BURRA V. SUBRAHMANYAM

In 1934 we were told by a senior Indian member of the I. C. S., who had then returned to India after observing the movements of new life in present day Europe, that it was possible even in our state of political backwardness to devise means whereby India need not remain illiterate for ages to come. Our Ministers of Education and our Directors of Public Instruction have been suffering not merely from want of funds to tackle the problem of illiteracy–a proposition accepted on all hands–but they have been suffering no less from want of imagination and, perhaps also, from want of enthusiasm. It was refreshing, therefore, to be told that the problem could be tackled even when circumstances were as disheartening as they continue to be. There is nothing so easy as to be dominated by difficult circumstances and to complain about them in self-excuse. Progress is always the result of a certain restlessness and of intrepid thought. Before proceeding, however, to consider the very interesting suggestions made by this Indian Civilian, it may first be found useful to state the problem of illiteracy accurately and to analyse the methods that have been so far employed to meet the problem.

The problem of illiteracy was world-wide before 1870. In 1867, in England, the Tory government of which Disraeli was the moving spirit extended the franchise to a vast number of illiterate workers in the famous attempt to ‘dish the Whigs,’ and three years later Gladstone’s government started the scheme of compulsory elementary education in the process of what was known as ‘educating our (political) masters,’ the masters being the new electorate. Other important countries in the West began taking full measures against mass illiteracy only in the last quarter of the 19th century. Till 1900, roughly speaking, the peasants and labourers in Europe and America were not more literate than are our Indian peasants of today. This fact is sometimes overlooked by quite eminent people, here and abroad, who feel oppressed by the magnitude of the problem in India and who are inclined to be very pessimistic about the future of Indian literacy. India, illiterate to the extent of more than ninety per cent today, is behind literate Europe by about fifty years at the most–a short, enough span in the history of a nation. And there is nothing to warrant the assumption that the Indian peasant is less educable than the average European. Some of the most grudging critics of this country had to accept that our peasant was at least the equal of his white-skinned brother in shrewdness, commonsense, and general intelligence. It is necessary, on the whole, to emphasise the fact that there is no cause for special despair about the quality of our illiterate people and about the position in time of our problem of illiteracy. Here in India we have brains enough in all strata of society, and we are not very late in the race of the nations towards complete literacy.

Europe, however, when she decided that her people should no longer remain illiterate, had not merely imagination and enthusiasm but also money wherewith to liquidate illiteracy. Industrial and commercial expansion, with the riches that followed, came to mean the expansion of literacy too. But India is backward and poor, and the example of Europe is not particularly valuable to us as at present we are. If England could start a network of schools all over the country, and enforce through efficient local bodies the compulsory attendance, at school of all boys and girls at a certain age, we have no immediate hopes either for the network of schools or for very efficient local bodies. It is true that some of our local bodies (at any rate, in certain parts of certain Provinces) have availed themselves of legislation to experiment with compulsory primary education within limited areas. But such bodies have been few; they have not generally been working efficiently; the experiment has not anywhere penetrated beyond the towns, and the entire rural area is unaffected.

Russia, with her squalid conditions before Lenin and Stalin and with her remarkable progress in literacy during but little more than a decade, may seem at first sight to hold out lessons to us in our combating illiteracy. But a careful examination will reveal that even the methods of Russia are beyond our reach. For, after all, whatever might have been the original disabilities of the Revolutionaries in combating illiteracy, latterly, with the increase of power and the stabilisation of dictatorship, Russia, in her scheme of compulsory general elementary education, called the Vseobutch, decided to tackle the problem of mass illiteracy exactly as Europe had tackled it before. The schools might have been organised on a basis peculiar to the circumstances of the Revolution, and instruction might have been offered of a sort adapted to the immediate political and economic needs of the party in power. But, as in other progressive European countries, the organisation of the schools by the State was there, the compulsion was there, and the efficiency was there. And Russia is achieving complete literacy exactly as Europe achieved it before.

