D is for discipline. Discipline and Punish is the name of one of the formative books of the modern/postmodern era. Together with his other books The Birth of the Clinic, Madness and Civilisation and The Order of Things, this book by Michel Foucault reveals processes that go into the making of the modern age. Foucault focuses on institutions like the prison and the hospital in modern Europe—but his analysis is perfectly adaptable to that of the Indian school.

There are two kinds of discipline. One is the familiar one of the stick and the reprimand. In schools in the past, there was of course such a disciplining. My father, born 1924, had one favourite story he always told: how his maulvi sahib’s solution to any discipline problem was “murga bana diya” (a particular folding over of the body to hold one’s ears with hands coming up from under the knees—which is called “becoming a rooster”). In many schools in India today, ranging from madrasas to private English medium schools there is regular corporal punishment. This form of disciplining, harsh though it seems, is superficial and short-term. The receiver of it remains free and plays the same tricks again and again. The blows form the master’s stick or raps on the knuckle or becoming a rooster does not produce any fundamental change in the student’s nature.

The second kind of discipline is what Foucault critiques. This is an insidious, holistic, system in which the child, if he wishes to be rewarded, to be respected, to be liked, to even to survive, must follow the rules. The rules are not forced on him in an obvious way such as with a stick. Rather the stick of modernity is praise and blame, good and bad marks, labels of “smart” and “dull.” Children from the earliest age can grasp what adults prefer them to do. Those who wish to succeed become disciplined, through their own volition, as they think. They do not think of themselves as strictly controlled by regulations, rather as being free.

And free they are in a way. Our best schools are those that have the best “discipline” in this modern , Foucauldian sense, where there is no need of a stick. Quite the opposite. The students are so motivated to follow all the rules that unruly behaviour is not an issue. Our weakest schools are those in which children repeatedly must be controlled in explicitly violent ways.

What would we rather have? Foucault has left no holds barred in his critique of modernity because he finds the invisible control of the state and its ideologies terrifying. But for us in India I think that such empowerment by discipline is the prerogative only of the elite and needs to be shared by the masses. Just as there are two kinds of discipline, there are two kinds of freedom. The masses are free—to wander around and spit where they like. They do not exercise self-discipline and their children go to schools where only the superficial disciplining of the rod is exercised. The elite are not free. They exercise self-discipline and in their schools are produced smart, modern citizens of a globalizing India. The freedom they gain from this disciplining is the freedom to choose their career and lifestyle. They have the freedom of social mobility. As perspicacious adults put it, “Abhi mahnat karoge, bad me mauj karna” (work hard now, and enjoy yourselves in the future).

Discipline of the modern kind, with all the reservations that Foucault teaches us to have, is necessary and desirable to ensure that everyone in our country has democratically the same freedoms. At this juncture in our history, the prospect is of “Discipline and Freedom.”

Of course a word needs to be said, and will be said later under “U for uniforms” about how there is totally superficial and unnecessary disciplining of the tie, belt, badge type; of assemblies and straight lines; of “May I come in?” and “May I sit down?” The elite learn the discipline of completing their homework and preparing for their examinations and the masses do not. The elite live out their dreams; the masses barely dare dream.

At the other end of the spectrum is an inability in most of our schools to recognise actual learning difficulties that children face. One such is dyslexia, a problem of learning in the normative way. It is not something that cannot be overcome.

D is for Dickens who may or may not be a household name to young British students today, but continues to be one for Indian students. Some one of Dickens’ novels is almost certainly prescribed for the literature syllabus anywhere between classes 9 to 12. Dickens’ value, together with other worthies typically present in our syllabi, such as Thomas Hardy and William Shakespeare, is questionable. One perspective on teaching has it that students should learn what is most relevant to them. Another perspective has it that liberal education consists precisely of seemingly “irrelevant” things, including things from a distant time and place. We may all believe in liberal education, as I do—but the practice of teaching English literature in India reveals such a tremendous gap between the desired and the actual, that we have to think anew. Even though it is important to learn of a country, the British Isles, of a culture and society in the nineteenth century, of metaphors and images very evocative and judgements on human character and life very profound—could all this not be done with less labour spent on mastering another language? Or by furthering one’s knowledge of the distant and strange chiefly for pleasure, and not necessarily for success in life?

