This paper first sketches the broad contours of India’s scientific and technical capacities prior to the arrival of the colonialists. It discusses the philosophies of science within the framework of the intellectual traditions of the time. It examines how the ideas in circulation were fairly elaborate, detailed, intellectually satisfying and above all practical in their approaches to the primary issues of an economy based on permanence and non-negotiable quests for meaning in life. Looked at another way, technical solutions appeared to be designed explicitly to flow with the natural cycle. The paper further discusses how these scientific and technical traditions enabled a vast degree of dynamism of which there is considerable evidence even today. In fact, had it not been for the disruptive, rude, intentional disruption that commenced circa 1750, Indian society was perhaps well on its way to a development scenario that sustainability theorists today promote as necessary for a planet increasingly disabled by the crisis of climate change.

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One of the major issues raised in the note that was circulated on this international conference concerns the causes that gave rise to the different trajectories which European and Asian societies followed especially from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The query that is raised is this: Why did Europe embark on the course it did and why didn’t countries like India and China also follow a similar trajectory?

This is a question that is repeatedly raised in various fora. The answers have been prolific but have not shed any great illumination on the subject. At the most one could say they have generated some income for academic scholars and for printers. The question raised, in my view, is methodologically unsound for reasons that are generally subsumed under what is known as the “fire argument.” Now what does the fire argument say?

Briefly, it proposes that when a fire breaks out – say in a building or a forest – one can fairly reasonably investigate the causes of the fire and isolate such causes even if some are proximate and others less so and at least one can develop a cogent theory, even if it may ultimately not be the actual truth: for example, somebody lit a cigarette or the gas cylinder burst or a hostile neighbour tried to get even and so on.

If, however, a fire does not take place, then one does not normally go around enumerating the reasons for the non-occurrence since the reasons in that event could be infinite and could also all be true. The spurious nature of the query is one issue. There is another: in what sense can one assess by straitjacketing several profoundly complex societies with diverse preoccupations within the parameters of one development model when one knows that the very word “development” was first used in its present meaning only around 1950 and the word “scientist” first appeared in circulation in 1833 and became well-established only in the twentieth century? Is it necessary to subject the histories of non-Western societies to what appears to be a second inquisition, viz., why did they not conduct themselves or reorganize themselves like the Europeans did?

Today, with the planet grappling for a way out of a major environmental crisis caused principally by the ill-effects associated with the scientific and industrial “revolution,” would it be sound to even place a nation “in which a fire took place” as the “end of history” model which others ought to have also followed in their trajectories, but failed? Can one, in other words, flunk an examination without even having sat for it?

Furthermore, the discussion on these issues has remained largely Eurocentric and has been mostly led and dominated by European scholars though it is has also drawn academics from outside Europe to put in their own hypothesis. I have, therefore, tried to take a different angle in this presentation and to persuade you to look at the matter in a different way in order to avoid the methodological fault.

The problem with most of the words that we use nowadays in these discussions – “traditional,” “early modern,” “modern,” etc., is that these are all loaded terms or what you may do today call, “branded” labels. I have tried to side-step them by using the word “post-modern” not to be used in the way the term is used by academics, but merely to argue that we should go beyond these categories altogether. All human history cannot be squeezed into neat Eurocentric boxes like primitive, ancient, dark ages, medieval, modern, etc. These are not universal or inevitable categories.

Take for example the calculus: it appears in the 16^th century in Europe as part of the Newtonian “revolution” but as Prof. C.K. Raju has shown, it was perfected in India from the 5^th to the 15^th century.¹ Or take the example of moveable type which was invented and already in use in Korea 200 years before Gutenburg. How do we place the so-called “Copernican revolution” in the history of world science when we know that the heliocentric hypothesis was already proposed by Aryabhata several centuries earlier and that the flat earth theory had been discussed by Lalla, Bhaskara and others and rejected much before the Europeans came to propose them as new and revolutionary hypotheses? Now I am not saying that these classifications of traditional or modern may not be useful as analytical tools, but we will make grave errors by giving them unwarranted ontological status.

The problem with dealing with this period (500-800) is that almost all its events continue to be seen within the “discovery” framework associated with the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Vasco-da-Gama. I am not denying that the Europeans are entitled to a European perspective on their events. There is no need, however, to continue to retain the European framework for a global perspective on these issues and events. For example, how do we evaluate the voyages of Cheng Ho in 1422 and how do we assess the Indian Ocean trade in the fifteenth (and earlier) centuries compared to which the trade inaugurated by Vasco-da-Gama was in fact insignificant?

The discovery framework has to be displaced by a different framework that looks at Indian society from the 15^th-18^th century as a functioning society operating within its own terms of reference, its own preoccupations. This necessarily means a more comprehensive understanding of its various features than we have today and which would include the technical capacity of the society, its knowledge base, its readiness and capacity to response to market demands and several other related features which would include systems of medicine and education, theories of language and aesthetics, etc.

Nowadays we talk glibly of the “knowledge economy” even when we know that none of the societies under discussion functioned without knowledge and without technical capacity over several hundreds of years. They were true “knowledge economies,” not pre-knowledge economies.

I would therefore like to spend time in this presentation on demonstrating the remarkable complexity of this society and to show that it would indeed be difficult, indeed foolhardy, to compare it with activities including technical developments that followed some other chronology – if they indeed did –elsewhere.

I will discuss (briefly) mathematics, agriculture, astronomy, industry, etc., within the context of a society that had evolved competent, in most cases, optimal solutions to problems it faced and then show how all these features indicated this society could not be labelled as unmistakeably “traditional” or “early modern” or even “modern” because none of these categories would be able to describe it in all its complexity in those three centuries. The traditionalist might argue that the tradition was modern since it has not been jettisoned in modern times; the early modern might argue that some of these ideas were nothing but prototypes of modern ideas. So where does that lead us except to caution us that looking at non-European societies through the frame work of Europe’s experience would do great violence to our understanding of this societal or civilisational experience.

I have already made a reference to the calculus. Prof. Raju has shown that much of the basic algorithms that began to be understood in Europe only in the 16^th century were already mastered by the Indians over the ten centuries prior. In India, the precise trigonometric values provided by the calculus were required for an agriculture dependent on accurately predicting the monsoon and also for navigation. Prof. Raju has pointed out that the very term “algorithm” is sourced to Al Khawarizmi who translated the basic mathematical texts from India into Arabic, from where they were translated into Latin and Greek.

But besides obvious competence displayed in inventing the calculus, there are other fairly impressive but little known skills that passed from India to Europe within the same period. The work of Donald Lach, “Asia in the Making of Europe” is often referred to in the discussions on this theme. But even Lach is not comprehensive enough since he could not conceivably access all available sources. Certainly he had no access to the materials painstakingly accumulated by Dharampal.²

One of the most outstanding of these, for example, is the medical skill of plastic surgeons. The art of plastic surgery was a routine medical procedure in the Pune region and fairly detailed reports of the operations were noted by British surgeons before they were copied, adopted and adapted in Europe. The transmission of knowledge is very clearly documented and is without any doubt whatsoever. The art of plastic surgery developed in India due to a peculiar social custom. Men found guilty of marital infidelity were subject to the punishment of having their nose cut off. Indian surgeons met the resultant demand for rehabilitation by developing the skill of rhinoplasty which when literally translated means “the art of reconstructing noses.”³

Besides the skill of plastic surgery, Dharampal has shown that the understanding and practice of inoculation against small pox was also well established in India before the technique associated with Jenner (vaccination) was first invented and then imported to displace it.

However, let us take the case of biodiversity: one example here alone will suffice and it deals with biodiversity in rice. Adivasis and peasant farmers were admittedly responsible for the creation and maintenance of some of 300,000 varieties of rice. This is a phenomenal figure and does indicate a very high level of understanding of seed selection and breeding techniques. I confirmed on a visit to IRRI several decades ago that 72,000 rice accessions in their possession were collected from India. There are likewise several thousand of these varieties at the Central Rice Research Institute in Cuttack. The late Dr. R.H. Richharia maintained 19,000 varieties in situ at the Madhya Pradesh Rice Research Institute at Jabalpur in MP.

The art of breeding rice varieties is a dynamic process. Dr. Richharia – himself a leading rice breeder – found he had to revise his opinion about adivasis’ knowledge of science when he tried out certain seeds which he got from these farmers but which he was unable to reproduce. He discovered that these were male sterile lines. He had no idea of how the adivasis had come to know about the existence of these varieties (which modern breeders are still struggling with) but they knew what these varieties were meant for and how they ought to be used in their rice fields to create new varieties. None of the so called “saline” varieties of rice were created by modern science; they were bred by farmers in coastal belts. In fact, the International Rice Research Institute has produced after 50 years of research only two major successes, IR8 and IR36. This can be compared with the hundreds of varieties generated by India’s peasant and tribal communities, and they served hundreds of different uses.

The ability to work with seeds was matched by other competencies. There are several reports of agricultural specialists – from Alexander Walker to Albert Howard – who came to teach Indian farmers how to do agriculture but retired after conceding that they had very little to teach and mostly to learn. Dharampal’s Chingleput data taken from British records indicates that output of field crops in that region was higher than that associated with the best of the so-called green revolution practices used today.