And so it is obvious that we have to think out somewhat unprecedented methods in order to achieve a growing literacy in our country. The methods which we have been employing so far are not peculiar to us. Night schools have a hoary past. ‘Adult education’ was, and is, a very valuable phrase wherever there have been illiterate groups. And the Library Movement (which we need not really mention, because it is a movement to maintain literacy and not to create it) is common to the whole civilised world. Actually, adult education and night schools, although the two often coincide, comprise the total attempt so far made in this country to achieve literacy.

Today, the night schools in our country are, in the last analysis, mere signs of accepting the problem of illiteracy, not a solution thereof. To learn a language and to study Arithmetic during half-sleepy hours in the dim light of a kerosene lamp, are nearly impossible to an adult peasant or labourer who has toiled the whole day and needs by night, more than anything else, relaxation. This is teaching the wrong thing to a person at the wrong age during wrong hours. The sooner we realise that the adult is to be tackled by propaganda and not by elementary education, by films of hygiene and talks of common-sense rather than by the multiplication table and elaborate rules of grammar, the sooner can we conserve that energy now being wasted by both the teacher and the taught, and perhaps utilise it better. The most optimistic cannot, and should not, expect more from an illiterate adult than that he will not stand in the way of his children becoming literate.

It must also be mentioned that at present the institution of night schools in India is a source of danger in another way. It is giving rise to a false sense of security. There is somehow an atmosphere about night schools which makes the organisers feel in a self-complacent manner that they have not merely undertaken the obliteration of illiteracy but that they are on the proper track and near the destination. With all due respect to them, the truth is far otherwise. The acceptance of the night schools as a solution is preventing us from realising that there is an urgent need to discover a really satisfactory solution. Illiteracy on a vast scale like ours cannot be substantially affected by stray individuals working at odd corners during inconvenient hours. This is ultimately so much dissipation of valuable energy. What we need is a concerted mass attack over large areas for a continuous length of time. Anything less effective will remain the province of sentiment and not of logic.

Although we may discourage the idea of educating our adults in the normal school-going manner, it is likely that there will remain even in our country a certain number of adults who are willing to go through the whole process of elementary education, whether they are free during some hours of the daytime or have to toil the livelong day. These are people endowed with a special aptitude for learning. To such people should be available not only the entire propaganda that should educate the rest of the adults, but also the routine system that should rescue the young illiterate.

The real problem of illiteracy is always the young illiterate, because in ten years it is the young illiterates who swell the ranks of adult illiteracy. The same arguments are tenable in their case, as in the case of adults, against a whole day school or a night school. It is true that the young people do not toil so much as their parents. But specific economic duties are laid on their shoulders during the day, whether they are tending cattle everyday of the year or doing more important work in the season. Every village and every villager will maintain that these duties are indispensable. Civilised governments see to it that no child under a certain age, who ought to be attending a school, shall be sent down to labour. But in the absence of favourable conditions in our country, we have to take these daily duties of the youngsters into consideration while prescribing a course of elementary education for them.

Setting aside for a moment longer the question as to who should organise the schools and who should teach, it is appropriate to maintain at this Stage that the schools to be established for the children of the villages should be early morning schools and not night schools. Night schools, by their very nature, cannot induce any enthusiasm for studies in the children. And schools to be really effective must also be able to create that enthusiasm. It should not be difficult to induce parents to leave their children free for a couple of hours every morning. The classes may extend from 7 a.m. till 9 a.m. One hour may be devoted to reading and writing, and the other to Arithmetic. In each linguistic area the instruction should be in the mother-tongue, and there should be no intrusion of other languages into this educational scheme. It is quite reasonable to expect that the changing of a night school into a morning school will increase both the receptivity of the students and the efficiency of the teaching. That there is need for improvement will be clear if accurate statistics are gathered of the slipping back into illiteracy of the ‘night school’ literates. The ‘wastage’ at present must be enormous.

In addition to the normal school of the morning, there should be during the early night instructive talks; the telling of Puranic, Biblical or other religious stories; the projection on a screen of pictures illustrating hygiene and sanitation–or, in other words, anything that combines instruction with amusement, the only way of educating the average adult and of making any youngster keen on gaining further knowledge. This instruction plus amusement should not be forced on the village every night of the week but should be at regular intervals, the intervals being properly timed to keep alive the interest of the villagers. These, however, are minor details that can be adjusted in the course of experience.