Dickens’ world is so distant from ours that it seems not merely difficult to understand, it seems mad. It would be a pleasure to encounter it freely, of one’s volition, once one had mastered the tongue. Secondly, it would be wonderful to spend some of the time spent on mastering Dickens’ language in mastering one of our own Indian languages so that many potential authors from among our young people could end up producing the worlds that Dickens created. Instead of merely studying Dickens, we should adopt an educational policy in our country that can produce and encourage native Dickenses.

A last word for daughters. It is no longer the case that there is a prejudice against educating daughters. With the exception of some regions in some states—Rajasthan comes to mind—and some groups within some communities, almost everyone in India today is convinced of the link between education and a better life for their children. Interpreting “children” as daughters remains a bit elusive. Girls do not need to be prepared for jobs and they do not need to stand forth as smart or educated. In the marriage market there is a mixed reception of brides who are well educated.

Change in this area has occurred on its own without much strategising by the state or the public. Further change will also occur thus on its own. There are state efforts to reward girls being sent to school, and there are NGOs that work to empower girl students. But it is only people’s conviction that education has positive value in producing a better life for daughters as well as sons that will produce 100% female literacy.

C is for classrooms. There was a time when our Indian educational systems did not use classrooms. The teacher was central, not the place of teaching or the textbook of study. Where the teacher sat was the classroom, what the teacher taught was the curricula. In government reports of the 1860s and 70s we have tabulations of “places where classes are held.” These include rooftops, gardens, temples, mosques, courtyards, verandahs, and terraces. A little history is relevant here. In this period, the end of the nineteenth century, the colonial government ceased to count these places as valid classrooms and monopolised that category for its own chosen notion of the classroom. Now that we are free and even the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ hangup with modernist architecture has been overtaken by postmodernist freedoms, we still act colonised. We cannot, as it were, imagine differently. We cannot shake off our colonial modernist habits.

As a result, the classroom in the modern-day educational scenario in India is a nightmare and a disgrace. There is an unimaginatively designed box of four walls with usually no nice openings for light and air. There are blank walls unbroken by interesting angles, curves, nooks or crannies. Indian buildings used to be exemplary in their play with space and how to enclose it in ways that let the body and mind free while enclosing it. We decided to forget what we knew when we adopted the modernist stance of economy and rationality.

But it is not rationality when the product can render the human being within it unhappy. Think of the typical classroom and a bleak picture swims into the mind. Always a cube of a room, with straight rows of benches or straight-backed chairs, inappropriate lighting, bored children, strict teachers, discomfort from which one hopes to escape to the freedom of the outdoors and the nurture of the home or the stimulation of friends’ company. All my worldly-wise readers will say, “Yes, but that is how classrooms are. That is what I studied in [and see, I turned out all right].”

The classroom does not have to be like a box or be geared to authoritarianism. Many studies in education and psychology, to say nothing of art and cultural studies, have told us that Newtonian and modernist approaches to learning and development are not needed. We could thus have a postmodern classroom. A postmodern classroom could be any space that was adequate in its light, air and dimensions for the number that should occupy it. It should not be one unit but broken up into spaces each of which could be different according to its use. Thus, in pre-school and elementary school classrooms, there would be corners for reading, building, art, computer use and so on. For higher age classrooms there would be comfortable set-ups where students could pursue their own work in maths, science, languages and arts without being treated as a miniature army being drilled by a sergeant major. To have smaller spaces rather than a large common one with the teacher at the head of it is not a trivial detail but one that addresses the heart of the philosophy. Children learn better in cosy, intimate spaces, and older children too need separation and privacy.

Now, all my well-meaning readers will say, “How can we afford this? We have the one teacher and we have a common syllabus to complete.” My quarrel is not with either and my suggestion is very specific: how to make the classroom more humane and how to make better learning take place. Yes, the teacher needs re-training because he or she is totally geared to functioning in the redundant modernist classroom. Yes, the syllabus needs re-working but even as it exists it can be better completed in the new classroom than in the old-fashioned classroom and more can be done on the same topics beyond the syllabus. My argument is not a romantic one relying on an idea that children need special treatment because they are “stars on earth” (an excellent movie by the way) but a rational, practical one that argues: “Let us teach children better than at present for ourselves and for the nation. To do this a different classroom is needed.”

