I have already had something to say on this subject in former chapters when writing of the Indian civilian2, and the principles which underlie3 good education are the same everywhere. A well-educated man is he in whom his mental and physical powers have been so brought out that he can face the ordinary vicissitudes4 of his life with confidence, that he can understand them and combat them materially to the best of his ability, and that when materially defeated he may still rise spiritually above all defeat and discouragement. Education is necessary to everyone—man or woman, peasant or prince, merchant or artisan—and that man is best educated who can make the best of his life whatever its station may be.
Thus it will be seen that education is mainly relative. A man who would be well educated if in one station of life would be hopelessly ignorant if in another. I doubt if Whewell would have been considered educated had fate suddenly made him a soldier, a political officer on a frontier, or a cultivator. A keen eye gained by experience for market fluctuations5 is better for a merchant than all the learning of all the libraries.
But this specialisation belongs properly to higher education. There are certain foundation principles necessary to any success in life, to being able to live it in whatever station with dignity and with prosperity. What are those principles?
I think the Indian Education Department would say that these are reading, writing, and arithmetic—that is to say, acquirements. I should say they are qualities of character.
What are these qualities?
First and foremost is belief in his own people, not his caste or his creed7, but in the people who inhabit his Province, who will eventually make up his nationality. If the man is to do good work for his people the boy must desire to do good work—he must have a certainty in the unlimited8 possibilities of his people, that though they may be young now they will grow to a world stature9. Therefore, that it is his duty to help them. He must be sure that this world is good—to be made better by him and his fellows and his descendants. He has inherited much; he must hand on more. He has no right to live unless he does his duty to life and in life—that is to say, he must have a purpose in life, for without a purpose life cannot be lived.
Secondly10, he must see that to the accomplishment11 of his purpose, which is but part of the World's Purpose, he must cultivate two qualities, obedience12 in act and freedom of thought. He must learn to obey, because he must see for himself that only by men acting13 together under authority can anything be achieved. His obedience will then be a willing and cheerful obedience, because necessary to his own purpose. He must obey that later he may be obeyed. He must keep his mind free, because to admit authority in thought is to kill thought. He must see things for himself and judge for himself, that when he is able to act for himself he may do so on truth and not on hearsay14. He must learn to respect the opinions of others which they have founded also on experience, while not necessarily adopting them, because he may see things differently.
He must learn self-knowledge to recognise what he can do and what he can't.
He should cultivate self-command that must not mean self-extinction.
On a base like this all other things come naturally.
Is there any such ideal in elementary education in India? I can safely say that there is no such ideal. All that the Department seeks to do is to stuff a child with reading, writing, and arithmetic, and other learning, regardless of his character or his objective in life.
Therefore elementary education is not popular in Burma, because it seems to have no good purpose.
That was true of education before we took the country. It was then mainly, for boys, in the hands of monks15, and I do not think that education when controlled by religion has been popular anywhere in the world. It has been accepted because there was no other means of education available, but it was not admired. Our Government has accepted the monastery16 schools, and it has also encouraged lay schools, but neither seem to give much satisfaction.
Now this is not the place to discuss religion of any kind, and I have no intention of entering into such a vexed17 question. There are good things in all religions—borrowed from humanity; there are doubtful things; there are bad things. But the foundation of every religion is a declaration that this world is evil and that we should despise it. Now the objective of all education is to fit a boy for his life, and he cannot be so fit if he despise life. He must love it, admire it, desire in all ways to help it, to increase it, beautify it. His objective must be in this life. Further, the tendency of all faiths is to raise barriers between races and castes. But it is an essential part of any true education that a boy understand that in striving for the good of the community he must ignore all differences. Humanity is one, and the God of Humanity is One, whatever faiths may say.
Thus religions when mixed with education have a paralysing effect. I have often heard this said in Burma. Here is a conversation I once had at a village I knew very well. It occurred, as did most of the talks I had with the people, just after sunset, when I had my chair set outside my rest-house, and the people came dropping in to gossip. There were a number of people, the headman, elders, their wives and children, and two monks from a neighbouring monastery. They talked quite freely because they knew that after office hours I forgot I was an official, or even an Englishman, and just talked to them as one human being to another. I may add that I had been inspecting the village school where little boys and girls learned together. I had also been to a monastery where the elder boys went.
"Well," I said, "what is the news?"
There was an expectant silence. Evidently there was some news; the question was—who should tell it?
"What is it, Headman?" I asked.
The Headman rubbed an ankle reflectively. "The fact is," he answered, "there is no news that would interest your Honour; only just village doings, foolish doings."
"Hum," I said; "that sounds to me as if a young man had been doing something."
Several of the men smiled—"Possibly with the assistance of a girl"—and I glanced at some girls. They giggled18, and the Headman said briefly19:
"Maung Ka's son has run off with a girl."
