THE
UNIVERSITY AS A SEAT OF LEARNING
AND
KNOWLEDGE
PROF. K. VISWANATHAM
Richard
Livingstone in one of his well-known essays points out that the universities
are nerve centres of modern civilization. Abolish the
universities, abolish the mind. A recent article by an American Professor Lowe
questions the relevance of higher education. Oscar Wilde’s witticism that what
we need is lower education is not irrelevant to a permissive society. Higher
education is aloof: it is abstract; it does not come home to the bosoms and
business of men. This island of contemplation should be connected by the
isthmus of relevance to the vast continent of life. If the
gown and the town do not meet, the worse for the gown. The idea of a
university ranges between these two extremes. But what is a university as it
arose in the medieval times in
For
the many languages a man can speak
His
talent has sprung the greater leak!
Education
which is purely cognitive is like the curate’s egg. Emerson in his famous
lecture on The American Scholar
underlines the significance of action. “An alternative title can be Man Acting;
Nature, Books and Action are the three seminal influences on Man Thinking.”
Many
and various are the measures suggested for the restructuring of the university.
Do these contribute to maintaining the university as a seat of learning and
knowledge? These are examination reform, regionalization of the medium of
instruction, science-oriented syllabus, reduction of language and literature
hours, research-biased education, the semester system, study of English as a
tool of communication, subject-oriented English, job-biased courses,
universities remaining affiliating or residential, the role of student unions,
student participation in the university bodies, Criteria for selecting and
promoting teachers or admitting students for higher courses, starting
post-graduate classes in the degree colleges, etc. These may be categorized
into (i) the academic and (ii) the administrative.
The
examination system is condemned by one and all. Examinations well conducted are
the best available test of a student; improper conduct is not an argument
against examinations. It is a cheap jibe that they test only memory, as if
memory is a negligible endowment. Ascham in The Schoolmaster points out quoting
Plato and others that memory alone should be the criterion for higher studies.
Internal
assessment suggested as a remedy may be worse than the disease as it is subject
to undesirable strains and pressures and frivolity.
The
semester system supposed to keep the students ever alert is a fragmentation of
academic discipline and breeds examination consciousness. Richard Livingstone
states sadly that universities become howling dust storms of examinations
losing sight of the values of education. We forget the seminal truth that we
know the whole and then the parts just we know the meaning of the sentence and
then the meanings of words in the sentence.
In
all our universities there is serious attempt to regionalise
the medium of instruction forgetting the vital truth that language is not a
product of genetic transmission. This results in the
linguistic balkanization of the country and keeps us away from English the only
window on the West we have, the one language that created a vital renaissance
in all our regional languages. Political considerations vitiate our thinking
about English.
Education,
even at the graduate level, is subject-oriented or science-oriented. We are
guilty of the deadly heresy that education must be completed in the college and
that the college is the breeding ground of genius. Science is a wonderful
achievement of man. But it should not be forgotten that the triumphs of
technology and applied science are to be handled by man. And if man is vicious,
his handling of these dangerous tools is bound to be vicious. And if the proper
study of mankind is man, literature is the only branch that tells us about man.
Physics
or Chemistry or Technology does not talk about Lear or Charudatta,
Desdemona or Draupadi. Good and bad are not in the
vocabulary of science and a knowledge of good and bad is more relevant to man
than the knowledge of Entropy. To imagine that poetry would do the miracle of
remaking man is, of course, as foolish as to moor a vessel with threads of silk
or cut blocks of ice with a razor. If any discipline can make man better, it is
literature. Literature places in our palm experience we can never hope to
obtain. Art is long but life is brief. And one who has greater experience is
wiser than one who has less. The physical sciences “murder to dissect”: the
biological sciences induce a false hope of limitless evolution into better
beings and technology, has led merely to elaborate barbarism. Dr Conant, a distinguished chemist, said that in terms of
general education poetry and philosophy are of vastly more important than science.
In the light of the above abolition or the reduction of the study of literature
is a short-sighted measure.