C is for colonialism, crucial to understanding the nature of education in India. C is for Calcutta, the seat of the East India Company’s, then the British, empire, and where much of the trouble started. The experiment of educating a huge population in a new curriculum of studies through a foreign language was centred there. Of course it was not the fault of Calcutta; that is just our shorthand for the British Empire. In fact the citizens of Calcutta were always innovative about how Indian education should be moulded in the modernising world. They founded the Hindu College in 1916 that has remained until today, as the Presidency College, one of the premier institutions of the country.

C is also for Lord Curzon (Viceroy of India, 1899-1905) who acted the villain in the grand narrative of various efforts to make education more meaningful for the citizens of India. During his viceregal tenure he ensured that Calcutta University, founded in 1857 together with the Universities of Bombay and Madras, was to continue in its well trodden path instead of responding to some of the calls for change. Unlike many among the British who also worked for education, Curzon’s was decidedly a negative role. Had he chosen a different path the numbers in our country who have a well-based access to higher education would have been greater.

The role of (c for) Christianity is a mixed one. On the one hand, the schools set up by Christian missionaries have been popularly regarded as the most excellent schools. The preparation they give students in both content and in manners and discipline is unmatched. On the other hand, it was the missionary emphasis on discipline that produced such a well wrought graduate of the school that for him to conceptualise change was difficult. To excel, to manage, even to lead, was fine, but to be creative or innovative was problematic. Again, Christianity itself is not at fault, it is the peculiar forms that institutions and ideologies take when history dictates their placement in new locations that we are talking about.

Christianity also played an indirect role in that its challenge to Indians’ value systems made the Indians respond with institutions that they claimed were as excellent as the Christian missionary ones but were native, or specifically, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or nationalist. The result is that we have in our country a rich array of schools following the model of the Christian missionary school with an original desire to be different, but not in fact so very different today. Or we can say that the model remains unchanged and only cosmetic changes are made. Which is not to say that alternatives to Christian missionary schools that are not elite schools (because alternative elite schools there are a-plenty) are not possible; only that they have not been imaginatively enough tried.

Then there is C for cricket, also a colonial practice and now totally indigenous. I wonder why schools cannot have cricket matches with each other and why in general sports should play such a small role in our students’ lives compared to, say, America, where baseball, football and basketball, apart from smaller sports, are an essential part of school culture? We are indeed too hung up on our rote learning and our examinations. Children will play cricket but necessarily outside school and the gap between home and school becomes ever wider. We need to think seriously of the weakness of our school sports policies and we could well begin with cricket.

One of the tragedies of Indian educational life is to have ‘books’ become equated with ‘textbooks.’ Time and time again you can go to a bookstore or exhibition and have the shock of discovery that books for us today mean mainly prescribed textbooks, textbooks struggling for acceptance, reference books for schoolgoers, and guides and keys written to make school learning easier. Many bookstores that do not make this crude equation simply do not have many books at all. They do not seem to be able to fill their shelves. They have best sellers and they have the classics. Indeed in this regard our railway platform booksellers are the most consistent. They have a range of books that our best bookstores have not been able to improve upon.

What kinds of books dare one dream of? Specifically, fiction. Books that tell stories, that have plots, characters, conflicts and outcomes that set the mind free to wander in other worlds. These books could be science fiction thrillers, fantasy stories, mystery and adventure tales, social narratives, school stories, fairy tales or picture books. Some of them will naturally be thinly disguised social allegories: the weak parent, the plotting relative, the loyal friend, the rich and the poor, the lonely individual in an unfriendly and unjust world. Others will be clever political satires: who is behind seemingly impersonal forces that control our lives? How can I love my country when I hate it so much?. Others will be creative types of ideological polemics and inspired by philosophical questions: What is the good life? Does man control nature? Where does happiness lie?

But the greatness of fiction (both prose and poetry) lies in the quality of life it creates. Like skies and breezes, friends and love, it gives us intangible value in our lives that makes us smarter, better, more capable people. Those who think only instrumentally, that studying a topic will enable you to master it, do not realise that the instrumental often exists in disguise. A good engineer is one who reads only engineering books. A brilliant engineer is one who loves fantasy tales as well.

