Learning without burden

R K Narayan was deeply concerned about education as a life experience and how many systems ruined it for generations of Indians

In his time as a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha in 1989, R K Narayan made an ardent speech on the woes of schoolchildren carrying overloaded schoolbags, calling it a national madness. “More children on account of this daily burden develop a stoop and hang their arms forward like a chimpanzee while walking,” he said. An average child carried bags strapped to his back like a “pack-mule”, he said. “The hardship starts right at home when straight from bed the child is pulled out and got ready for school even before his faculties are awake. He or she is groomed and stuffed into a uniform and packed off with a loaded bag on her back,” he said.

In many of his stories set in late-colonial India, Narayan’s surface-level geniality often gives way to facing the subterranean frustrations of Indian society. Somewhat like Charles Dickens, much of Narayan’s oeuvre has grappled with the role of education (at the school, college, or university) and its messy relationship with society. In novels like Swami and Friends and short stories like Father’s Help, there’s a rich comic observation of the absurdity of educational life and childhood. In other stories like Ishwaran, there’s mordancy over what failing an exam repeatedly can do to a young human.

Clearly, Narayan was concerned deeply about education as a life experience, and how many systems ruined it for generations of young Indians. He wrote of life nearly a century ago. Yet so much of that feeling that Indian school or college life connotes, is extant.

Narayan’s words in the Rajya Sabha stirred up like-minded souls working in education at the time. It triggered eminent educationists-scholars like Prof Yash Pal and later Prof Krishna Kumar to reflect profoundly on the nature and trauma of education (at all levels) in India. Prof Yash Pal passed away in 2017, leaving a redoubtable bequest on educational thinking. Prof Krishna Kumar writes in English and Hindi so thoughtfully that he seems really like a poet who happens to be a teacher, and treats education as his leitmotif to explore experience. One of his books is called A Pedagogue’s Romance: Reflections of Schooling, and is dedicated to Prof Yash Pal. Pause on that title, please. Can one imagine a teacher who thinks of teaching, learning, and the classroom experience as forms of wonder and romance? But really, isn’t that the whole point of it? The fact that our education is far removed from such ways of thought makes one wonder how big-hearted intellects like Yash Pal and Krishna Kumar continued to exist, dissent, and thrive in the despondent spheres of Indian educational thought and policymaking.

I know I speak from the position of a teacher at a private institution. But to see so much evidence, as we saw now recently, of schools in Karnataka and other parts of India, not having the fundamentals that schools should possess, is dismaying. In tracts that Yash Pal or Krishna Kumar have written separately almost 30 years back, the realities of Indian education are captured only too well. How can some of the basic conditions not have fundamentally changed for the better now?

R K Narayan’s Rajya Sabha speech initiated the formation of a committee in 1993 to examine school education by the then ministry of human resource and development. Prof Yash Pal headed it and brought out a heart-breaking document called “Learning Without Burden”, with chapter headings like ‘Joyless Learning’, ‘Textbook as the ‘Truth’, ‘Observation Discouraged’, ‘Teaching Everything’. They hold true today. Where does one fix the accountability for making Indian education a transgenerational nightmare? The buck must stop somewhere. When? Where?