Large-scale, meticulously planned irrigation systems not only enabled people to transport and store water in very large quantities (examples: Rajasthan, Pune) but the system of tank irrigation (for example, in Karnataka) was so well designed that when engineers proposed to increase the number of tanks they found there were no more locations available since the existing ones had adequate arrangements to collect all the rainfall that fell on the ground in the areas. Indian water havesting systems were designed to deal with the monsoon, that is, to collect rain where it fell, precisely like the Mumbai housewife who finds she must collect as much water from her tap within an hour every morning when the public water supply starts and then shuts. Modern irrigation systems built on the technology of dams are never sustainable, since they dam the run off instead of harvesting it. In fact, the forests that harvest and store the water are slaughtered and drowned in dam reservoirs. Since catchment areas are denuded, the life of the dam is considerably reduced. In the tank system, the silt accumulated in tanks was removed and used to fertilise agricultural lands.

There are many other indicators which I will not discuss in too much detail but those working in botany and plants know that Garcia de Orta faithfully recorded local knowledge of a huge variety of plants that were being used in India for medicinal purposes and which was thereafter transmitted by him to Europe. The knowledge he collected was circulated in the form of the Colóquios dos simples e drogas he cousas medicinais da Índia (“Conversations on the simples, drugs and medicinal substances of India”), published at Goa in 1563. His understanding and systematic collection of this vast indigenous knowledge of plants is sometimes misunderstood to claim he discovered the various medical uses of these plants himself!

What about more basic things like food? In fact, from the point of view of nutritious food and a wide variety of recipes available especially the widespread expertise with the making of breads and fermented foods, one could only advance the argument that as far as food and preparation of food was (and is) concerned India and China were indeed both advanced civilizations which Europe would take several centuries to match and which it still shows no signs of catching up with. It is an indisputed fact that the variety of Chinese and Indian cuisine still excites and dominates the palates of the planet.

Several skills like the manufacture of textiles could not have developed in Europe without close study and import of Indian textile making procedures by English and European traders. In fact, English colonial masters in some areas had to cut off the thumbs of local weavers in order to kill the local industry. We know that the knowledge of natural dyes was widespread. Today after a relatively short and disastrous courtship with chemical dyes, natural dyes have returned under the garb of promoting sustainable industry which shows very clearly that some features of the Indian economy ought never to have been changed in the first place.

The intellectual traditions that were still very vibrant at this time were intensely preoccupied with the theories of aesthetics, architecture and grammar. For example, the cultural arts and their gharanas (including the various classical schools of dance) maintained their ability to reproduce the expertise, innovating when circumstances required. Psychological theories and therapies, still in use today because of their obvious therapeutic worth, were passed on without much damage. One of the most important demonstrations of dynamism is the maintenance of the system of commentaries on various scriptural texts by eminent teachers and spiritual men and women which sought to re-interpret them in the light of contemporary experience. The Bhakti movement is not the sole instance of vitality. All these are not signs of what is generally dubbed a “traditional” society.⁴

Those who think that the period from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries 15^th-18^th centuries was largely passive or stagnant – whatever image this may conjure – will have a difficult time explaining the speed with which India accepted a whole series of new crops including potatoes, chili, tomatoes and cashew that came from South America. The ready adoption does not indicate the presence of a moribund or static society stuck to its civilisational habits from which it was not inclined to move.

There is little doubt then that we are dealing with a civilization that can hardly be dubbed as traditional, early modern or modern simply because several of its features in fact reflected an economy of permanence which could be pursued as long as human beings survive on the planet.

Much of this work of discovery was triggered by the research of the late Dharampal who though not an historian eventually forced historians to take stock of his findings.

The point of this presentation is not simply to highlight the various competencies that people in India continued to display from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries (considered as the pre-modern era), though I find even very elementary knowledge of these facts especially among educated folk. There is no doubt that because our academic life has been submerged and soaked in Eurocentric perceptions of social history, and because most of our historians have come from arts faculties with little or no engineering or scientific or technical backgrounds, the general impression that has gained disproportionate credence is that whatever good has come to this country in the form of serviceable ideas has come exclusively from the West. This has had a severe impact on the self-esteem of the public at large because of the impression created that the modern tradition is borrowed and not their own whereas in actual fact it is quite apparent that much of modernity would not exist but for the fact that India (and China, Egypt, Arabia and Persia) existed and provided the foundations.

I am glad to hear at this conference that there are western writers like Jack Goody and Martin Bernal who have been working on similar themes. My grouse remains that this work has to be done and acknowledged first by Indian scholars who have for far too long continued to blindly accept the western view of modernity and work within its categories. This presentation is an invitation to this august audience to re-think the frame-works that rule and burden our intellectual work. Certainly we did not have a vast period like the dark ages in Europe and in almost other country (outside the west), ideas and innovation moved people with relentless force. In fact, it may actually be hazarded that our “dark ages” are only just beginning, ever since our intellectual elites including our planners decided to ignore history and instead place this huge billion plus civilisation under the self-destructive development path chosen by the West.

Notes:

1) C.K. Raju, Cultural Foundations of Mathematics: the Nature of Mathematical Proof and the Transmission of the Calculus from India to Europe in the 16^th c. CE, Pearson Longman, 2007.

2) Dharampal’s work is to be found at www.dharampal.net. His Collected Writings were published by Other India Press, Goa, in 5 volumes.

3) Some of the important technical innovations that arose from India are discussed in Claude Alvares, “Technology and Culture” in Helaine Selin (ed), Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, Springer, London (1997) and in Decolonising History, Other India Press, Goa.

4) For a stunning introduction to a functioning society today, see the recent article by Uzramma, “Learning from the Grassroots”, in which she introduces the work of Ravindra Sharma, founder of the Kala Ashram, Adilabad. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6179856/Uzramma%20on%20Learning%20from%20the%20Grassroots.pdf

(Paper presented at the Conference on Multiple Trajectories of Early Asian Modernities, 16-17 December 2011 Varanasi)

Abstract: One reason for dehumanised institutions – to which students are unable to relate – is because too many policies, regulations and rules are decided for the convenience of the institution and its administrators and the smooth running of both. Rarely are the interests of either the student or genuine learning or the creation of new knowledge taken into serious consideration.

We are therefore forced to compare learning in higher educational institutions today to a factory model because what matters most is achieving mass certification efficiently.

Students do not attend university to fail. They attend because they want their learning of subjects or proficiency in skills to be recognised or certified. Once the student pays her fees, it is upto the university to ensure that the proper environment is created for learning that will ensure that the learning sought (and promised) is effectively, painlessly, joyfully achieved and that students feel at home.

My presentation at this conference will focus on the dehumanisation process within institutions of higher education but from a largely Indian and Asian perspective. It is more in the nature of a self-reflection. Over the past several sessions we have discussed many significant issues affecting higher education including the future nature of universities, funding problems and other pressing matters. However, one aspect on which we have not spent adequate time is on some self-reflection and some self-criticism. It is incumbent upon us to examine how deeply we ourselves – teachers and administrators – are implicated in the degeneration of the present system.

The students attending this conference were provided a regular session to air their concerns.  I attended the session yesterday and was surprised to find that few non-students or seniors attended the session. In my humble opinion, the students ought to have been given a plenary. After all, besides research, students comprise the major focus of the university.  Some would say they are its primary focus.

Therefore in this presentation I would like to examine the dehumanisation of university environments from the perspective of the student community. One of the student speakers yesterday – Mohammad Shafiq Bin Abdul Aziz from USM – was of the firm opinion that the relationship existing between the university and students is similar to the one obtaining between a master and his slaves.  He was very clear about this. He described the features of masters: people who know everything; people who must be obeyed; people who cannot be wrong. To this, he counter posed the qualities of slaves (students) – they are weak, they have no civilisation and no knowledge and their sole role is to obey orders and regulations which have been set up by their master. In fact, it appears that universities have been set up to take care of the well-being of professors and lecturers and that students exist only to serve the master.

In our 2010 Multiversity Conference held here in Penang, Saifuddin Abdullah, the Deputy Minister for Higher Education, made a frank admission that universities today lack soul. He said that only having grand buildings and labs did not make a university, universities must have soul. I would go further and say that soulless universities very naturally assume that students lack soul as well. In other words, universities assume students have neither personality nor desire and everything is to be laid down for them, like where they should get into the bus, the route the bus would take to its final destination and when they could get off. There is no scope for modifications. This was the position described by another USM student from India, Mohammad Zubair.

Zubair in fact went on to declare that higher education had been reduced to a “laundry process” – students are presumably seen as dirty, rural, stinky, uncivilised, barbaric individuals that must be taken, for their own good (and after they have paid for the service) through a mental cleansing process that would make them suitable for life in the modern world. Both Shafiq and Zubair were anxiously attempting to draw attention to university environments which have become profoundly dehumanised and from which learning has long since fled.

We should be frank enough to admit that very little of “learning” takes place in universities today. There are a number of activities that do take place within these institutions and appear to have some connection with learning. But in fact one could even argue that universities specialise in putting up mindless road blocks to learning.  Let me refer to India here which is a very good example of this.

By simply insisting on higher school certificates as a basic requirement or a bar for entering higher education, all universities have solved the problem of numbers by very adroitly keeping more than 90% of the adult population outside their walls. In this context, endless discussions about enabling greater access of unprivileged people to universities are quite hypocritical since the rules are designed to prevent entry. This to my mind is the first large-scale slaughter of human beings that takes place every academic year and it is done mindlessly by higher educational institutions. I know of only one instance – that of Annamalai University in the Tamil Nadu state of India – which permits adults, whether qualified by school or not, to register for its undergraduate courses.