In India we had a renaissance in literature in the nineteenth century and most Indian languages witnessed a spurt in creativity especially in prose stories and novels. In English it came about less smoothly, and later. But in all cases, there has been an imbalance, greater than in other countries, with the writing for adults outbalancing the writing for children. As a result, children have today either nothing to read for pleasure, or they have imported popular books in English, not those rated the best in the anglophone world, thus the Nancy Drew series but not the books that have won the Caldecott and Newbery awards (the most prestigious American awards for children). As a result of this, we could posit, children in India for several generations now have been growing up in a situation of ‘booklessness’ with reduced imaginations and sensitivity to their worlds and creativity towards it. This is all totally intangible, although an imaginative historian could measure it. Those children who are avid readers anyway, such as many adults reading this column will claim to have been as children, might admit to a peculiar form of mental globalisation, where they jumped right from the personal to the global, without adequately encountering in imaginative forms, the local, the communal, and the national.

In this regard we have to be unabashedly nationalistic. Without suggesting competition or conflict with any other nation’s literature, we have to admit that the children of our country deserve to read, to wallow in the literature, about their families, seasons, peoples, animals, and encounters, and not only those of other places.

The more powerful argument to make is that this nationalism is not in an abstract pursuit of the lost glory and splendour of our country. It is important because we want to be counted among the developed world. Development means certain facilities, including roads, bridges, dams, schools, libraries, publishers and citizens who are aware of their country and the world. Modernity, which we are certain that we hark after, means to give respect to the individual, to allow him to dream and to strive to fulfil that dream. Democracy, for that matter, means not only that every citizen should have sufficient to eat and the right to work to make that possible, but that every citizen should have sufficient mental food and the right to make that possible.

India’s children need books, desperately. India’s publishers need to realise that books are not equitable with textbooks. India’s potential writers need to feel the urge to write the thousands of stories waiting to be told. Illustrators need to know that the scope for them is unlimited. India’s government agencies need to recognise, subsidise and reward India’s writers and illustrators as essentially contributing towards development, modernity, and democracy.

Equally, parents need to know that they are caught in a second-hand colonial mentality that assumes that for success in exams the child needs to be glued to the school books. We should be all for success in exams, such success allows us to achieve our heart’s desires. But the success in exams is also at least a function of wide-ranging reading and the knowledge and confidence that generates.

And the intelligentsia of the country, all those professionally concerned with education and reading and writing and the many professions associated with these, including the engineering, the medical, the legal, and the management professions, must at least acknowledge the value of children’s books. They must engage in debate and discussion about them in public forums such as the newspapers, and be the advocates of further writing, publishing, marketing, purchasing, and rewarding books for children.

This ‘B for Books’ is so overwhelming in its importance that I have hardly the space left to speak about (B for) Bags, that less-than-carefully thought-out aspect of our educational system that ensures that children and their parents feel important carrying oversize, overweight bags to and from schools. It is one of those products of poor management and poor leadership that abound in our public life. All are ready to complain of it and none to take action regarding it. The few schools that intelligently dispense with the apparatus of the overweighted bag, are treated as alternative schools.

Our last word should be reserved for (B for) Bangalore. A beacon light of the emerging technology-industrial leadership in the world, this city of India could be a leader in educational matters also, but is not. A visit to its schools and colleges reveals a situation not different to elsewhere in the country—naturally, because it is the educational system in India that has not received any reviving shots. Yet, the answer stares us in the face. If Bangalore can do certain things for the technology industry, obviously those of us concerned about education and children could do similar things in the sphere of education. We should acknowledge that there is now proof that Indians are as “smart” as they choose to be, and we should acknowledge that our national educational base is so pathetic that we cannot hope for a smartness proportionate to our numbers if we do not take steps towards educational reform. Bangalore, or we should say, the Bangalore Syndrome, teaches us that radical change could be possible but is not being pursued systematically yet.

Such as in reducing the weight of bags and making more intelligent, exciting books available to children.

In the long run the future of the country will be decided equally by this as well as by the progress being achieved in Bangalore.

The big Indian tragedy is that you can meet people who have studied English through High School and College, and they do not know English. They may even have studied in English medium schools, but they cannot speak English. Nor can they understand it well or use it beyond the simplest uses. They do not even like it enough to enjoy reading English books or watching English films. This tragedy can be traced back to the way the very alphabet is taught from its first introduction—to the way they are taught that  “A is for? Ap-pull.”

