ON TEACHING

ON TEACHING

It is often the fate of certain things to live on the lips of men but never really to enter their understanding. When a thing is most easily talked about, it is, generally speaking, least well understood. For there is little need for talk when knowledge is full. The work `education' is in these days, an over-used coin of speech. One cannot live in the modern world many days but feels called to say something about education. Thus, education has been committed to the care of quivering words.

What is this education which has set tongues loose? It has been described, defined and explained endless times, and still its heart remains unrevealed. We hardly know what it is, except that it is something that must do us good but often does us even harm. It often does us harm because we hardly know what it is. We cling to it as if to an uncertain gleam in the dark because we believe that it would lead us to light. So, we have been putting our trust no less than our hope on a riddle, and to some extent, playing with it, perhaps unconsciously, thinking ourselves wise all the time.

The result is that there is no country in the world to-day which is fully satisfied with its education. More or less, every where, it is leading to unexpected results. It has brought new evils in its train while it cannot be said to have quenched the old. In several lands, it is leading to disillusion and throwing up thorny problems to vex the brave hands that dare grasp them. The new systems of education that now and then appear in battle-array to challenge the sanity of the old are a sign of the disappointment that the higher judgement of mankind has suffered in their so-called educational panacea. The desire for the evolution of a right education has begun to stir imperatively in the collective aspirations of man.

Vain must be the attempt, however, high intentioned, to extract light from darkness, of which we know nothing. If education has so far failed or at least fallen short of hopes, and no candid mind will deny it has, it is because we have been building on an education about which we had no clear ideas. The educational icon was invested in schools and colleges, with the wild enthusiasm and extravagant hopes with which people sometimes launch themselves on commercial speculations. This educational venture has mostly resulted in little but a polished emptiness, a spluttering garb. Even the most ardent admirer of it will hardly gainsay that judged from the harvest, it cannot be said to pay.

If we expect anything from education, we must first know what it is? This knowledge is essential, for, without it, we should not know to put it to such use as will benefit us, and we have to right to expect any definite good from a gamble in chance. Folks that deal with the forces of chance take what comes.

Our present ideas of education are none too clarified. We say that education must fit us for life as if life is a finished article and as if we know that it is. Education is always defined in the most general terms a certain sign that those who talk about it do not always know it. These general terms have led us to fill young heads with all the component parts, as it were of the universe and to hope for the emergence of something wonderful from the ill-assorted store. We have been expecting the rise of the perfect citizen, the ideal man, the highest type of human being from it and when we find ordinary human beings with ordinary visages and ordinary outlook, small minded and self-intoxicated come instead our disappointment naturally is bitter. If we are ever to realize our hope, we must build not on vague ideas, less trust-worthy than sand, but on some definite purpose.

Education should be a little more than a merely spectacular passing of time from birth to boyhood, from youth to manhood. What shall we feed the children with in their journey to mature life? That depends upon what we like the children to become when they grow up. We cannot have a multitude of irons in the fire with regard to the education of the young. To tell them all the things under the heavens, in the hope of making them fit enough to meet the various contingencies that life may have in store for them is very often as good as telling them nothing. The necessities of growth will not tolerate such excessive solicitude. They will march ahead practically untouched by the efforts this solicitude sets in motion. An over-loaded curriculum must be the enemy of real education. And if our education is to day on the verge of grave doubts it is because for one thing, it is overloaded and is lacking for another in a vision of things within our reach and a clear purpose within our fulfilment. This pressure of a hundred subjects upon the young minds which by a curious lapse of judgement we call education cannot give us the man or woman of our educational dreams.

If education is to bear fruit it must be changed from the noisy activity which it is today, to purposeful action. We must will to give the educated man or woman certain things taking care not to will more than we can give. Education must leave its testimony on us its ineffaceable stamp must kindle a light in us which shall not waver in storm or grow dim in gloom. Let the educated man go through life like a moving illumination and we cannot stop the uneducated from demanding to be transformed likewise. Today, we can hardly tell the educated from the uneducated. Both have the same stature, are lashed by the same passions, troubled by the same needs inspired by the same motives which are seldom frankly owned are equally happy and equally miserable equally able and equally helpless. There is perhaps a difference after all and it often consists in the cunning power of the educated, aided by which he takes unfair advantage of the other. It is this selfishness often hiding itself behind an embroidery of glittering lace that distinguishes today, if he is distinguished at all, the boastful and declamatory individual of education from the simple unsophisticated children of ignorance. We have been tilling the human mind to raise a crop of gold, but tares come into the field and grow as if our ploughshares have been turning the soil in such manner as would make it fit only for tares to come up.

There is perhaps a seeming exaggeration of evils in all this. But the evidence of known facts cannot easily be brushed aside. What has education done to eject selfishness, jealousy and rivalry from human conduct? What has education done to bring man nearer to man, to accord his conduct to the deep forces to kinship that, altogether independent of our education and aspirations bind all these diverse, mutually suspicious and cantankerous peoples into one family? Why is it that there is little domestic peace in it today? It is not because that there is any element of natural irreconcilability in it, but because we have managed thus far to suppress the stream of harmony which flows in the deeper spaces from which its common existence springs. Our upbringing has been hostile to this great harmony. Dark whispers shake the music, and we stand today, as we have stood through the centuries parted from our destiny by seemingly unfathomable gulfs.