Is
the university devoted to the diffusion of knowledge or research, that is, addition
to knowledge? A great deal of shallower study goes in the name of research
today. Literary archaeologists dig up a fifth-rate author from oblivion into
which time has deservedly and mercifully thrown him and become sixth-rate in
intellectual calibre. Newman is of the view that if
research is the aim of the university, why should students be there at all? Of course,
his idea is unacceptable today. But his idea that all knowledge is one is
acceptable; we call it cross-disciplinary fertilization. This interaction cures
each discipline of any elephantiasis; otherwise a truck driver may imagine that
God also is a truck driver. Specialism is a menace to
sound norms. It is narrow specialism that leads to
barren ideas like subject-oriented English which corrupts general English: what
is needed is English-oriented subject.
Then
study, it is the cry today, should be job-oriented–bread
and butter concept of education. University education seems to be oriented-this
and oriented-that. Education is not education-oriented. There are very few
teachers committed to learning and very few students committed to scholarship.
According to Newman, university is a guild of scholars, some more advanced than
others; no distinction is made between teachers and students. But how can
learning be made as exciting as window-breaking?
One
of the strident cries today is participation by students in all university
bodies as if university is a power to be shared by all and not some ideal of
scholarship to be pursued jointly. Students are not the citizens of the future
but of the present. The idea of power corrupts every aspect of administration.
For instance, the publication of a work of scholarship should be one of the
finest moments in the life of a university; but it does not raise the slip test
ripple.
Universities
have become cockpits of politics; snake pits of nepotism; shallow pits of unacademic energies. They are not temples of learning but
temples of tension. They should remain seats of learning and knowledge because unbiassed contemplation of problems helps us to solve them
aright; praxis follows, or ought to, gnosis. Otherwise it is the blind leading
the blind. Universities should be not only seats of learning but laboratories
of character training. If they are to be the nerve centres
of the play of the mind they should have a vision of the first rate: the tenth Adhyaya in the Gita
gives a list of the first-rate: Ramah Sastrabhrutamaham. The vision at present seems to be
the vision of examinations. Universities are factories of degree-production. It
is the exaggerated importance of the degree that has vitiated even the
examinations; mass scale copying is part of the examination today and a degree
makes you think that you know when you do not really know. Universal education may
turn out to be universal illiteracy: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing: Jnanalavadurvidagdham brahmapinaram naranjayati. The ex-chairman of the U.G.C. stated
recently that our degrees should be revalidated every five or ten years. It is pleasant
to mention that I made the same suggestion eight years ago in my paper on Psittacism. He also says that we should have humanistic
technology. The Harvard Professor Chomsky in the recent Nehru Memorial Lecture
drew a lurid picture of technology minus humanism. When Barker tells us that
technological institutes should not remain technological, we pride ourselves on
technological institutes. The weakness with us Indians is adopting an idea discarded
by the West and implementing it with fatal enthusiasm.
“Our
universities should be adapted to modern trends,” shout me eggheads not knowing
that modern is not a question of date but of outlook. Have modern methods
shaped better scholars than traditional methods? One is not sure. Man today is
plagued by the philosophy of becoming, not the philosophy of being–restless and
itching for change, appropriately compared to a monkey which never keeps quiet.
Professor Whitehead stated: “The Harvard School of Politics and Government
cannot hold a candle to the old-fashioned English classical education of half a
century ago.”
“It
is possible to get full marks in examinations,” writes Linvingstone,
“and first classes and doctorates in the university and miss education.” “The
noblest of all studies,” said Plato, “is to know what
man is and how he should live.” What has a scientist to do with a sonnet, say
some unthinking bigots. Sonnet should be the study of
the scientist too as Man matters and a sonnet deals with this matter and Adam,
even the scientist Adam, remains the old Adam in fields other than his
specialization. Science in its narrow present day sense should change into its
etymological sense to be of help to us. The fact that the nation which landed
on the moon is the very nation callous to suffering in
A
university is no doubt a seat of learning: the terminal state should be a
completion and fulfilment of the initial state. It
should be a spectrum of possibilities, not a Church. This is not enough. It
should be a laboratory of character-training and soul-making: satyam vada; dharmam chara put the girdle
round university education. “Education does not mean,” said Ruskin, “teaching
people to know what they do not know; it means teaching them to behave as they
do not behave–as members of the family, of the community, of the nation and of
the world at large.” Education means both, though Ruskin underlines conduct.
And it is by practising greatness that one becomes
great just as one becomes a swimmer by swimming or knows food by eating it. To practise greatness the university should have a vision of
greatness, of the first rate as embodied in
Father, forgive them for
they do not know what they do
or
Bhadram harnebhih
srunuyamadevah