by Prof. Madhav Gadgil.

These names inspire confidence, and, indeed, the exercise as a whole seeks to privilege content over form, or, might we say, quality over ideology.  A most interesting proposal, emanating from the science focus group, is for textbooks to be written by teachers and young researchers, with senior scientists merely being called upon to review the exercise.  This is the reverse of what is now practised, where the books are written by scholars at the furthest remove from the school system itself.

School education as a subject does not excite our leaders - it is slow, patient work, without the symbolic appeal or electoral pay-offs of a 'showpiece' project such as a large temple, a larger dam or a nuclear bomb.

Still, a nation is more than the sum of its (present) politicians.  These are failures for which we are collectively culpable.  India's claims to being a democracy shall remain in question as long as so many Indian children stay out of school, and while those within are taught so little and so imperfectly. 

Gandhi, Aurobindo and Tilak on Education

The National Council of Teacher Education has put together a comprehensive compilation of

• Mahatma Gandhi's thoughts on education. It is available for download as a 169 page MS-Word document (707kb).
  
• Sri Aurobindo's thoughts on education. It is available for download as a 72 page MS-Word document (288kb).
  
• a series of articles on Lokamanya Bala Gangadhar Tilak's thoughts on education

They have also put together President Zakir Husain's thoughts on education, which I couldn't find online.

A list of NCTE's publications are available online.