"Oh!" I said, turning to Maung Ka, whom I knew well enough—a tall, fine-looking man, who was looking very gloomy. "It's a way boys have. There's no harm in it."
"Not if he can support her afterwards," said Maung Ka gruffly.
"Can't he do that?" I asked.
It appeared he couldn't. He had spent all his boyhood in a monastery "learning" till his father fetched him out. Then he went to the other extreme and levanted with a girl. "He doesn't know one end of a bullock from the other," said the father; "he can't plough or sow; he can't work; he has no common sense. That's what schooling20 does for a boy."
Most of the other men agreed with him, and we had a discussion on education, in which everyone took part.
The general opinion was that schooling should be to fit you for life. The monks said for eternity21, but the villagers—though out of respect for the monks they said little—evidently didn't make any such distinction. What wasn't fit for time wasn't fit for eternity. Reading, writing, and arithmetic were good, because a boy needed these. Beyond that they seemed to think schooling did harm. A boy learned more from his father and the other villagers than from school. As to a girl, "What," asked an elder indignantly, "is the use of a girl learning to write? What will she write? Love-letters only."
"Well," I asked, "and isn't that good—for the boy who gets them?"
The fact is, the villagers are plain, common-sense men and women, and what they want for their children is that they be better fitted for the struggle of life. They do not observe that to be the case at present. They judge by results, and the results are not good, they say.
In fact, except as to the actual acquisition of reading, writing, and arithmetic, which may or may not be of much use, the teaching—and still more than the teaching, the influence—is bad. It unfits for life, it gives wrong ideals, or it kills all ideals.
The higher education is, I think, worse. It follows an imported system, and in the importation all the good is left out. In England a boy's real education comes from association with the other boys and from his father. From them he learns whatever he does learn of conduct, of ambition to true ends, of acting in concert, of ability to judge for himself and stick up for himself.
In India a wrong ideal has been conceived from the beginning. It has been assumed, tacitly maybe, that an Englishman is the final and completely perfected work of God and man, and that all nations should copy him and try to become, if not a sterling22 Englishman, at least an electro-plate one.
That is disastrous23. It depresses the people by depreciating24 their own races and holding up an objective which is impossible, and if possible would be wrong.
There are in the pasts of nearly all Oriental people ideals which are quite as good as ours, and far better fitted for them. Are these ever taught to them? India once led the civilisation25 of the world; is that past ever brought up and explained and realised for them? Never, I think.
Further, higher education to be of any use must be objective. You must know what you want the boy to be. What does Government want the products of its higher education to be? I have no idea. Has the Government?
Of what use are these products of the higher education in India? They are useful but for two things, to be lawyers or pleaders, or to be clerks. They are dealers26 in words, and not in facts or in humanity.
Government accepts a certain number into its service, because the first ideal of Government is a man who can fill up forms and returns, speedily, accurately27, and punctually. They can do that. When they have district work to do they fail, because they have no personality, no freedom of thought, and because the people despise them. The old officials whom we took over from the Burmese Government, whatever their defects, had "auza"—personality. It is a commonplace to say that the Burmese have deteriorated28. That is not true. They have as much potentiality as before, but this potentiality is wiped out by "education." Far from being really educated, they are merely stuffed, and their natural abilities stifled29. Moreover, they cease to be Burmans, or Madrassis, or Bengalis, and become a sort of hybrid30. This is due to their English masters, who are obsessed31 with the idea that the only way to "educate" anyone is to turn him into a plaster Englishman. I have had some experience of these unfortunate boys who have taken degrees.
Personally, if I had to administer a difficult district, I should choose my Burmese assistants from men who had never been to school, and to satisfy Government I would engage some B.A.'s and F.A.'s to be their clerks and fill up the forms. I should be sorry for the B.A.'s, because I think they have as good stuff in them as the others, but their want of education has unfitted them for work requiring "auza."
That is really what it amounts to; the school-trained boy is not educated, whereas the boy brought up in contact with the world is perforce educated. The first is a hothouse plant; the second a useful field plant.
I am aware that current opinion puts down the failure of the educated young Indian to his want of religion. He has been educated out of his own faith and not accepted into any other; hence his want of character. Of all the wild shibboleths32 about India and the Indians this is, I think, the wildest. That a man is injured by being brought to see the foolishness of caste, of infant marriage, of harems and zenanas, of all the forms and ceremonies with which all religions are covered, seems to me a triumph of illogic. Only the "Occidental mind" at its best could conceive such an idea. In so far as education destroys these ideas it does good. Wherein it harms him is by taking him apart from his people, rendering33 him not desirous to help them but to disown them. He is taught that to be an Englishman should be his ideal—that he "should cultivate English habits of thought"—as if true thought had any habits—so that, finally, he can't think at all. He is directed to wrong ideals; he is rendered unhappy; he is dépaysé; he is useless for any work, except being a clerk or lawyer; he has no more character than a jelly-fish. Instead of wishing to lead his people he wishes to identify himself with the English Government, be a civilian, and rule his people. He should be filled with a boundless34 confidence in the future of his people, and that it is his duty to help that future to be realised. He is discouraged and rendered hopeless. Instead of being a help he is the greatest danger his own people will have to meet when they move forward. He is a danger to all.