The second mass slaughter of individuals – this time of youngsters – takes place with those who do procure school passing certificates.  In Delhi, for example, the admission to three of the most prestigious colleges in the city is now restricted to those with marks above 95%. Not going into the terrible tension this creates for youngsters and their families in the city, one can well imagine the psychological impact of not being able to make the grade on the thousands of students who have marks below 95%.  However, the institutions do not care. In fact the three prestigious institutions lead the pack not due to anything inherently excellent in their make-up but because they are able to harvest the crème-de-la-crème of the student class every year.

The third large-scale slaughter of individuals takes place once the students enter the class room and within weeks the teachers who address them have already in their mind divided them into two categories: low performers and high performers. The low performers are noisy, sit in the back benches, are not interested in academics and generally include all those young people who display the behaviour that any normal person would display when kept within sterile and barren institutions faced daily with largely boring lecturers who have themselves (with a few exceptions) stopped learning ever since they got their degrees and positions.

Ironically, the classification of low and high performers habitually applied to students has now come to haunt the professors and lecturers as well in the form of the ranking circus. During our last Multiversity conference at Penang in June 2011, Prof. Zhou Li from Renmin University in Beijing told us about what Yi Zhongtian, a popular member of the Chinese intelligentsia had observed about the ranking disease in 2009:

“Since the Education Ministry launched the reform in the form of quantitative management, all China’s universities have become chicken farms. If you want to be promoted from an instructor to an associate professor, you have to lay so many eggs; if you want to be promoted from an associate professor to professor, you have to lay so many more eggs. And the places to lay the eggs, i.e., authoritative publications and core journals, are also prescribed. Teachers are so busy laying eggs that they have no time to teach students or do research. Just recently, they said, ‘Hey, you should lay more “innovative” eggs!’”¹

So now universities are reduced to the status of chicken farms and students see the system as a laundry in which they are sent rolling and tumbling and nicely educated to remove the stench of their ignorance and the dirt of their rural personalities. Well, to that imagery, we can now safely add the circus as well.

The modern university discounts intellectual freedom which is a prerequisite for producing creative individuals. This is manifest directly in the procedures involving compulsion, especially compulsory attendance. There is very little doubt in my mind that if the requirement of compulsory attendance were removed, university professors would largely be bereft of audiences. Compulsory attendance is no more than a means to keep unwilling learners tied to classrooms and has absolutely no pedagogical value. You can see good examples of compulsory learning when you go to a circus where you can see elephants and monkeys performing mindless acrobatics, in fact doing things in which they would normally never engage.

This brings me to the actual learning process which allegedly is underway in our institutions of higher education. Filling students with information and ensuring that they have compulsorily acquired certain knowledge is considered “successful learning”! In fact, the common approach now of the pedagogical project is to see students as an empty bucket and the predominant role of the teachers, lecturers and professors to ensure that this bucket is steadily filled with large volumes of pointless information till it is flowing at the brim. When it begins to overflow, the student is declared “educated,” and certified accordingly. Psychologists may rave about the “joy of learning,” but most university campuses are in fact joyless learning environments where students face the prospect of unrelenting boredom added to the tension of examinations and making grades.

The other feature of the university system – which was strongly critiqued by professor Tan Sri Dzulkifli Razak in his presentation – is its close imitation of the factory model of production. One major aspect here is the reliance on uniforms.  Uniforms are a useful technique of ensuring that students know that they are students and belong to a special subordinate category without power. Factory workers are made to sport uniforms for the same reason. At no time should students with a yellow uniform pretend that they have the knowledge that is reserved only for blue colour uniforms. Only when they are certified can they give up the uniforms. But not for long.  There is only a short interlude after which the student, post graduation, joins a company only to find that she has to adopt the dress code of the company or the uniforms that identify them with the company as its property in exchange for a modest wage.

I am amazed to discover that there is no legal responsibility fixed on university administrations and the teaching community to guarantee effective or successful learning. The right of institutions to “fail” students is difficult to accept in view of the fact that students pay tuition. The right has been unilaterally appropriated because universities have power whereas students don’t. Actually, the “failure” of a student is an admission that the system has failed in delivery. Under consumer law, the student would be entitled to reimbursement of her fees at the very least.

To add to all this, we have the pervasive disease of Eurocentric studies: the learning schedule includes compulsory ingestion of volumes of material that have mostly originated with western academics studying western societies.

At Multiversity, we have been trying under a “decolonisation project” to focus attention on the construction and use of non-Eurocentric curricula. Though almost every teacher in the university admits to the need for a wholly decolonised (non-European) curriculum of studies, the actual shift towards decolonised academic frameworks has been rather slow.  Practically all the social sciences, their theories, their analytical categories have been simply and uncritically inherited or borrowed from western academia. Now this creates a problem: university lecturers are unable to make such material interesting or relevant to the students since the fact of the matter is that it is not relevant to situations in their own countries and, in addition, it is almost always old or outdated. Lecturers teach it because they have to teach it. But students find it impossible to relate to it and so it becomes compulsory learning which is used only to pass examinations and get certified and then rejected or forgotten. Final result is there is no real learning which is useful to students in later life once they leave university and attempt to fit into society.

This is where the academic community in our part of the world should be severely castigated and criticised. They could not have continued so uncritically for more than half a century with ideas and theories inherited during the colonial period from the West. There is simply no justification for such conduct. Eurocentric academics are therefore largely responsible for the meaninglessness of most studies offered in institutions of  higher education today.

Here, as an aside, I would like to draw the attention of this learned audience to the marked difference in approaches to learning between the Indian and Western systems. While I have characterised the present approach of Western, Malaysian or Indian universities as the “empty bucket” model of learning, it is important to at least to know that in earlier periods such a method of learning was considered inferior and unacceptable. In fact, in the traditional guru-disciple relationship of learning prevalent in India, the guru never provided the final answers to the student. The student in fact was made to spend several years to discover her truth on the grounds that the guru’s knowledge, if passed on to the disciple, would not be the disciple’s knowledge but the guru’s. In fact, here is something that will startle many: there is no word for the verb “to teach” in any of the Indian languages. The emphasis was on learning on the basis of self-discovery. Due to lack of time, I am not going into further details of this fascinating difference in approaches.

But this brings me to a related issue which I will also highlight only very briefly: the role of universities in the destruction of non-Western cultures and the elimination of communities.  Universities have functioned as mere extension centres of western cultural ideas, promoting them in inappropriate contexts, thereby causing much harm to the careful assessment of the intellectual traditions of many societies, India and Malaysia included. This is another huge slaughter basket and much of it has been permitted and encouraged on the grounds that traditional knowledge is no longer valid or no longer of use.  Both the latter statements are now universally admitted to be incorrect.  By being unabashedly and uncritically hitched to the global economy and by providing sum and substance to the legitimacy and expansion of the global corporate economy, the universities have in fact strengthened corporate rule and state-sponsored development programmes which have led to large scale displacement of local communities and their knowledge systems from their inherited spaces and niches.

Having been extremely critical of the dehumanisation process, I know I will be expected to provide specific proposals relating to how we might get out of this totally undesireable environment. Here are some ideas.

1. Firstly, the student/learner has to be a part of the decision-making process in institutions of higher education. After all, it is because someone wishes to learn that a learning institution is set up – and not because someone wants to teach! I think that if one had to ruthlessly examine or justify why certain subjects or study areas need to be made part of the curriculum, one could cut out much of the “irrelevant” aspects of education and replace them with others. Hence student input is vital. What do they want to get out of university? What use do they want to make out of education? For these obvious reasons, students cannot be excluded from the business of education and therefore there has to be a serious involvement of the student community, student bodies and students individually in the discussions and debates surrounding policies, directions and rules relating to university administration, education and research. Present systems do not permit such involvement and most students are kept to student bodies which are given a marginal role in university functioning safely dubbed “extra-curricular.”

2. The second important principle that needs to be emphasized and supported if we wish to make a radical departure from the present situation is that our university should involve students in the creation of knowledge and not focus exclusively, as at present, on the dissemination of available knowledge. It is undisputed that creativity and assembly line production stand at the extreme ends of the learning spectrum. If the university knowledge production is modelled on assembly line production, then the possibilities of creating new knowledge rapidly diminish. Certainly there would be no facilitating environment, creativity would be generally discouraged and in any case since so much of time is required for the purpose of preparing for examinations linked to certification, it would always be at a discount. Examinations have no means of  recognising or rewarding creative endeavour in any significant manner.  So this issue needs to be examined in a fundamental way if we have to slice through the stagnancy of university culture today. (Creative learning is not to be confused with research which is another conventional task in which universities are involved.)

3. Universities should consider embedding themselves within horizontal frameworks of power rather than vertical hierarchies. There are any number of eminent educators who have taught and practised a co-learning model in which both teachers and students collaborate as equals.  The teacher may bring her experience and knowledge of the literature, but the students would provide the creativity, the energy, the aspirations, the needs and the new technological skills that are available including smart phones, social networking sites, internet universities and the like.  A good model of a non-hierarchical model is the Islamic School of Arts in Iran which encourages practices that enable the institution to function as a family. The students do not come into the building with their shoes, and faculty and students eat and play games together, all discussions take place in circular settings and both teachers and learners locate themselves together on the learning curve.

