The Destruction of Indian Education System by Macaulay

A country needs people who are proud of their own culture and civilization in order to move forward.It also requires an intelligentsia which reflects this pride in its newspapers, books, paintings, sculptures and sports.

But for such overall excellence to be achieved, a country needs intellectuals in contact with their society, who know their roots, who have been groomed in the intricacies, the subtleties and genius of their own culture, while not being blind to its faults. For intellectuals are the ones who shape the psyche of a nation.

In India, we generally find there exist a brilliant intelligentsia, which is at par with most of the Western intelligentsia. Indian intellectuals are fluent in English, write it even better, are cognizant of Western literature.Unfortunately, not only are they totally ignorant of their own culture, but they also look down upon it. Not only have they no idea about the greatness of the Bhagavad Gita, of meditation, of Ayurveda, or pranayam, but they use the best of their talents to run it down, with wit, good English.

These intellectuals are all a product of a man called Macaulay, who, more than 200 years ago, had the brilliant idea to fashion sahibs out of brown-skin natives and make them not only more British than the British, but also make them ashamed of their own culture, spirituality and ethos. When they took over India, the British set upon establishing an intermediary race of Indians, whom they could entrust with their work at the middle level echelons and who could one day be convenient instruments to rule by proxy, or semi-proxy. The tool to shape these British clones was education.

In the words of Macaulay, the pope of British schooling in India: “We must at present do our best to form a class, who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern, a class of persons Indians in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellects.” Macaulay had very little regard for Hindu culture and education: He stated “All the historical information which can be collected from all the books which have been written in the Sanskrit language, is less valuable than what may be found in the paltriest abridgement used at preparatory schools in England.”

He further said: “Hindus have a literature of small intrinsic value, hardly reconcilable with morality and full of monstrous superstitions.” (for complete minutes of Macaulay’s take on Indian education system, please visit http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/rraley/research/english/macaulay.html)

It seems today that India’s Marxist intelligentsia could not agree more with Macaulay, for his dream has come true: Today, the greatest opponents of Indian-ised and spiritualized education are the descendants of these brown sahibs; the “secular” politicians, the journalists, the top bureaucrats, the whole westernized cream of India. And what is even more paradoxical, most of them are Hindus!

It is they who, on getting independence, have denied India its true identity and borrowed blindly from the British education system, without trying to adapt it to the unique Indian mentality and psychology; and it is they who are refusing to accept a change of India’s education system, which is totally West-oriented and is churning out machines, learning by rote boring statistics which are of little use in life.

And what India is getting from this education is a youth which apes the West: They go to McDonald’s, thrive on MTV culture, wear the latest Klein jeans and Lacoste T-Shirts, and in general are useless, rich parasites, in a country which has so many talented youngsters who live in poverty .