But the most important question still remains. And this is the organisation of the teachers for each village. If illiteracy is to disappear and if the Government cannot afford a school and paid teachers in each village, it is necessary that some other means should be devised. We have today in this country a vast host of illiterate people on the one side, and on the other a staggering number of young men getting higher education and finding themselves without any employment later on. Suggestions have been numerous of late, whether they issue from the platform of the nationalists or of the yearly University Convocations, that these young men should go to the villages and serve the ‘Nation’ or the ‘State’–the two words denoting a subtle difference of psychology!–by educating the villager in every possible way. Perhaps once a year in the University buildings and once a month at a political meeting, young men feel a thrill at the thought of their going out into the countryside and reclaiming lost souls, but there it ends. It is a most deplorable fact that the students of this country are not trained from the beginning in that spirit of self-reliance which alone can make them organise any constructive work on a large scale. The sight of self-reliance and of initiative among young people is the delight of those alone who can watch the Youth Movements in Europe today. It is unfair to expect of the present generation of Indian students that, after the sort of training they have had in their schools and Universities, they will be able to organise a movement all by themselves for the uplift of the villages. And it is still more inexcusable to indulge in wild dreams of an individual student going out alone to a village, there to spread the enormous culture he has gained at the University. This is ignoring the present soullessness of University education in this country, no less than it is ignoring the economic factors in the average student’s life.

If the students cannot organise themselves, can any one else organise them? And how and when is the organising to take place? It is at this point that the suggestions of the Indian Civilian come in very relevantly. He reminds us that almost every State in Europe demands a couple or more of years from the life of every citizen for the service of the State in the form of military conscription. He also draws our attention to the fact that Germany has launched upon what is called the Land Reclamation Scheme, the reclaiming of hitherto uncultivated land being done with the active help of Young Germans, male and female alike, who form the Arbeitsdienst, the Labour Service. These young people who have matriculated cannot now join a University in Germany unless they have been six months in some village helping to reclaim land. These two examples are mentioned by him not with a view to exaggerate the virtues of compulsion and conscription or of dictatorship and war, but to emphasise the fact that it is not unusual or unprecedented that one should give a little part of one’s lifetime to the service of one’s community. And he suggests that we should similarly try to establish a state of affairs in this country when all young people can give to organised educational work in the villages, say, a year of their lives before they finish their education and face their individual problem of life. The loss of a year is definitely not too great a loss to young men who find themselves without any work for a considerable time after leaving the University. There is no doubt that if a vote were taken today among the entire bulk of educated people and of young people getting educated, the vote would be nearly unanimously in favour of a year being taken from a student’s life and being utilised for the uplift of the illiterate. Here today in India we too are experiencing a new life; and if the roused imagination of young men and women is not readily harnessed and profitably employed, it is a great chance lost in the history of a nation, Any scheme so to utilise the services of our country’s young men will be peculiarly appropriate just now, because both the Government and the people are very much alive to the need for village uplift, and young men who enter life only after apprenticing in the service of the villages will have a better perspective of our national problems. It follows that there will be nothing autocratic in principle if, for instance, it is decided that a matriculate before seeking admission into the University should spend a year in a well-organised Village Reclamation Scheme. Or, if, as is only too likely, the idea of the matriculate should be rejected on account of his immaturity, it may be insisted that a student who has passed the Degree examination should spend a year in a Village Reclamation Scheme before he is entitled to his diploma. A break of a year’s duration at any other stage in the course of education is undesirable. Education up to the Matriculation is certainly sufficient to qualify one for the purpose of giving the minimum education to the illiterate. The advantage of making the year of service a condition precedent to one’s being admitted into a University is this: the annual number of matriculates is many times the number of graduates, which means so many more ‘student-teachers’ for the villages. The glaring disadvantage, perhaps outweighing possible advantages, is that the matriculates will be too young to take part in the scheme. And parents of these young men can complicate the situation with their fears and rights. There may thus be no choice but to insist on a year’s service in a village only after the Degree examination.