Our foggy educational ideas most commonly find expression today through the teaching of certain subjects such as languages, mathematics, science and history. Nothing worth knowing is actually achieved in these subjects, not by any means in the school, nor even, frequently, in the college. The students acquire the teachers manage to give them a vague confused superficial smattering in them and both are satisfied that the work of education is over. The students quickly get rid of this smattering at the examination where they spare no efforts to display it to the best advantage. Thus the two ends of the educative process nearly meet at the same point, the end hardly showing anything great that the beginning lacked.

A young man at the end of his school education writes:

"My parents sent me to school thinking that it would make me fit to earn my bread. Now I find with my little experience of this world that there is no use of studying for government service. Therefore, I must return to the land from which I came and cultivate my small field and be content. Now I know bits of English, Science, Mathematics and my mother tongue. I am satisfied with what little knowledge I have gained after spending years and large sums of money. If I had spent these years usefully I might have been far better than I am. I must be thankful to my parents and the government for giving me the knowledge."

Another writes:

"When I was four years old my parents put me to school. I have been eleven years in it and now I am in the School Final Class. But till now I have not gained anything from this education. I had hoped to gain much and now I am disappointed. I do not know what the reason is."

A third bewails:

"After all I have gained very little."

A hundred students write in this strain. They have gained nothing. They feel like guarded princes suddenly abandoned to the fears of the dark. A salient sad disappointment has settled on the schools. Education has failed to speak to the growing generation through the school subjects. A monetary consciousness of mere information is not education. The school curriculum was based on its supposed educative value. It was hoped that the teaching of certain subjects would by some esoteric action lead to the education of the young but far from leading to this devoutly to be wished for goal, it has led to the encumbering of juvenile minds with dubious matter and even hindered the true educative process. The young have been stuffed instead of taught their growth has been artificially arrested instead of aided through natural means. The institutions meant to spread education have mostly been tending an awkward parody of it. In the noise and confusion of spurious educational notions wrangling in schools and colleges, true education had largely been forgotten if it has not actually fled to some hidden refuge.

Thus, it has become imperative to recall and re-state the true function of education. If education is not a lasting illumination of mind and the inculcation of a habit of easy health, it is a hollow word producing troublesome sound. And the two must go together to make education. Mere illumination of mind without physical health is ineffective. Mere physical health without illumination of mind is harmful. The one is wisdom without the means of using it; the other is energy without wisdom to regulate it. The combination of wisdom with energy leads to beneficence, to active good and that is education.

Whenever, then, wisdom is not found thus combined with energy whatsoever things may be there, education is not there. If the individual claiming to be educated, does not bear with him these two vital elements that go to make a happy and abundant life, be he an intellectual giant or a giant man, we cannot admit his claim. Let us then insist that education must give us wisdom and strength in equal measure. If men are strong and wise they will also be good, unselfish, innocent, and innocence the mild majesry of the mind _ transforms and ennobles those who come in contact with it. Thus, the truly educated man is a light that kindles other lamps.

Can the school curriculum, such as it is to-day, yield this education? Unless it is made to include a programme of effective physical education, it cannot give that habit of health which we have said is one of the two great essentials in education. And regarding wisdom, what can it do? Precious little as it has done so far in this vastly important matter, does it at all have the potential power to produce better results? There is little doubt that if the subjects taught in the schools have failed to be productive of really educative results, it is not because they themselves have no virtue in them but because in teaching them education has been forgotten. The greatest enemy of education is the examination system and it is most invidious and unscrupulous enemy because it fights its battles in the name of education itself. It has practically succeeded in laying waste the realms of education and to usurp, the thorn. It is not when one really thinks overnight. When at some time the guardians of education probably flagged somewhat in their vigil the waiting enemy must have stolen into the king's chamber and throwing him quietly out of the window and putting on his image, must have softly taken his place and nobody was ever the wiser for this tremendous change of king. The pretentious thief has been scattering deceptions with both hands and filling the minds of men with the sparkling strong wine of a false and almost fatal allegiance. Thus, it is that, education has become a pageant of spurious spectacles.

The combination of education with an uninformed system of examinations has proved to be an error of the almost consequence, has degraded teaching to a dull mechanical routine, has turned out a superficially polished generation bearing a little knowledge but without the power to tent it, and exercising strange reactions on the bearers. It is exactly in such circumstances that a little knowledge is said to be dangerous. It has shown its danger at least in the sphere of the material needs of life. A little knowledge has shown its inadequacy to make a living, and as this question os bread and butter is of paramount importance, the failure of education in this respect has been borne in upon us with particular poignancy. It has failed equally in other spheres also although we may not realize it with the same intense and almost maddening disappointment. Education has failed because the real idea underlying education has hardly been given a chance. We have hardly been trying to attain either health of body or nourishment of soul. We never seriously bent our efforts that way. Just as in some religious certain ceremonies and observances, we find, have eaten up the meaning, so in education certain formulations and conventions have altogether overshadowed its essence. It is time that the living educational ideal was brought back to the schools. The greatest part of a nation's wealth is its collective energy, not the mere man power, as the phrase goes, but the grand total of all the human capabilities it holds. The present so-called educational system has proved a tremendous drain on these very capabilities exceeding price. Therefore, a careful survey of existing educational practice and an anxious search for remedies have become imperative. And it is just because these two things appear to be so imperative that the following pages could not remain unwritten.