C is for Classrooms

There was a time when our Indian educational systems did not use classrooms. The teacher was central, not the place of teaching or the textbook of study. Where the teacher sat was the classroom, what the teacher taught was the curricula. In government reports of the 1860s and 70s we have tabulations of “places where classes are held.” These include rooftops, gardens, temples, mosques, courtyards, verandahs, and terraces. At the end of the nineteenth century, the colonial government ceased to count these places as valid classrooms and monopolised that category for its own chosen notion of the classroom. Now that history has moved forward. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ hangup with modernist architecture has been overtaken by postmodernist freedoms—but we are still colonised. We cannot, as it were, imagine differently. We cannot shake offour colonial modernist habits. As a result, the classroom in the modern-day educational scenario in India is a nightmare and a disgrace. There is an unimaginatively designed box of four walls with usually no nice openings for light and air. There are flat walls unbroken by interesting angles, curves, nooks or crannies. Indian buildings used to be exemplary in their play with space and how to enclose it in ways that let the bodyand mind free while enclosing it. We decided to forget what we knew when we adopted the moderniststance of economy and rationality.But it is not rationality when the product can render the human being within it unhappy. Think of the typical classroom and a bleak picture swims into the mind. Always a box of a room, withstraight rows of benches or straight-backed chairs, inappropriate lighting, bored children, strict teachers, discomfort from which one hopes to escape to the freedom of the outdoors and the nurture ofthe home or the stimulation of friends’ company. All my worldly-wise readers will say, “Yes, but that is how classrooms are. That is what I studied in [and see, I turned out all right].”The classroom does not have to be like this or be geared to authoritarianism. Many studies in education and psychology, to say nothing of art and cultural studies, have told us that Newtonian and modernist approaches to learning and development are not needed. We could thus have a postmodern classroom. A postmodern classroom could be any space that was adequate in its light, air and dimensions for the number that should occupy it. It should not be one unit but broken up into spaces each of which could be different according to its use. Thus, in pre-school and elementary school classrooms, there would be corners for reading, building, art, and so on. For higher age classrooms there would be comfortable set-ups where students could pursue their own work in maths, science, and languages without being treated as a miniature army being drilled by a sergeant major. To have smaller spaces rather than a large common one with the teacher at the head of it is not a trivial detail but one that addresses the heart of the philosophy. 

                                                        

Little children learn better in cosy, intimate spaces, and older children too need separation and privacy.Now, all my well-meaning readers will say, “How can we afford this? We have the one teacher and we have a common syllabus to complete.” My quarrel is not with either and my suggestion is very specific: how to make the classroom more humane and how to make better learningtake place. Yes, the teacher needs re-training because he or she is totally geared to functioning in the redundant boring classroom. Yes, the syllabus needs a bit of working but in this classroom it can be easily completed better than in the old-fashioned classroom and more can be done with the topics thanin the syllabus. My argument is not a romantic one relying on an idea that children need special treatment because they are “stars on earth” (an excellent movie by the way) but a rational, practical one that argues: “Let us teach children better than we are doing at present and for this a different classroom is needed.”

                                        

C is for Calcutta, the seat of the East India Company’s, then the British, empire, and where much of the trouble started. The experiment of educating a huge population in a new curriculum of studies through a foreign language was centred there. Of course it was not the fault of Calcutta; that isjust our shorthand for the British Empire. In fact the citizens of Calcutta were full of ideas as to how Indian education should be moulded in the modernising world. They founded the Hindu College that has remained until today, as the Presidency College, now a university, one of the premier institutions of the country.C is also for Lord Curzon (Viceroy of India, 1899-1905) who acted the villain in the grand narrative of various efforts to make education more meaningful for the citizens of India. During his viceregal tenure he ensured that Calcutta University, founded in 1857 together with the Universities ofBombay and Madras, was to continue in its well trodden path instead of responding to some of the calls for change. Unlike many Britishers who also worked for education, such as Sergeant and Elphinstone, Curzon’s was decidedly a negative role. Had he chosen a different path the numbers in our country who have a well-based access to higher education would have been greater.The role of Christianity is a mixed one. On the one hand, the schools set up by Christian missionaries have been popularly regarded as the most excellent schools, the preparation they give students in both the content of learning and in manners and discipline being unmatched. These include diverse Christian sects ranging from the Fransiscans to the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. On the other hand, it was the missionary emphasis on discipline that produced such a well wrought graduate of the school that for him or her to conceptualise change was difficult. To excel, to manage, even to lead, was fine, but to be creative or innovative was problematic. Christianity also played an indirect role in that its challenge to Indians’ value systems made them respond with institutions that they claimed were as excellent as the Christian missionary ones but were native: Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, nationalist, and so on. The result is that we have in our country a rich array of schools following the model of the Christian missionary school with a desire to be different, but not in fact different. The model remains unchanged and only cosmetic changes are made. The result is mostly a lowering of the high quality of the original. Which is not to say that alternatives to Christian missionary schools that are not elite schools (because such there are a-plenty)are not possible; only that they have not been constructed imaginatively enough.

                                            

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

I end with a promise, to discuss C for curriculum, under the different subjects; caste and class under hierarchy; Covid, under virus; Coaching, under institutes; and Circle Time and Critical Thinking under pedagogy. We have to distribute our ideas over the alphabet and every letter deserves a chance!