But, in order to take any such novel step, there should be a well-organised scheme for the reclamation of the illiterate in which these students can take part. We have seen that the students cannot themselves organise such a scheme. The Universities may not undertake the organising because they have enough work within their own portals to occupy all their time. And, also, there is no escaping the fact that in each Province the Government alone is powerful enough to organise the scheme, just as the Government alone can command the many subsidiary facilities which contribute largely to the realisation of the scheme. With the creation of the necessary spirit among students, the students gladly offering their free services to their illiterate brothers and sisters, it should not be an appreciable burden to the Government, either financially or administratively, to inaugurate a scheme for the education of the illiterate with this band of young people. In the end, all the expenditure that the Government incur on account of the scheme will be the expenses for the boarding and lodging, in each village (or close group of villages) where there are no facilities for education at present, of a minimum of two ‘student-teachers.’ If there are not enough ‘student-teachers’ for all such villages, all that can be done is, of course, to start the campaign for literacy in as many villages as possible with the available number, and then to appeal to the general public for suitable people to come forward and make up the deficiency.

If the financial side is not difficult to manage, the purely educational side of it, mere matters of detail like the syllabus of study and the time-table, will be found simpler still to tackle. Roughly speaking, an illiterate person may need two years to become a mentionable literate. The easiest course is, therefore, to have two classes under two ‘student-teachers,’ one for students who are fresh, and one for those who have successfully finished a year of studies. If by any chance at a future time more than two ‘student-teachers’ are available for each rural school, the courses of study may be rendered proportionately more elaborate and thorough.

In the establishment of a lasting cooperation between the University students and the Provincial Governments over the provisions of a scheme like the one outlined above, lies the only solution in the immediate future of the problem of illiteracy in this country. For, it is almost certain that even under the new Constitution the Indian Ministers cannot find enough money to push forward any scheme for a normal net-work of schools throughout this country without having recourse to something like a scheme of ‘student-teachers.’

It must be noted that only young men have been considered as going out to the villages, and not young women. Young women may not be despatched to villages as easily and confidently as young men. Besides, the number of matriculates (and graduates) among women is considerably low, and any just distribution of them among the villages is inconceivable. But, merely for this reason, lady students should not be exempted from a year’s service as a condition precedent to entering a University or taking a diploma. There is in every town a large body of women who have leisure during certain hours of the day and who waste it completely for want of proper educational facilities. It may be found not altogether impossible to organise this valuable year in the life of lady students for the spread of adult education, whether it be by the usual school-course, or by oral instruction and propaganda, among such women in urban areas.

Today, in this country, we are anxious to do everything to improve the soil which men plough, the seeds which men sow, and the cattle with which men plough their fields, but we are not thinking with equal care of improving the men themselves. In a welter of economic facts, we are ignoring the central economic factor, the man. It is very easy to answer back that a man cannot become a very much improved man just because he knows the alphabet. But the transition from illiteracy to literacy in the case of any person is not so much a transition from one level of ignorance to another as it is a transition from one world to an altogether different world, from a world of superstition and acquiescence to a world of light and independent judgment. Literacy is like the chemical catalyst. It may appear to be of little significance in itself, but it can make every force of national regeneration more effective in the moulding of our country’s future, just as surely as the illiteracy of the bulk of the people retards the progress of even the more progressive elements in the country. But apart from any argument of collective good to the country, literacy is also the birthright of every individual so far as a human being can have any fundamental rights from birth. Anything worthwhile that a man can achieve, he can achieve only by first being a literate, and the illiterates, starting life as intellectual cripples, are largely foredoomed to lead incomplete and unfulfilled lives. The tragedy is the greater that the illiterate folk themselves little know that their lives could have been fuller. "That even one man should die ignorant who had in him the capacity to learn," wrote Carlyle, "I call the greatest tragedy." And yet this greatest of tragedies happens to more than three hundred million people in our own country under our very eyes.

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