4. One way of demolishing the present structure of university teaching is to reduce dependence on text books. All text books by definition convey second-hand knowledge and inhibit creative thinking.  I have recommended that text books, if still required, can be generated together by students and faculty and would make much better sense if available instead at the culmination of a course. They would then comprise, for instance, of the theoretical and analytical insights developed pursuant to activities planned during the course. They would also indicate whether the students have mastered the subject and whether they agree with the conventional academic wisdom associated with the discipline.

5. It is not important at all that learning activities take place within buildings or campuses. Taking students out of learning environments and putting them in unlearning situations like sterile class rooms is probably one of the most foolish principles on which modern education is based. Learning cannot be reduced to mere cerebral activity out of context, that too with almost exclusive reliance on rote learning and textbooks. Most impactful learning invariably comes from experience and personal experience is paramount. Universities and schools consider mistakes and errors as a sign of inadequacy, personal deficiency or poor academic inclination or capacity. This is completely contrary to our understanding of evolutionary processes, all of which have unfolded through trial and error. In other words, trial and error and the perception of having made mistakes or come to wrong conclusions are actually an admission that learning has been attempted whereas correct answers will never allow us to conclude directly whether the answer is due to correct thinking or has been made available by rote learning.

6. Finally, several issues have been raised at earlier sessions of this conference in connection with the funding of universities and the rebellion against enhanced university charges particularly tuition. I think that the period in which students could necessarily demand free or low cost higher education should be a feature of the past. It is a fact that all higher education is grossly subsidized (in some countries more, some less) and mostly the better off in most countries are able to access it. Free access or low cost access for persons from the privileged classes to university is not at all justified. Mahatma Gandhi, one of India’s greatest educationists, has written extensively on students earning while learning and had linked learning specifically to training for specific skills which would enable the students during the period of schooling itself to earn a decent wage. If that principle were to be extended to university education, costs would no longer become a nightmare since universities would themselves be able to earn through their students a significant proportion of the tuition that is now being levied on the students instead. Since students would be outside the classroom for these exercises in practical learning, the learning process itself would no longer be seen as a boring and meaningless task. These ideas need to be pursued.

References:

1. Zhou Li, “Colonising and Decolonising Works in Chinese Universities,” Fourth Multiversity Conference, Penang, 2011. Copy of the paper can be downloaded from www.multiworldindia.org

Why parents and educators should consider a “gap year” for their children

One of the emotions we experienced as (“highly educated”) parents was the overall negative impact of the schooling system on our three boys. We found they were happiest when out of school. If it had not been for the compulsion, they would rarely have gone to school. At some stage, youngsters placed in such a situation – not just for a year but for an almost never ending decade – can experience a need to be set free from it all, for some time at least.

We discovered that the school never provided our kids with the opportunities to do the things they wanted to do or which gave them greatest pleasure. The school did not concern itself with their need to uncover and develop their own identity or personality. If any activity – whether or not desireable – was unrelated to the textbooks prescribed for them, according to the school it had no learning potential and for this reason was to be firmly set aside.

So when each of our kids completed school (either at the 10^th or 12^th), we set them free from all bonds for a full year. They would use the time to discover themselves, their likes and dislikes, with absolutely no compulsion or driving from our side. Basically, we wanted to ensure they got time – without the pressure of another year of study, or another examination around the corner – to come to terms with their own existence, what it meant to live in a society or country, explore its environment, interact with people of all ages, experience and expertise, and to consciously understand the idea that self-imposed discipline (swa-raj) is an inherent part of being creative and free.

All three experiments worked out satisfactorily. Each boy bounded out of the cage that school had become to explore total freedom. In the process, they slowly but unmistakably discovered their innate capabilities and developed these to use them as the basis for good, creative and satisfying work.

After the gap year, they found they had developed an ambivalent attitude towards the idea of going to college. They registered for graduation, but with our support kept to their own work and learning schedules. They discovered for themselves that the stuff they teach you in school and college may perhaps help you get a conventional job, but may not necessarily provide you with the vast resources that life makes available to human beings who have tasted freedom.

When the principal of the college called us for discussions because our sons could not be found in class or were located more frequently in the college canteen, we reassured him that our sons were disinterested in superior grades because they had their own schemes and were working those. Once the principal found the parents had no tension on this issue, they were much relieved and felt a burden had been lifted off their shoulders. We were never called by the principal again.

As parents, we do recognise that there are reasons why adults feel compelled to send their kids to school. We did so ourselves. But having done so, we say give the children a break – at least for a year – from the punishing and depressing schedules of these institutions. During that break, their “learning” from textbooks might decline. However, their conscious experiencing of life’s processes, social activity, personal sense of worth, capacity and responsibility will expand to its limits. The joy they will experience will be boundless. They will never be the same again.

In the case of our three sons, all chose independent careers which they created out of thin air. The first became a self-trained herpetologist, wrote a book at 16 called Free from School and followed it up with another book, The Call of the Snake. Free from School has inspired hundreds of other parents to take it easy on their kids as well.

The second son turned out to be a self-trained musician, while the third self-trained himself into an apple-computer expert by the age of 18.

In all three cases, it is the gap year which gave them the time they needed to think and decide wisely. Compare them before that to kids drowning under a regime of academic studies poured relentlessly down their throats, almost choking them. After the gap year, they were no longer gasping for air and had learnt in addition to fly, on their own, with marginal assistance from their parents. In fact, compared to other parents in similar circumstances, we emerged undebted to any banks or money-lenders for this manner of encouraging the children to grow needed only the very modest means available to ordinary middle class families in this country.

(Written for Manish Jain)

(A foreword to the Indian edition of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring)

One of the astonishing features of life that you notice in Europe or in the United States of America is the general absence of birds and their lively music in residential areas. You can awaken in the morning, in Frankfurt, Amsterdam or even Woods Hole, and it is deathly still. There is no chatter of birds, no chirruping of crickets and no croaking of frogs. It is not that these creatures do not exist any longer in Europe or the U.S., but you will find them largely in well-demarcated, protected nature reserves or wilderness areas.

This is to be contrasted with the experience of countries like Malaysia or India. Be it in the city or the village, daylight arrives with birdsong, twittering, whistling and cooing. The monsoon brings with it its own special sound: the chorus of frogs in the fields. Despite the imposition of ‘development’, nature continues to be alive and prolific in our part of the world. For this, we should count our blessings. If you want to understand and appreciate the true significance and value of these blessings, then you should read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

The spring season, signalling the end of winter in the United States of America or in Europe, was always heralded by the arrival of birds and birdsong. Silent Spring tells the story of how the use of poisonous chemicals, particularly DDT, to eliminate insect pests, so thoroughly decimated wildlife over the years that by the sixties – when Carson sat down to write the book - spring had already begun to arrive unaccompanied by birds.

Carson’s book was the first study of its kind to indicate that there was an acute problem with the use of chemical insecticides. The need to protect the products of modern agricultural science (high yielding varieties of crops, grown as monocultures) from pests led scientists to create a wide range of deadly poisons which they hoped would make large agricultural areas sterile and free from insects of every description and size, so that food and other agricultural commodities required for humans could grow undisturbed. From the nature and quantities generated and stocked in the pesticide arsenal, it appeared as though scientists wanted farmers to get rid of the insect world altogether.

Silent Spring questioned the morality – and the scientific rationale – of using broad-spectrum pesticides that killed thousands of beneficial, or neutral insects, in their action of killing the few that were actually troublesome. (With the same mentality, similar strategies were introduced in the field of public health and modern medicine. DDT and BHC were produced in vast quantities to deal with mosquitoes. Similarly, modern medicine came up with new tools or drugs which are actually called anti-biotics.)

The result of unleashing a wide array of lethal chemicals in agricultural fields led to a chain of ecological imbalances in natural populations. Sprayed in fields, the chemical brews eliminated spiders, butterflies, frogs, snakes, birds and several other members of a complex living community, most of whom were incapable of doing any harm to the crop and some of whom in fact actually preyed on the insects that destroyed crops. Pesticides eliminated whole species of bees, which played the vital role of cross-pollinating plants. Having found their way into freshwater streams and rivers, they killed the fish and tadpoles there.

(Below the soil, the use of man-made chemicals for fertilizing crops drove away the earthworm, once dubbed by Charles Darwin as the ‘builder of civilisation’.)

Probably no other book on the environment in the twentieth century had as much impact on public consciousness as Silent Spring. It inaugurated the environment movement in the United States of America. Today the use of DDT and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) has been almost completely outlawed in the U.S., and some of the species most at risk from those pesticides, such as eagles and peregrine falcons, are no longer facing extinction, but have in fact staged a remarkable come-back after the use of these substances was banned.

In one important matter, however, there has been no change at all. The production of a variety of deadly chemicals has continued unabated. The chemical industry continues to have a simple slogan: produce first, think later. In fact, for years after the publication of Silent Spring, the chemical industry refused to acknowledge the validity of Carson’s work and ganged up against her; it even tried to malign her and to ridicule her data.

