An essay that attempts to put the recent issue of “saffronisation of education” brought on by the BJP’s manipulation of school texts in a historical perspective.

The process of what has been called the “saffronisation of education” has its grounds not in what many believe to be the blind cavalier machinations of a fundamentalist regime but is a step taken by the BJP-RSS cabal with remarkable foresight and vision and if executed properly is destined to work in its favour in the coming decades.

It is easy to imagine that if the proposed syllabus is installed the BJP or for that matter any party that espouses its tenets will find by the next few generations many more followers and sympathizers among the white-collared citizenry. In so much as schools have been the products of the state’s ideals the BJP’s move is nothing out of the ordinary and definitely not without precedent. The flaw is not in what the BJP is attempting to achieve, it is the absence of an adequate system of checks and balances that would prevent it. It would be ingenuous to expect the state to respect the sanctity of an institution like public education with its power to transform society. Given that with sublime manipulation the whole mythos of a nation can be controlled, the temptation is too great. And politicians, historically, have a very bad record when it comes to resisting it.

Lycurgus the founder of the Spartan state held the view that the education of children is the chiefest and greatest matter that a reformer of laws should establish. Plato, who professed admiration for all that Sparta stood for, took a leaf out of Lycurgus’ book when he discussed his views on education in his “Republic”. Plato held that there was to be a rigid censorship over the literature, music and arts that children were to be exposed to. Mothers and nurses will be allowed to narrate only those stories that have been authorized by the state. Homer and Hesiod, for various specious reasons, are not to be read and all dramatists and their works are to be banned since they all contain characters that are evil and he believes that children who play those roles will be tainted by it. This then was Plato’s Utopia.

Now after seeing what has occurred in the recent months with the NCERT’s revised syllabi, those among us who profess honest indignation at this apparent meddling in an institution that is sacrosanct would be in error if they presumed that it has been untainted and balanced to begin with.

The Nehruvian vision of a nation of engineers and scientists who would lead the nation in its new found religion had no small part to play in the decision taken by the early formulators of our educational policies to set high standards in our schools when it came to mathematics and the sciences. This by itself is not such a bad move if it had not come at the cost of other disciplines; disciplines like the Arts and Sports.

How many of us left school with an appreciation of poetry? Even those among us who are professed lovers of literature have had a hard time coming to terms with it.

Much of my schooling has had the effect of inoculating me against much of all that is admirable in the Arts. Having to memorize poems, which to me were, at the age of ten, meaningless and tedious had the effect of desensitizing me against poetry. Our school textbooks possess the singular ability to suck the beauty and pleasure out of anything that has to do with the Arts. One shudders to think what would happen if the sciences were treated in similar ham-handed fashion.

In the absence of any conclusive proof I am loath to believe that there is something in the Indian genetic make-up that makes us such good mathematicians, scientists and engineers and equally bad athletes at the international level. Notwithstanding societal attitudes and dietary habits the public education system is not completely innocent when we begin to investigate the reasons behind why this nation of a billion odd churns out thousands of competent engineers every year and barely a handful of world-class athletes every decade. Ideally, shouldn’t a society with a balanced educational system in place produce equal numbers of scientists, artists and sportspersons?

The reason why India produces such an inordinately large number of competent engineers is that those who have the aptitude and the inclination are afforded all the opportunities to excel in it. While those among us who are natural athletes or artists enjoy neither social acceptance nor adequate support structures in the school or outside of it.

The intention here is not to suggest that the early formulators or our public education system had some devious objective behind this obvious bias towards the scientific disciplines. Young India, steeped in illogic and stuck in the mire of a thousand years of scientific darkness needed, indeed demanded, its multitudes of homegrown engineers and scientists and doctors. My intention is to provide an illustration of how state sponsored education is by definition a controlled commodity. And now, when things have come to such a pass that youth with engineering degrees are a dime a dozen and not a few of them incompetent, is it not time to set the balance straight? And is it not time for the formulators of the syllabi and the heads of educational institutions to give an equal importance to the disciplines of arts and sports that have unfairly been relegated to second-class status?

It can be reasonably argued that in a nation with literacy rates as dismal as ours, education at all levels is better left to the state. In the same vein there is also a case against trusting something of such crucial importance to private initiative. But so long as the policies that guide public education lies at the unchecked mercy of the state, it and its impressionable recipients will be forced to carry the ideological cangue of the ruling party. In so much as we are all agreed to hold freedom of thought and expression as essential liberties it is clear that while it is for the state to provide education, it should not imply control.