The English alphabet is not phonetic. There are only a few schools in India that recognise this commonplace and that in order to teach this non-phonetic alphabet some teaching strategies must be adopted. The majority of schools teach the alphabet merrily through the formula, “A is for ap-pull” refusing even to acknowledge that English has silent letters and that the second ‘p’ in ‘apple’ is one such. Millions of Indians who think that they are mastering English thus learn to pronounce ‘apple’ as if with two distinctly emphasised syllables. The lack of  phonetic learning leads to immediate reliance on rote memorisation, the bane of Indian education. If and when India is ready for reform it can start at the first step, with A. It can make it compulsory, and comprehensible for all English teachers in the country to accept that A is not for ap-pull, but that it is the first letter of a non-phonetic alphabet, a letter that has three distinct sounds that make words as distinct as ant (ae), apron (ai), and ask (ah), to say nothing of the sounds that A has when combined with other vowels.

            This is a simple key that will unlock many closed vaults of knowledge. We will have millions more successful learners. They will have new mobility in their careers and they will have new sources of enjoyment.

            A is also for Art and that brings us to an even bigger problem with education in India. There is an absence of art in our schools. The paradox in our country is that rich as our country is in the arts, and has been through its long history and has staggering variety in its diverse regions, its schools are impoverished in the teaching of the arts. There are two distinct problems, each one hiving off into a dozen associated ones.

            In the average school in India, there are so many subjects taught and so much “course” to be covered that the school decides to dispense with art. Because it is a legitimate subject, “art” is given one period a week. It consists of the teacher explaining a technique, putting up an example on the blackboard and letting the children copy it. They have homework, classwork, and exams in art as in their other subjects, with tick marks and remarks in their art copies.  Many children are interested enough in art to love the period anyway and to make the most of the work they are given. The majority are never stimulated by its possibilities. They are able to realise, mostly subconsciously, that it is an ill-devised, amateurish approach to teach, but not actually teach, something un-defined. They dismiss it with a bored shrug. We thus lose the possibility of awakening minds and hearts, to teaching important skills, to producing an art-literate population. We will gradually lose the levels of art production in our country because now that the population is exclusively educated in schools and not at home, they have few sites for learning anything outside the classroom.

            In the better schools of India, art is taught more imaginatively. But it remains a subject, along with others that implicitly have more weight because they are the ones in which marks must be obtained for future success. Art is not integrated into the functioning of the school and the learning of all subjects. This missing approach is a commonplace in the best schools in the developed world but is missing in India because there has been no discussion of the problem and because our art teachers and researchers are few and isolated from each other. Some of them know that Science, Social Studies, Languages, and Maths are all subjects that must start off by using art generously. Genres, colours, the body, the media, all is available for creative exploitation in the teaching of these subjects, and thousands of ideas on how to do so exist in the educational repertoire of the world. But our teachers are not trained in these techniques. There is no reward for acquiring them. There is active discouragement from the school to doing anything that does not directly relate to the syllabus and helps to complete the course. That art could do precisely this is not known.

            A is also for Aryans. The new NCERT textbooks have valiantly engaged with the question of how to think about our history and what precisely to make of various power politics in the past. That debate must be continued and ideas generated continuously. But we should also lighten up. If we had more artists in proportion to our population, we would undoubtedly have more irreverence and the targeting of an artist like M.F.Hussain for what was hardly an irreverent act would be more avoidable. We could have more artwork, including cartoons, music, performances on every aspect of our history. Let us look briefly at the A for Asterix example. Created over the ages by the masters Goscinny and Uderzo, the comic series Asterix educates, entertains, and impresses by its profound playfulness and sensitivity to the conundrums of history. Our new digitised epics notwithstanding, we do not have in contemporary times that playfulness with history that art can present, and of course has presented in older Indian genres. If only art was more present in the lives of children it would permit them to think about every part of their spatial and temporal environment in creative ways. Not to be imitative but merely to take inspiration, we would have our artistic, humerous, witty, sensitive, irreverent portrayals of our own past Aryans.

            A, therefore, is for the action we need to take. We need to worry about AIDs education. We need to think of the specific disorders related to learning such as attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity, none of which are seriously thought about yet. Thousands of children are treated as problems because of this lacuna in our thinking. We need to take action by first making certain that these are issues that are actively discussed and that would make action imperative. We must take action about Art and about the teaching of the English alphabet. In the huge territory of education that confronts us, bristling with problems, let us take one step at a time, and the first step is—the teaching of A.