Today, the number of man-made chemicals in use in the US alone is over 100,000, most of them either untested or inadequately tested for their impact on the environment and on living beings. DDT and PCBs, while not used in the U.S., are still routinely produced there and cynically sold to other countries. In the U.S., they have been replaced by narrow-spectrum pesticides of even higher toxicity, which have also not been adequately tested and pose equal or even greater risks. Since Silent Spring hit the market, pesticide use in the U.S. on farms alone has doubled (to 900,000 tonnes a year) and pesticide production has increased by 400%.

Today’s scenario is therefore, if anything, even grimmer. In 1996, Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers published Our Stolen Future (a book which is widely seen as a worthy successor to Silent Spring). Our Stolen Future traces birth defects, sexual abnormalities and reproductive failures in wildlife to their source: man-made chemicals that mimic the action of natural hormones in the human body, thereby upsetting normal reproductive and developmental processes. It documents a wide range of strange behaviours: eagles that lost their natural instinct to mate and raise young; disappearing otters; the inability of minks around the Great Lakes to produce pups; alligators with tiny penises; a plague among seals near Denmark.

The damage documented in the book is not limited to the animal kingdom. Human beings are affected as well. Sperm counts have dropped by as much as 50 percent in recent decades. Women have begun to suffer a dramatic rise in hormone-related cancers, endometriosis and other disorders.

The chemicals responsible for these deadly effects are now to be found all over the planet. The most significant aspect of these chemicals is that they produce impacts when they are present in the human body in extremely minute doses. Worse, such substances – also known as Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) – are not biodegradable and can be around for decades.

Counterpose the attitudes behind the production and use of such toxic chemicals with that of simpler folk of an era not too far into the past. I was told this story by a young Jain monk, Hitruchi Maharaj, to demonstrate the care which an older society took of other species, among them lowly kidas (insects). He said that till about 40-50 years ago in Gujarat, society patronized an elaborate system for the protection of even the lowliest of prani (living beings). In India rice, wheat or wheat flour is hand-cleaned before it is processed further or cooked. This is not only to remove fine stones that have got into the grain, but to remove prani: small worms and insects. In Gujarat, after the prani were picked out, they were never killed. They would be placed in a cup on a handful of wheat flour. Weekly, a man with a cart would travel around the city or village, shouting ‘prani! prani!’ The women would hand over the cups of wheat flour with the prani to the man who would then take the entire lot away to the panjrapole (animal shelter). In the panjrapole, all the prani would be placed in a special protected enclosure, safely out of the reach of lizards and other predators, where they lived out their natural lives.

The use of toxic chemicals to kill prani is a fairly recent phenomenon in India, associated almost wholly with the green revolution. Since the technology of the green revolution was imported from Western countries lock, stock and barrel, it came equipped with its own philosophical baggage of justifiable biocide. Predictably, its extension in India has had similar devastating and senseless consequences.

Here too, however, we may still be able to count some blessings. First, despite our best efforts and intentions, India remains one of the lowest users of pesticides in the world. In the year 2000, we produced 90,000 tonnes of pesticides (up from 26,000) tones in 1966). Compare this with the 900,000 tonnes produced by the United States in the same year! 60% of pesticides used on Indian farms are limited to cotton growing areas. Contrast this with the use of pesticides in the United States, where it is extended to almost all crops.

Second, the intensive use of even this relatively smaller quantity of poisons - smaller, when measured against the quantities used in the U.S. – has already reached a dead end. As the recent tragic suicides of Indian farmers show, we are already reaching the outer limits of usefulness of these lethal chemicals. Farmers in the State of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka have committed suicide when even the latest and most potent of pesticide brews available to them have failed to stem insect invasions which have devastated their crops. In fact, such suicides have now become an almost regular feature in the Indian countryside.

Once every potent chemical has been used and found wanting, there is simply no alternative but to return to traditional - and less toxic - means of controlling the insects that modern farming methods have turned into pests.

Other India Press is committed to exposing this deadly mirage of a green revolution that has ended up turning the planet blue. Though Silent Spring is a classic, it has never been available in India, even though it was first published in the U.S. way back in 1962 (and where it has gone into more than 30 editions). OIP is happy to bring out the first Indian edition, and hopes to publish in the near future an Indian edition of Our Stolen Future as well.

The use of lethal pesticides has forced us to submit ourselves and other living beings (prani) to forms of distress and suffering that makes those associated with our ordinary karma appear positively beneficent. The point is that the world cannot be caring of life and still love chemicals. It may appear difficult and trying to get out of our dependence on chemicals, but for those who love the planet, their children and the future, nature has given us the clearest of messages, documented in vivid detail in the pages of Silent Spring.

Go Organic! A Rough Guide to Clean Foods

http://epw.in/epw/uploads/articles/16663.pdf

Happy reading!

Claude Alvares talked to “See Goa” magazine (Vol.3 No.1, July 2008) on a host of issues. Excerpts:

Goa is in the throes of activism. This seems a very crucial stage – a fight between those who are all for unbridled development and those who want Goa to retain its idyllic charm.  Is anyone winning the battle, how does it go from here?

I think at the moment the public is winning the battle, one can say this with confidence because on major issues like the Regional Plan, SEZ (Special Economic Zone), many large housing projects, even the opposition that is developing against the mining industry, all these are unprecedented. In terms of the mining industry, there has really been no great protest against it because of the industry’s policy of dividing villages and giving some benefits to some people in a village so that they will become a force in favour of the mining industry. But that’s also gone right now, and many of them are approaching courts. In the case of the Regional Plan, it was the first time in the country that a statutory plan had to be withdrawn by the government, it is unprecedented. Even in the case of SEZ, in many places like Nandigram (West Bengal) people have had to die for the cancellation of a single SEZ whereas in the case of Goa, 18 SEZs have been denotified.

There are several factors why activism is succeeding in Goa. Goa is first of all a very small place; you can’t have these types of agitations in, say, Maharashtra because you can’t get the people of Maharashtra all together on a particular issue. But in the case of Goa, we can get activists to move around, people from the south to attend meetings in the north and people from the north to attend meetings in the south, and people from the coast to attend meetings in the interior, and all this perhaps within one and a half hour of travel. The other thing is the political process itself; most of these things are done with some sort of approval from the government itself. The whole business of democratic politics in India today is that the government has to respond to the public, the government can’t say that it has been elected by the public and it will do what it wants. The government has to be sensitive to public opinion. For example, the Congress party would lose the whole of South Goa if it were nasty on SEZ because the entire church has been very much a part of the agitation against SEZ and against the Regional Plan.

You have long been a vehement opponent of the educational system in the country.  What are your problems with this system, and how does your concept of “Multiversity” provide an alternative?

It’s rather foolish for me to even think in terms of doing anything about the organized schooling or college system. It has sort of run into a rut, and it is not going to recover, and it is going to get only worse for the kids. And my interest is the kids, how do we get kids to learn again. Right now, kids are being taken out of learning situations, they should be interacting with their parents, their Goan grandparents, their uncles, their aunties – all of them great learning institutions. There are various colleges, you can learn from the book there but you can’t learn from life, you can’t learn how to interact in a bank by staying in a class, you have got to go to a bank… you have got to go to a factory to see how things work; if a river is being polluted, you have got to go there, you have got to study that river, you have got to find out what is wrong with it. These are the millions of practical situations that are available, unfortunately the entire educational system has wrapped itself around in trying to follow this view that eventually if the children are taken out of this learning situation and brought into these rooms, they will be able to engage in the business of learning… that is not learning at all.

As for Multiversity, it is an Internet-based learning centre, it is to enable people to reduce their dependence on formal learning institutions. We have no objection if somebody wants to go to school or college, we are not interested in spending our time and energy trying to prevent them from doing so, some students enjoy school, I don’t know what type of a person enjoys school (laughs). But by and large, most people find school a bore or they find it terrifying or they find it very difficult to cope with. There are so many pressures now, and the educationists have ended up putting more and more burdens on the child, because they think that as so much more information is there, all of it must be into the mind of the child. The whole approach is the classic bucket approach that the child is an empty bucket, so you keep on filling the bucket with all the stuff that you want and in so far as the bucket is filled up, the child is educated. This is nonsense! Information is not learning, information is not education, but we have got into that trap and we can’t seem to get out of it. So the best thing is to encourage children to reduce their dependence on school or college, and for them not to give studies very much importance. The learning pattern followed in schools is not going to be useful for the students either in life or even in getting a job. What we would like the kids to do is to spend more time in actual learning situations.

Now if somebody wants to be a mechanic, why does he have to wait for 12 to 14 years, why does he have to wait for certification – certification is only text-book knowledge, it has got no practical experience. If you want to be a good mechanic, start at the age of six, no problem, work in your uncle’s garage because you have got nimble fingers, and by the time you are 10 or 12, you will already be a good mechanic, and by the time you are a little bit older, you will be absorbed by all these factory garages. If the kids get to do things that give them some joy, which matches their curiosity, expertise take place. Why is it that we have got a class of people who are parasites and a class of people who keep this country going? For example, the people who produce your rice are people who are not necessarily educated or have gone to school, but they know how to work ploughs, they know how to work oxen, they know the fertility of fields, how to put in plants, how to raise plants, which something even the agriculture department may not know – if you take the director of agriculture and tell him to please go to the field today and plant, he will not know how to do it, he may be able to give instructions for somebody else to do it, but he will not be able to do it.

How successful have you been with the organic farming movement? What have been the stumbling blocks to its success?

