Don't Try and Heal a Fracture with a Band-Aid

Always try and get to the root cause of a problem first.

You cannot resolve any problem completely without getting to the root causes of its creation. A fracture cannot not healed by Band-Aids. And, is equivalent to ignoring it, but giving yourself solace that you did something.

It’s textbook stupidity (pun intended).

What passes as education in India today is such a glaring example of it. It’s broken. It has been broken since 1835. But, hardly anything has been done to fix it. Governments are the most useless bodies (all of them) when it comes to this, because they for the most part don’t understand it.

The issue starts with the fault lines which were artificially created by history writing. These can only be first understood by being discerning enough to separate the true from the propaganda.

Science helps tremendously here, but multivariate logic (nyāya) is also needed. Interestingly, without history there is no science or technology either, as it builds on or improves, or supersedes previous problems or ideas.

Want to improve history writing? First understand the motivations and methods of the writers. What did they choose to ignore? Were they unbiased? Were they scientific enough to get proof from other disciplines? What did they ignore? Why? What did they highlight? Why? Can it be done better? How? Is there already a way of doing it better? What?

When we even do a cursory examination and analyze the content, it’s evident that history writing has been extremely pathetic for sometime, because of their unscientific approach and/or lack of knowledge of the ‘scientific method’.

In fact, almost everyone in the humanities departments of institutions who have been writing history are actually in violation of article 51A(h) of the Indian constitution, which places the burden of responsibility of being scientific on the individual.

Ok, let’s get back to education.

Want to improve education systems?

First you have to study the history of education systems and what resulted in it being the way it is today including the methods and motivations.

What were the methods of knowledge creation, knowledge transfer and their resultant effect on society, surroundings including nature and the world.

What was considered "knowledge"?

Was it merely literacy like it's today or was all knowledge including non-literary given high esteem? What can we understand from there? What can we discard? What can we use from today's resultant systems? What can we discard?

Without understanding history, motivations, methods of knowledge distribution, methods of knowledge appropriation, discerning propaganda from evidence, roots of historical and current education systems and their resultant, your efforts can only bring in limited improvements, if any.

Governments can impose draconic laws like the RTE which was a deathblow for indigenous skills and did just what the British did to Indians during their reign in the name of education. But, governments can also build a new National Education Policy (NEP) which is yet another band-aid because it works within the same framework.

When the framework itself is an issue, then no amount band-aids are going to work. You have to take the bull by the horns and build out a completely new framework.

Thankfully, ancient Bhārat which is the ‘cradle of education’ and producer of the largest amount of knowledge compared to any other ancient civilization not just gives us several ideas and techniques that are usable today, but even concepts in topics such as Mathematics that make things easy to understand. Of course, in today’s world you cannot only depend on that and there are some countries like Finland that give us other ideas from which real steps can be taken. Besides that, there are several online pedagogies by a plethora of different teachers who have proven themselves to be far better than the systemic drones who also give us several ideas, methods and pedagogies to mix, match and use.

Watch for more upcoming on education. What it meant in ancient India. What was done to it. How ideas from it can be incorporated into modern learning. And, the futility of most of the modern constructs like school and why they’re more harmful than helpful to not just the children, but the country as a whole.

We’ll dig into the history of many of these constructs.

By the way, while everyone in India blames Thomas Babington Macaulay, who is certainly at fault no doubt when it comes to Indian education, the system is not devised by him, but is rather the Prussian system of education, and it’s not just India, but the entire world that has been suffering from it because of all of it’s constructs and hierarchies.