Few years back, the Tibetan government in exile embarked upon new education policy. The Peton School was set up as a humble, yet a bold forward step. The new education policy calls for instituting Tibetan language as a medium of instruction at primary level education. It adopts Child Centred approach in imparting education or revolution in the class room where the role of teacher is to be strictly reduced to that of facilater. In Jan 2007, heads of various Tibetan schools in India were gathered for a meeting cum discussion on ways to formulate and to implement the new education policy. It is apparent that a new radical shift in imparting education in exile is to be implemented soon.
I often wonder if I failed to secure a just passing mark in the mathematics subject in the class tenth board examination, I wouldn’t have received university education and today I won’t be considered ‘literate’ as per the literacy barometer of Indian government. I knew very well in my early childhood days that my gifts and interests were in few subjects except mathematics.
I always wonder how many bright minds and thinkers we have lost simply because they failed to secure passing mark in one subject yet brilliant in subjects of their preferences. Has the British system of education failed many of our bright students? This is the bone of contention and reason why the 13th Kashag government under Kalon Tripa Prof. Samdhong Rinpoche embarks on this radical new education policy.
After forty years, many experts and Kashag government questions the education line they have been following. The introduction of bold and daring education line seems to have its factors rooted in British Indian empire and the challenges face by Tibetans in today’s world.
Similarly many experts within Indian society have been raising questions on the Indian education system to put it under strict re-evaluation. Since our education system too is based on British Raj education system, we also need to rethink and ponder over the matter seriously. The most important contention is the introduction of a vernacular approach in imparting education at least during the first initial periods of school education.
English language as a medium of instruction that we follow today came from Lord Thomas Batington Macaulay who famously or infamously drafted “Minute on Indian Education” in 1835. Education is the highest attainment of civilized world yet education can be misused as a tool of oppression and exploitation. History has witnessed it again and again.
Therefore, it becomes a paramount issue to deconstruct and unravel what had gone into the mind of Lord Macaulay to draft his minute on Indian Education. In my readings, I found him to be a man of letters in western education, Whig historian, skilled statesman and a faithful servant of British Empire. Considering his background, doubts surrounding his minute on Indian education are abounds.
In his “Minute on Indian Education in 1835”, he boasted, “I have never found one among them who could deny a single shelf of a good European library was worth a whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the Committee who supports the Oriental plan of education.”
However, the chief reasons of British education in India seemed to have been founded on an aim of as he wrote in the minute, “It may safely be said, that the literature extant in that language is of far greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together. Nor is, this all. In India, English is a language spoken by the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at seats of the Government. It is likely to be become the language of commerce through out the seas of the East.”
Analysing Macaulay’s minute, it is well evident that he was only interested in promoting the cause and interest of an empire, a language to be spoken and used by handful of ‘Babus’ who could help him to govern the British Empire yet not to educate and empower the great Indian masses.
When the Tibetan first come to India, it was epoch of sudden change. In old Tibet the Tibetan masses have no access to education. Education had been the sole preserve and monopoly of few aristocrats and elite of the society. As the present Education minister Thupten Lungrik argues, “When we first came to exile, we have no education policy, no schools, it all had to be begun from a scratch. We simply adopted the existing British education system followed in India at that time. We have no choice but not now.”
The present Kalon Tripa, being an educationist himself, is instrumental in envisioning and drafting the education policy. He pointed out in his outline draft forwarded to His Holiness the Dalai Lama that, “Although I worked nine and half years in the present Indian School System and spent 30 years in the Indian University, yet I remained untouched by these self-grounding modern education systems. But it is my compulsion, as a democratically elected, rather imposed Kalon Tripa of the Tibetans in exile-it is my moral and legitimate duty to formulate an education policy suitable to the real needs of the Tibetan people as required by the charter for Tibetans in exile in its directive principles.”
The crowning gem of the new education policy is its great inward gaze or going back to our richly endowed tradition and unique civilization. There never was a civilization more profound than our past Tibetan civilization; there never will be such another civilization to dawn on this earth in hundred billion years to come. The sacred duty of education is to nurture a civilized society, that has been the pursuits of the past Tibet as His Holiness the Dalai Lama said, “This is much evident, that if some one strives to seek peace, justice and order in the world and has to attain lasting happiness and true freedom, he or she will have to seek solace in tradition- tradition in its wider sense. In its true sense, tradition is neither old nor new, neither modern nor anti-modern. It is eternal, universal and sacred.”
However, there are many critics who were of view that the experiment with new education policy is a whimsical fantasy arguing a generation of Tibetans could be misled or landed off the track if this experiment fails or proves catastrophic. More so, the response from the Tibetan public to embrace new education policy has so far been lukewarm. Although such daring and bold initiative taken by the Kashag government is heartening and yet the proverbial Sword of Damocles will dangle over them
By Chukora Tsering Agloe
"The present evaluation system of children after class X examination is a mistake. Suppose if he or she fails. Then you have actually wasted ten years of his life. It is too late to begin something new. So you should have an evaluation system which enables you to recognize that something is going wrong with the child right from the first year itself. Therefore, the evaluation system should be of the system and not of the student. Children are innocent; there is no accountability on students. Hence, we can’t blame the failure on students. In fact, it is the failure of the teacher and the system. So if any child fails, it is the failure of the school and the system," says Dr. Claude Alvares