The only stumbling blocks is the government’s commitment. But we have now reached a stage where organic farming is accepted as a method of farming. The government of Goa in many of its meetings with us has said that it is so convinced about organic farming that it is now committed to supply information to farmers about organic farming – the same way that it used to cater to the needs of farmers doing chemical farming.

For the last 40 years, the government has been setting up a system for the promotion of chemical farming. In those years, if you wanted to farm organically, no bank would give you a loan, this was a bias. Now the government says that it is going to remove that bias and will make it equal, so we will have two parallel tracks – one for organic farming and another for chemical farming. The government won’t give up chemicals at all because it is convinced that chemicals are required. This is because the people who make the policies in agriculture are not farmers themselves, they are bureaucrats, they think in terms of very large numbers, they think that we have to get so many chemical fertilizers every year and this must be dumped into the soil some way or the other. And how do we make that possible, it is made possible by the business of subsidy. That’s the business of agriculture – how to find a subsidy; today there’s a subsidy of 100,000 crore rupees only on chemical fertilizers! This is complete nonsense, this has got no future. If you have an agriculture system devoted to this type of subsidy, there really is no future because ultimately, we don’t have that kind of money, we are not producing that kind of money, we are just printing more notes, that in itself is having an inflationary impact.

Our disappointment is that the government is not really putting in the urgent effort that’s required to promote organic farming, which it has been doing for chemical farming. So it’s an absurd situation today that people who produce food chemically, who produce food using pesticides – very toxic pesticides – and who are harming the soil and its communities, these people are being subsidized. As for the organic farmers who are farming by maintaining the integrity of their soil and producing good, nutritious food, they are not being helped; they are not being supported in any way. On the contrary, the organic farmers are being asked to go in for certification. So the paradoxical thing is that a fellow who is producing contaminated food doesn’t have to get his food certified, but the fellow who is producing good food, natural food, as nature produces it, they tell them to please certify so that it is proved that it’s been grown naturally. That’s an absurd situation!

One very good case is that the India Today magazine is starting a medical insert for awareness on public health issues, and they have asked me to do a column for them on how food items are being produced by farmers today, and what the impacts are on health because of the heavy dependence on chemicals, and how one can identify organically grown food and where one can get it if one want to. And the first piece that I submitted to them, they were shocked, they said that if this is the situation, it is going to shake people up altogether. As a person who has been in the organic farming movement for the last 20-25 years, I know that most things that are produced in the field today is being done with the use of the most toxic chemicals.

Does Goa completely do away with mining, or is there any way whereby both the economy and the ecology don’t suffer?

Let me put it in a very graphic way. The only illustration I can give you is of a poor person in a good state of health who wants some money, so what does he do, he sells his kidney, that is the classic method today in India for people to get 50,000 to one lakh in ready cash; it’s not something he will do in normal circumstances, it looks as though there are some people who are benefiting, somebody gets a kidney, there’s a hospital, there are doctors, there’s infrastructure, there are medicines sold so that the kidney operation can go through and the person who is getting the kidney can be levied a hefty fee of three to five lakh rupees, mostly he will be a foreigner or a Gulf person. All of this looks as though the economy is benefiting, because from a simple kidney, which was only operating in somebody’s body, doing nothing, now a lot of money has been created, and some people have been employed.

That’s what I tell people when I try to explain mining to them, I ask them to look at it from this point of view. There’s an ore in the ground, now this is not something that has been put there by Goa or by nature because they did’nt know what to do with it. An ore is a very valuable filter of water, and the tribals in Goa know this because they have situated their paddy fields very close to many of these places, which are now going in for mining. So that’s the kind of ore that’s being exported, it is as if Goa’s body is donating this purificatory element to somebody else. And that too to a country like China, who is India’s rival and competitor. We are selling ore to them so that they make weapons out of it, which at the end of the day, may be trained on India.

Goan politics has always been unstable.  Is the problem with Goan politicians? Do you think there’s any silver lining there?

No, not at all. But then, we are not interested in that kind of politics. That’s why we are on the outside. When the villagers seek justice and get together, their power is such that no politician or even the Supreme Court can do anything against them. Without public sanction, nothing will move, and the politician has to understand that.

There’s this popular opinion that environmentalists are always there to oppose, they are never constructive, and all these NGOs are finally there for the money.  What’s your take on that?

Goan NGOs are not funded, all of them work free of cost. It’s all voluntary. We have no air-conditioned offices unlike what some people allege; these people themselves can’t do without air conditioners. These are all wild comments. We are involved in positive work. Like in the case of the garbage dumping site in Sonsoddo. For an amount of 17 lakhs rupees spread over one and a half years, the Goa Foundation clearned up the 40-year old site, detoxified it, erected a wall, brought water to the site, created a composting yard, prevented the entry of stray animals and finally eliminated the fires. But today, even with 7.84 crore rupees of public money actually approved by the government for Sonsoddo project, the site remains as it is, with some superficial work carried out by the contractor. Again, it was due to the efforts of the NGOs that Panjim city got 80 composting pits. We only oppose destruction, we do not oppose development.

You have ruffled many big feathers in your battles to save the environment and preserve ecology. What’s your experience with intimidation?

In my 25 years of activism, there has been really no intimidation, instead they – the people who flout norms – get intimidated. Yes, there have been one or two threatening phone calls from desperate individuals. See, when it comes to facing judicial proceedings – as per the right that the Constitution has given us – all become equal. All our opponents know that the Goa Foundation has done considerable work in the last 25 years, and it’s been work without any blemish. No one has ever accused us that we approached them for money. Actually, our opponents give us grudging respect.

What are your thoughts on Goan tourism?

Goan tourism is in a bad shape. Some norms should have been put in place in the first instance itself. There’s too much of ripping off, from the taxi drivers to the cops. Then there’s the garbage situation, the noise pollution, the drug racket … The cops are still harassing tourists, sometimes even by planting drugs on them. This is not what the tourists come here for, one of the things they come here is because the Goans are always ready for a talk; to strike up a conversation comes naturally to the Goans. I want Goan tourism to be a convivial industry. So a time will come when things hit real rock-bottom, then the industry will get together and take some positive steps. That’s always what happens here, we will wait for a crisis and then take steps for a better situation.

Any message to the younger generation…

They will have to act soon, otherwise there will be no next generation because of the sea-level rise (in some 10 years, 10 percent of Goa will be under water) and global warming. The young will have to get into action fast, instead of having Bacardi breezers!

There has been no fundamental change in the structure of teaching and research at universities all over the world since the first university in the West was set up at Bologna around the year 1155 (CE). Our universities today are all based on the Western pattern, since these institutions were installed during periods of political rule and not by choice. In a country like India, the modern university is certainly not evolved from its ancient precursors like Nalanda or Taxila.

Classroom picture of university teaching from the 1350s in Europe

The scene that is depicted in the picture above is fairly familiar to all of us including the detail of the students at the back who have always found university class room benches – howsoever hard – fairly comfortable places to take naps during boring lectures. It’s from a university classroom in the Europe of the 1350s.

I will not go into detail here about the methods of learning and teaching at the Islamic and Indian universities that preceded the establishment of Western institutions of higher education though that is a very interesting subject, but alas is not the focus of this presentation except indirectly.

Present pedagogical methods

Teaching at universities and research today are closely identified with the following established assumptions, practices and norms:

1. Knowledge is textbook knowledge.

For those in the undergraduate social sciences and humanities, the primary source of information is the book. The lecturer/professor is a middle-man for the transfer of knowledge from the book to the student. The main repository of knowledge in this system was once the university’s library. Modern day text book production, however, has eliminated the need for students to visit the library since text books (and guides) condense the required information and put it in a predigested form so that it can be easily regurgigated by the student. Text book writing is usually done by lecturers as a source of extra income. If we eliminate the text book from today’s university, the entire structure of higher education would flounder and collapse.

Text books, in fact, tend to homogenise perceptions and approaches to solutions since they are given to students as a matter of uniform nutrition and identified with “knowledge that matters”. There is no pretense whatsoever that any knowledge outside the textbook is desireable or necessary or that the purpose of joining university is to create anything new. Thus, the knowledge provided is “dead”. It is vicarious, second-hand, sometimes, third-hand.

2. Memorisation is the most appreciated method of learning

The primary method of learning is memorisation of information and facts for the purpose of reproduction. The most brilliant students, the front rankers, are invariably those who can reproduce textbook knowledge without error. The method ensures that even in the case of mathematics and language teaching most lessons are “by-hearted” by most students. The implication of this is that those who diverge from the set path of set knowledge, who write things differently from the textbook, are considered failures.

3. Examinations can evaluate knowledge acquisition

The assessment of learning, of knowledge retained, is carried out on the basis of examinations, mostly written, a few oral, of the information provided in the textbook through the lecturer. Successful regurgitation leads to success in certification. What this means is that learning is assumed to have occurred if the student is able to reproduce the contents in the desired form which is laid out as a challenge ostensibly made available equally for all. In recent times, these examinations have taken on more and more abbreviated forms. Essays and prose which disclose personality have been eliminated and replaced by fill-in-the-blanks and other standardized, de-personalised forms of eliciting information. An automaton, a cipher, not a person, is being examined. Personality is irrelevant to the evaluation process. Since all effective learning is always personal, it stands to reason that what is being evaluated is the performance of a parrot or a taperecorder, not a human being.