The Education Department of the Government of India is the new Frankenstein, and the Higher Education is its monster. The students have sunk under their "education," and in consequence they are unhappy. Who wonders? But, in fact, an alien Power cannot introduce or work any real system of education. It must be indigenous—something of the soil, and not exotic. It, like self-government, must begin with small things in the village and gradually rise.
Like all things, if it is to live and prosper6 and extend it must have a soul. And the soul of education, like the soul of life, is an emotion tending towards a desired end. The desired end of education is the rise and progress not merely of the individual but of the nation. That has been the soul of the progress of Japan; that must be the soul of the progress of any people; and education will only be enthusiastically taken up when it is seen to be a means to that end.
Such an education cannot be given by Englishmen. Any Education Department must be Provincial35 and draw its vigour36 from below. It must not be a machine governed from Simla with text-books as thumbscrews and manuals as beds of Procrustes.
Before there can be a real Education Department it must be entirely37 native of the Province, responsible to the Province for its success. Can we create such a Department? I think we could, slowly, by handing our village schools as much as possible to Village Councils, district schools to District Councils, and the University to the head Provincial Assembly when it comes into being. They will each have to think out what result they want, and then how to attain38 that result.
But all must begin with the village; within it alone is the germ cell of all future progress.
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1
steer
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| vt.驾驶，为…操舵；引导；vi.驾驶 | |
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civilian
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| adj.平民的，民用的，民众的 | |
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underlie
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| v.位于...之下，成为...的基础 | |
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vicissitudes
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| n.变迁，世事变化；变迁兴衰( vicissitude的名词复数 )；盛衰兴废 | |
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fluctuations
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| 波动，涨落，起伏( fluctuation的名词复数 ) | |
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prosper
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| v.成功，兴隆，昌盛；使成功，使昌隆，繁荣 | |
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creed
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| n.信条；信念，纲领 | |
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unlimited
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| adj.无限的，不受控制的，无条件的 | |
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stature
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| n.（高度）水平，（高度）境界，身高，身材 | |
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secondly
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| adv.第二，其次 | |
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accomplishment
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| n.完成，成就，（pl.）造诣，技能 | |
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obedience
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| n.服从，顺从 | |
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acting
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| n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的 | |
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hearsay
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| n.谣传，风闻 | |
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15
monks
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| n.修道士，僧侣( monk的名词复数 ) | |
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monastery
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| n.修道院，僧院，寺院 | |
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17
vexed
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| adj.争论不休的；（指问题等）棘手的；争论不休的问题；烦恼的v.使烦恼( vex的过去式和过去分词 )；使苦恼；使生气；详细讨论 | |
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giggled
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| v.咯咯地笑( giggle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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briefly
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| adv.简单地，简短地 | |
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schooling
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| n.教育；正规学校教育 | |
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21
eternity
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| n.不朽，来世；永恒，无穷 | |
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sterling
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| adj.英币的(纯粹的，货真价实的)；n.英国货币(英镑) | |
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disastrous
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| adj.灾难性的，造成灾害的；极坏的，很糟的 | |
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depreciating
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| v.贬值，跌价，减价( depreciate的现在分词 )；贬低，蔑视，轻视 | |
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civilisation
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| n.文明，文化，开化，教化 | |
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dealers
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| n.商人( dealer的名词复数 )；贩毒者；毒品贩子；发牌者 | |
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accurately
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| adv.准确地，精确地 | |
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deteriorated
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| 恶化，变坏( deteriorate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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29
stifled
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| （使）窒息， （使）窒闷( stifle的过去式和过去分词 )； 镇压，遏制； 堵 | |
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hybrid
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| n.(动，植）杂种，混合物 | |
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obsessed
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| adj.心神不宁的,鬼迷心窍的,沉迷的 | |
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shibboleths
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| n.（党派、集团等的）准则( shibboleth的名词复数 )；教条；用语；行话 | |
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33
rendering
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| n.表现，描写 | |
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boundless
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| adj.无限的；无边无际的；巨大的 | |
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35
provincial
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| adj.省的，地方的；n．外省人，乡下人 | |
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vigour
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| （=vigor）n.智力，体力，精力 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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attain
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| vt.达到，获得，完成 | |
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