Macaulay is often credited with modernizing (read anglicizing) the educational system in India (British India) in the early 1800s. Today my thoughts are reflective upon what has transcended from those days and its effect on people like me.
When I used to be a school kid, in Tamil Nadu system of education (matric and state board), decent emphasis was placed on learning - understanding concepts, facts. But looking back, I felt that a much greater emphasis was placed on ability to reproduce a bulk of these stuffs repeatedly till the term is over. Success was gauged based on skill to put in paper, during an exam, without error, in a very legible fashion, verbatim from text book a lot of these facts. So, the thought process - "thinking and analyzing" - about a concept or fact stops the moment a particular chapter is covered by the teacher in the classroom. What prevails is the repeated memorizing and the need to reproduce what was memorized in a fashion I told earlier. Exams are all about memory power, legible calligraphy and timely completion of text book material. Period. No thinking needed in 99% of cases.
Now that brings us back to the Macaulay we started with- who wanted to breed a class of Indians who are literate in English (so that the rulers can communicate), keep legible records, remember laws/rules without thinking what they actually do and communicate with vernaculars. At 30, I am afraid that I am a product of that school. No disrespect intended to my teaches, for whom I hold the highest respects and regards even today for their tireless efforts to see us succeed and treating us as their kids and taking a genuine interest on us. I am very fortunate to have many a teacher like this in my child hood. But its the system that I am not able to come to terms with. Read the passage from Macaulay's speech on India at this link.
Barring me, I am yet to come across a single soul of my age who has not hated his history classes, for example. What do you expect when you are made to memorize meaningless numbers and dates and bland events and not to reflect or appreciate the impact those events had on your lives even to date. How many of us had to do some research of our own and bring in or contribute stuffs that are not spelled out in the sacred text books that we slept with daily. But for some great teachers and my parents' interest in me and an insane amount of luck, I would have developed nothing but hatred in most academia stuffs and my child hood would not be something I can look back and feel happy about and feel obligated to provide the a similar nostalgic one to my kid.
Today's pics are a symbolic representation of how our minds felt in early days of schooling in a Macaulay-ish system. (Note of course, there are educational systems like the CBSE, ICSE etc which dont come under this umbrella.) The pictures are of the closed race track I bought for my kid. The technique used to show the motion of the car toys with the streak of light trailing behind them is called - rear curtain sync - a flash photography technique where you set the flash to fire just before the shutter closes and the shutter speed is slow enough compared to the speed of moving object so that it causes the light streak.
We should have felt like these cars - going round and round in a closed controlled system yet thinking all the time that we are up to something great. Here is what I yearn for -
"Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."
When I used to be a school kid, in Tamil Nadu system of education (matric and state board), decent emphasis was placed on learning - understanding concepts, facts. But looking back, I felt that a much greater emphasis was placed on ability to reproduce a bulk of these stuffs repeatedly till the term is over. Success was gauged based on skill to put in paper, during an exam, without error, in a very legible fashion, verbatim from text book a lot of these facts. So, the thought process - "thinking and analyzing" - about a concept or fact stops the moment a particular chapter is covered by the teacher in the classroom. What prevails is the repeated memorizing and the need to reproduce what was memorized in a fashion I told earlier. Exams are all about memory power, legible calligraphy and timely completion of text book material. Period. No thinking needed in 99% of cases.
Now that brings us back to the Macaulay we started with- who wanted to breed a class of Indians who are literate in English (so that the rulers can communicate), keep legible records, remember laws/rules without thinking what they actually do and communicate with vernaculars. At 30, I am afraid that I am a product of that school. No disrespect intended to my teaches, for whom I hold the highest respects and regards even today for their tireless efforts to see us succeed and treating us as their kids and taking a genuine interest on us. I am very fortunate to have many a teacher like this in my child hood. But its the system that I am not able to come to terms with. Read the passage from Macaulay's speech on India at this link.
Barring me, I am yet to come across a single soul of my age who has not hated his history classes, for example. What do you expect when you are made to memorize meaningless numbers and dates and bland events and not to reflect or appreciate the impact those events had on your lives even to date. How many of us had to do some research of our own and bring in or contribute stuffs that are not spelled out in the sacred text books that we slept with daily. But for some great teachers and my parents' interest in me and an insane amount of luck, I would have developed nothing but hatred in most academia stuffs and my child hood would not be something I can look back and feel happy about and feel obligated to provide the a similar nostalgic one to my kid.
Today's pics are a symbolic representation of how our minds felt in early days of schooling in a Macaulay-ish system. (Note of course, there are educational systems like the CBSE, ICSE etc which dont come under this umbrella.) The pictures are of the closed race track I bought for my kid. The technique used to show the motion of the car toys with the streak of light trailing behind them is called - rear curtain sync - a flash photography technique where you set the flash to fire just before the shutter closes and the shutter speed is slow enough compared to the speed of moving object so that it causes the light streak.
We should have felt like these cars - going round and round in a closed controlled system yet thinking all the time that we are up to something great. Here is what I yearn for -
"Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."