Everything that human beings have ever learnt is by trial-and-error. But trial and error are eliminated completed in the evaluation/examination process. Errors and mistakes, answers that are not in conformity with what has been taught in class, words different from those used by the teacher – are all invariably used to mark the examination answer sheet and are all seen as signs of inadequate or inefficient or incompetent learning. The student is therefore failed. The failures are marked always as personal deficiencies and are seen as a blot on the character and capacity of the student when they are actually part of the learning process. (The system is very happy if the answers are correct even if there is no proof of understanding or if the correct answer is provided even when the steps taken are wrong.)

One does not learn if one does not make mistakes. Conversely, those who do not make mistakes, never learn. This is the second major principle of pedagogy to be violated in educational institutions: marking mistakes as failure, refusing to allow the student to answer truthfully, whether he understands or doesn’t. The end of the creative process comes when departures from the norm are seen as “error”.

4. Lecturers as bores

The conduct of the person (lecturer/professor) engaged in the transmission of knowledge is dull in most cases and there is no effort to assess whether the transmission has been successful except for the instrument of examinations. The structure of teaching does not allow for much interaction since it is assumed that one is in the business of speaking to the ignorant. Lecturers are forced to repeat annually the same transmission having given up all pretense to creative learning. University administrators, in fact, frown upon departures from conventional teaching practices, like lecturing. They resist any effort to take students out of classrooms. Even fairly good lecturers therefore face difficult learning environments.

5. Quality learning can only take place in classrooms. Learning need never take place outside classrooms.

It is assumed that all meaningful research or learning can take place only within the walls of the institution and the covers of textbooks and that norms like compulsory attendance, registration, fees, etc., are mandatory requirements for the learning process. Few universities would dare to give up the requirement of compulsory attendance as they fear there would be no students turning up in the class rooms. This experiment should be tried by all universities to assess their inherent worth. (Will also apply to schools.) The idea that learning flourishes with rules, time-tables, in neatly divided periods over several years, is completely abnormal, abhorrent and unnatural. It is monumental stupidity to imagine that a person who remains crouched on a wooden desk or chair for 20 years of her life, being talked down to by several people one after another standing above her, will come out with anything creative except in terms of means to get out of such a situation as often as possible. Inmates in prison have greater freedom, comparatively speaking. In their case, only their time is regulated, not their mind or what goes into it or goes on in it. This is impermissible in classrooms.

6. Learning need never follow natural principles. Learning following natural principles militates against the factory model of higher education.

None of the features of modern university teaching is consistent with elementary principles of natural learning. For example, the reduction of the learning adventure to text books forces the students to consider second-hand or vicarious knowledge as more valuable and important than primary sources of knowledge. She might even begin to devalue her own experience in favour of textbooks, then media, TV, experts. Outside the university walls, there are endless opportunities for learning what text books claim to provide. Universities actively plan to ensure that students don’t get access to such opportunities or situations. Learning outside the text book is discouraged, since it is not considered possible to assess. In any case, it is not mediated knowledge.

The lecture classroom can never replace – due to its homogeneity and uniformity – the surrounding rich context of natural and social learning. Only a few teachers have ventured outside building walls and ensured exciting learning environments for their students.

7. Universities are designed to disseminate information, not generate new knowledge. Students cannot generate new knowledge.

Finally, all universities now restrict themselves to the business and practice of knowledge dissemination only. Most research work is of dreadful quality and often repeats work done elsewhere. The idea that universities must create knowledge and are in fact capable of doing so has been steadily buried, as commerce linked to certification and jobs has taken the upper hand. Without creative work, a university cannot be distinguished from an industrial unit. It will be forever condemned to mediocrity. It will in fact excel in mediocrity. The tragedy is millions of young men and women get ground senselessly in these so-called institutions of higher learning and they emerge more incompetent and confused than when they went in.

Since universities have now reduced their primary objectives to certification (i.e., product), the evolution of the knowledge production system has closely followed the factory system. As Dzulkifli Razak described it at the Multiversity Conference last year (2010), the university today has become very much like a factory system. “I can draw a good parallel between the two,” he said. “The university is almost like an assembly line, where the student moves from classroom to classroom, lecturers are like operators in charge, examinations are another label for quality control. You pass the examination and move to the next conveyor belt. At the end of the day, you are ready for the market. You are successful if you can be absorbed or not successful if employers cannot find a use for you.”

8. The illness associated with “disciplinary” knowledge

The most debilitating disease affecting the administration of learning within universities is the so-called professionalisation of the disciplines. Each discipline is now insulated from the other and like the proverbial eight blind men of Hindustan and their discovery of the elephant, we have only more and more tunnel visions, most ending in pointless new adventures with concepts and words, each more and further divorced from reality. There is a complete absence of either holistic or lateral learning. It is now quite well known that the sociologist does not read psychology and vice versa; the economist will disdain both sociology and psychology; the anthropologist will sit alone. This illness is in the nature of a cancer: it has nearly killed the learning patient. Unless some drastic reconnection of knowledge disciplines is encouraged, tunnel vision will rule the day, making all knowledge, howsoever plentiful, lethal, since it reports only on some aspects, not others, providing inherently deformed knowledge which will be a rich source of dysfunction.

Some innovations proposed in University pedagogy

Over the years, however, several innovations have been proposed within the existing university set up and I shall now introduce these since it is about time that we depart with some courage from the predominant lecture and text book system which (as I stated earlier) has not changed in form for nearly a thousand years.

The methodologies proposed in this paper would produce better and more effective learning and energise the learning environment provided by the university, they would lead to better knowledge, better science. The ultimate criterion of success should be whether the students attend university eagerly or feel they are doing so under duress. They should also feel convinced that they are part of a creative process in which new knowledge is created by them that is useful to society and thereby justify society’s investment in their education compared to the present, where they are considered empty receptacles fit for info dumping and retention. Discussion points on several new methods:

1. REDEFINING THE TEXTBOOK AND ITS ROLE

There should be a conscious policy to reduce reliance on textbooks. Instead, the university should enhance the component of direct learning encounters outside the classroom / university walls. Text books, if required for any reason, should emerge at the end of the course, not at the beginning.

Since textbooks and creative learning cancel each other out, it stands to reason that if the university desires to promote creative work, then the wholesale reliance on text books may have to be considerably reduced in favour of open-ended learning in several areas. In any event, books are legitimized because they ostensibly record the efforts of human thinking and human experience. If the student is enabled to learn the same things from direct human experience, then obviously the predominant importance given to books can safely be dispensed with since we are only giving up secondary (and tertiary) sources of knowledge for the primary.

Knowledge that is desirable or knowledge associated with life is always living and by nature experiential. Therefore it can by definition rarely be found within the covers of a text book or within the walls of the university. What principle of pedagogy is this that takes the learner out of her learning environment (natural, social) and puts her in a box deprived of the stimulus of direct encounters and living context? The form and content of course work is more important in the university today than the process of learning. There is little emphasis on the learning process in itself, on developing capacity for capable self-learning and self-skilling. For example, a lecturer would do well to experience for himself (before introducing) the debating form of learning in Buddhist Tibetan monasteries which comprises exposition, rhetoric and argument in addition to drama, none of which are even remotedly associated with present day universities.

Universities should therefore have a conscious policy of going beyond the textbook in terms of physical space. This means literally that the classroom as classroom also gets downgraded; it has now a limited role in the scheme of learning. This situation liberates both lecturer and student from the ancient regime of a thousand years and provides for daily unpredictable learning opportunities.

In fact, universities should consider the possibilities of students and teachers manufacturing a ‘text book’ by the end of the course based on their understanding of the situations they have experienced, the books they have read, the persons they have interviewed, the places they have visited and so on. Such a ‘textbook’ would in itself generate a fairly comprehensive picture of the students’ understanding of a discipline, of its core concepts and methods. Learning in such a context would have to be a collaborative project as well, and those who teach and those who come to be taught would become co-learners. Nowadays with Xerox machines and spiral binding, it is possible to create text books at any stage of the learning process. “Temporary” text books would also reflect far better the fact that knowledge is dynamic and constantly changing and that what is required is not the digestion of huge amounts of dead secondary information which can always be accessed or retrieved when required with adequate training in such skills, but the development of a stable and sound capacity for critical understanding and self-learning.

2. REDEFINING THE ROLE OF LECTURERS AND PROFESSORS WITHIN THE UNIVERSITY SYSTEM

Due to the present structure of the university system which compels it to concentrate on dissemination, the role of lecturers and professors has degenerated into that of dispensable middlemen. It has always been part of public policy to eliminate middlemen. In the present set of circumstances, it seems more likely that it is the middleman who will get eliminated on his own because the parallel learning track that has developed through the internet has overtaken the middleman in terms of content, access and access with speed. No professor or lecturer today can match in terms of availability and speed, the information that is available on the internet. Such lecturers who have seen themselves as middlemen and middlewomen are gradually becoming redundant since the student is able to access knowledge more quickly and more efficiently than through the slow process of dissemination taking place in the class rooms. In fact it is quite clear that efficient learning has moved out of university which still plods on with its ancient methods and that going to university actually slows down learning.

