India's policy repeats mistake

The last governor general of India, a celebrated political figure and a corecipient of the inaugural Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari was hailed as a visionary leader, statesman, and a hero of the Indian freedom movement. Yet a single educational-reform proposal forever tarnished his legacy in the eyes of the Indian masses.

Indian society was historically organized into four social classes or castes. The Brahmins were the topmost and enjoyed the highest social respect and veneration. The lowest of the four were the Shudras, who were denied education, among numerous other ordinary rights, amenities and entitlements.

Then there were the Dalits, or the untouchables, who lay outside this social stratification and were grossly dehumanized.

Traditionally, studying scriptures, treatises, and other scholarly texts was exclusively and rigidly the domain of Brahmins. Shudras and Dalits could not enjoy the prerogative of literacy, and their attempts at learning were met with harsh punishment.

In fact, ancient Indian normative codes of lifestyle and behavior such as the Manusmriti and the Gautama Dharmasutra prescribe severe penalization of attempts to hear, recite, or memorize scriptures or to interrupt, argue with, or correct Brahmins. Punitive measures include filling the listener's ears with molten metal or oil, severing the tongue of the reciter, or even killing the subject in a merciless manner.

In 1953, in a purported bid to counter the colonial influence on education, and roll back occidental (read modern) impressions, the erstwhile chief minister of Madras state, Rajagopalachari, introduced the Modified Scheme of Elementary Education under which schools were to work in the morning and students compulsorily had to learn their respective family vocations in the afternoon.

It had only been a few decades that Dalits and Shudras had been attending schools and joining government jobs. The scheme of two sessions in elementary school where the latter would be spent learning one's family trade, craft, or profession, was problematic as it indirectly ensured that the practitioners of underprivileged, menial, and dishonorable professions, already egregiously mistreated, obligated and underpaid, at times unpaid, would pass on the burden to their children.

In fact, for hundreds of thousands of Indian children, their "family vocation" meant partaking in obligatory menial activities like manual scavenging, rag picking, domestic labor such as sweeping.

It was seen as a crafty ploy devised by the Brahminist Rajagopalachari abusing his authority and legislatorial designation to keep the downtrodden in utter, bleak ignominy and perpetuate the ongoing social paradigms and caste hierarchy. By stripping children of choice, the suggested reform was not merely detrimental to social mobility but was imposing perpetual servitude upon the lowest castes.

Against the backdrop of abject poverty and illiteracy, this was seen as an attempt to restrict knowledge to those who already favorably possessed it, reinforce entitlements and the hierarchical social order, and distract youth from modernization and exposure to Western ideas. The scheme was deferred and the whole controversy indirectly cost him his chief ministership. His successor dropped the very idea altogether.

Sixty-seven years later, the new National Education Policy (NEP) brought in by the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) government should trigger similar concerns. While like most other sudden strides of the regime, this proposal could be deemed "well intended," for it seeks to make youth self-reliant, enhance and uphold the dignity of labor, and address the commonly bemoaned lack of self-dependency in Indian children, it will likely end up doing more harm than good in practice.

Whereas such countries as Japan and Russia train students early on in performing chores, everyday tasks, and basic repairs and crafts, as an integral part of education, these measures are seen as duties and responsibilities that help make the classroom and the society more egalitarian, united by the dignity of labor.