The role of lecturers should be that of guides, assisting students when required on how to learn rather than what to learn; how to exploit a situation / topic to the fullest; how to make links with other aspects on the subject. How to gain skills on interviewing knowledgeable persons. How to prepare for an interview – by reading up of the works done by the interviewee, framing questions, learning about the subject before asking the questions etc. This is where the teacher’s role would be of immense value to the novice student.

3. TURNING THE WORLD AROUND INTO A CLASSROOM

The social, political and natural world that the student inhabits must become the classroom.

The ideal way to do social science is to turn the outside social world itself into a class room. Every social science, from psychology to economics, can be turned out at the door. Sociology, for example, is best oriented to a study of the society in which one lives and its problems and not some idealist structures which do not exist anywhere in practice except in some people’s heads. Societies are so many and so diverse that students can study these for centuries. Each study can be creative, new, and unique and therefore generate new knowledge. Today’s students are presumably associated with so-called new knowledge only when they do research. However, students can generate new knowledge even during the time when they are registered for undergraduate studies. An intelligent and brainy university administrator can thus turn sociology, political science, anthropology, economics, history and psychology, etc., into active learning canvases and frameworks outside university walls, generate new knowledge and contribute significantly to human welfare.

The philosophy course designed by Multiversity, for example, begins with visits to slaughter-houses and riot-torn areas, so that the student gets immersed directly in problems of violence and begins to look closely at her responses: should she stop the violence? Is the violence justified because she likes meat? Do animals have fundamental rights? Is there a hierarchy of creation? Is violence good in some circumstances? If all Gods are the manifestation of the same principle, why do their followers insist on killing each other? The student of philosophy only incidentally learns about philosophy from textbooks or learns he can never learn philosophy from text books. To break the crippling and debilitating hold of the textbook on the knowledge system, Multiversity recommends changing the media altogether: to film, to active encounters with gurus like Ramdev, Sri Sri, to music and dance, drama. The idea is that philosophy is about ‘darshanas’, a vision, obtained or given, not an intellectual, cerebral insight that can be reduced to words. Finally, the student, after her period of study may want to demonstrate her understanding of philosophical issues through selection of any one of several means: a viva voce before a group of citizens, or philosophy masters, or gurus. Or she might review philosophical films from around the world. The possibilities are simply endless. If she ends up with a play or film, there are far better chances of it being examined than the option of a written thesis which may never get off the library shelf.

So why can’t history be done similarly? The education system has over the years displaced the development of a historical understanding with knowledge of various histories and historical facts. That is why there is the general lament among children about the rajas and the dates of wars they must memorise because it is “history”. Universities, however, must develop historical understanding. In cultures like India, they can encourage a serious encounter with mythological knwoledge.

This may be available through books. However, it is far better through other exercises. Every family, every ward, every village, every town, every city, every ecosystem, every forest, everything has its history, so why restrict the ideas of history to kind and war dates and thereby kill all fascination for this discipline? Why can’t a lecture introducing history to students begin with oral history from a 90-year old, or from meeting the Samudri Raja of Calicut, or the ruins of monuments from the Mughal period? There are literally thousands of situations and environments rich with history, oral, textual, achaelogical that can become the canvas for experiencing the idea of historicity.

In such situations knowledge is no longer compartmentalised, but is seen as a whole and therby attains relevance for the student, for it is now living knowledge and relevant to one’s life. Knowledge gained in such a manner will never be forgotten once the examinations are over.

4. CREATE LEARNING SPACES WITH EXPERIENCE SETTINGS

Even if a university desires to continue the textbook for some period of time, they should consciously reduce the need to prescribe Western authors and Western presses for student work. These works are based on experiences of the West and such situations are rarely understood, much less appreciated, by students from other cultures. Thereby knowledge become irrelevant, and learning has to be ‘by-hearted’. The reliance on irrelevant authors or quoting authors simply as padding should be penalized. Work done without citation which can be defended should be encouraged.

Resistance to de-europeanising text books produces the standard anxiety that even if we wish to teach our own social sciences at the moment we do not have the books to replace the texts presently imported from western countries and their expensive publishers. This, for example, is the principal conclusion drawn by the University Grants Commission of India when it surveyed the literature and sources for a new set of 32 courses for undergraduate students in Indian universities in the year 2000. The new pedagogies suggested above provide a ready solution to this problem. Professors or lecturers no longer need continue as middlemen between text books and students if textbooks are discounted as the principal avenue for knowledge. They can now work easier as co-learners and colleagues assisting students with their experience and guiding them to new insights and situations for learning. If there are no text books available for the new courses, one need not worry unduly since one can rely upon direct experience instead and create text books as suggested earlier by the end of the first year itself, that is, if you are still addicted to the need for one.

5. REPLACE CLASSROOM TYRANNY WITH COLLEGIALITY

It is important that collegiality should replace authority – the structure of knowledge dissemination from one to many should be abolished as a matter of routine. The professor or lecturer is only one among equals. University will encourage methods that encourage personality rather than methods that dismiss or downgrade personality. Learning, after all, is always personal. In a collegial situation, the professor or lecturer need not be anxious about being wrong on some fact or issue, a situation that can never be permitted in existing classrooms. (For a good illustration of collegiality, please read the paper by Hamid Parsa elsewhere in this conference paper collection.)

For this to happen there must be greater communication between the lecturers of various disciplines rather than the present compartmentalisation of knowledge. Lecturers will also need to have at least basic knowledge of subjects other than their own to be able to direct the students quest for learning knowledgebly. Such approaches will in practical terms demonstrate in practice the essential principle that one is always a learner and that learning never stops with attaining a degree / title.

6. ENSURE LEARNING DOES NOT CONFLICT WITH NATURAL PRINCIPLES

The idea that learning should be carried out in set periods of time controlled precisely by bells and gongs is also profoundly against nature. When true learning is taking place, it should continue especially when it has absorbed all the attention and time of the student. Learning without interest is bad and pointless learning. For this reason, good learning in which there is considerable interest or passion should never be terminated for silly reasons like the end of a period. If lectures are given a fixed period, this is because most lecturers are bores and it is important to bring an end to the torture inflicted by them or the students would go insane. But this does not mean that learning is more efficient in such circumstances. Present university structures disallow continuous learning even when the results are far more efficient and desirous than lectures scheduled through out the day.

Pulses – a general term we use for peas, beans and lentils – are the stuff of Indian food which is associated with a strong dimension of vegetarianism and healthy living. So ever wondered why many of them are named after animals and birds? We have for example, “horsegram,” “cowpea,” “pigeonpea,” “mothbean” and “chickpea,” among others.

One story is that our former colonial overlords (the English), having no experience of these foods in their own culture, found them being used here to feed animals. (Actually, mostly the skins and lowest quality materials were fed to animals.) Almost because of this association, pulses are still held in low esteem by bureaucrats and policy makers even though they are nutritionally more appropriate for the human body than more expensive sources of protein like meat.

Like I’ve said so many times in this column, Indian foods and recipes are generally wise and therefore has lasted for over 5,000 years. The pulses are a classic showcase of this wisdom. Compared to meat and eggs, pulses are natural products that result from a simple mixture of sunlight, soil nutrients and water. Many of them – those that result from legumes – even add nitrogen to the soil through nodules in their roots. Thus they add nutrients to the soil instead of depleting it.

Pulses are also grown mainly in those areas which are not used for higher value cereals like wheat or rice. 85% of pulses actually come from low rainfall or dryland areas which do not have access to irrigation. This means they are generally grown without chemical fertilizers. Perhaps for this reason, they are nutritionally more balanced. They in fact supply all our protein.

The problem is pulse crops are not absolutely safe from insects; and farmers, even if they do not use chemicals for feeding the plants, are nowadays using poisons for protecting them. Laboratory tests of pulses have shown that they do have pesticide residues though far far less than those found in fresh vegetables, fruits or grains like wheat and rice.

Thus it is all the more important that we ensure we eat pulses that are not subjected to dangerous pesticides.

Another problem with pulses available today is the use of pesticides during storage. As any housewife knows, affected pulses will have tiny holes in them. To prevent such damage, traders will use deadly pesticides and fungicides in their godowns.

One way to get out of this is to consume pulses as dhals. A dhal is a pulse with its skin removed and split into two. “Dhal” actually means “split”. The pesticide goes with the skin.

However, whole pulses can be sprouted whereas dhals cannot. Sprouts are greater storehouses of nutrition and in these days of high vegetables prices, can be a good substitute.

For the above reasons, look more carefully at the sources from which you get your pulses. I buy mine from Khadi stores which keep well graded pulses of various kinds. Otherwise, the only other option is to collect supplies from organic stores in your city.

As everyone knows, pulses are getting costlier by the day so that forget about the animals, even ordinary unprivileged Indians are finding it difficult to consume them in the quantities they are accustomed. We are producing less pulses because entire States like Madhya Pradesh are now growing soybean for the consumption of European cattle and dairy herds. But the Europeans are not returning the compliment and growing pulses for us since they don’t eat them in any case. So we have to fight among ourselves for scarce supplies. India is the main region for growing pulses. If we don’t grow them, no one else really will.

The problem is without rajmas, chana, masur and tuar dal, urid, mattar or moong, we lose a huge bit of ourselves. What in fact would Indian food be without rasam or chole. So get out there and demand more pulses. You can do so by eating more of them in place of meat. And while you’re at it, ensure they are grown without poisons as well.

(Published in Prevention Magazine)