by James Tooley
Low-Quality Buildings?
Another of the criticisms, raised in particular by William Adam, was of the quality of the school buildings, or the total lack thereof: “There are no school-houses built for, and exclusively appropriated to, these schools.” Scholars, he observed, met in places of religious worship, or festivals, or village recreation places, or private dwellings, or in the open air, with a “small shed of grass and leaves” erected in the rainy season.26 This was not good, he noted, pointing to the “disadvantages arising from the want of school-houses and from the confined and inappropriate construction of the buildings or apartments used as school-rooms.”27 Here we have in embryonic form the criticism that would lead, in Gandhi’s view, to the promotion of a system that was not based on what could be afforded or efficiently used, but to something imposed from outside that was too expensive to be practical. Instead of a criticism, such comments about the lack of buildings could be used, as Dharampal does, to suggest that the “conditions under which teaching took place in the Indian schools were less dingy and more natural” than in Britain.28 Again, the parallels with the obsessions of development experts to provide public school buildings that wouldn’t be out of place in the West, and their criticisms of present-day private schools for their inadequate infrastructure, jumped out at me.
Low-Quality Teaching Methods?
Perhaps the most revealing of all of the criticisms is of the teaching methods found in the village schools. Adam began his criticism thus: “Poverty still more than ignorance leads to the adoption of modes of instruction and economical arrangements which, under more favourable circumstances, would be readily abandoned.”29 Curiously, the potential strengths of these very same teaching methods are then elaborated at length: Scholars, Adam wrote, are taught effectively to read and write, to learn by rote tables up to 20, and to do commercial and agricultural accounts. Indeed, regarding the method of teaching reading, he says that it is superior to the methods of teaching reading back in Scotland!: “In the matter of instruction there are some grounds for commendation for the course I have described has a direct practical tendency . . . well adapted to qualify the scholar for engaging in the actual business of native society. My recollections of the village schools of Scotland do not enable me to pronounce that the instructions given in them has a more direct bearing upon the daily interests of life than that which I find given . . . in the humbler village schools of Bengal.” So what was offered was better than that in Scotland for equipping young people with the skills and knowledge needed for everyday life. That seemed an odd basis for criticism to me.
Other British observers, however, were entirely positive about these “economical” teaching methods: A report from the Bombay Presidency in the 1820s held that “young natives are taught reading, writing and arithmetic, upon a system so economical . . . and at the same time so simple and effectual, that there is hardly a cultivator or petty dealer who is not competent to keep his own accounts with a degree of accuracy, in my opinion, beyond what we meet with among the lower orders in our own country; whilst the more splendid dealers and bankers keep their books with a degree of ease, conciseness, and clearness I rather think fully equal to those of any British merchants.”30
And, indeed, the supposedly critical Campbell, collector for Bellary, himself seemed to approve of the teaching methods. (He was also appreciative of the rather stern disciplinary methods in the village schools: “The idle scholar is flogged, and often suspended by both hands, and a Pulley, to the roof, or obliged to kneel down and rise incessantly, which is a most painful and fatiguing, but perhaps a healthy mode of punishment.”31) Campbell provided quite a bit of detail, ending with the following commendation: “The economy with which children are taught to write in the native schools, and the system by which the more advanced scholars are caused to teach the less advanced, and at the same time to confirm their own knowledge is certainly admirable, and well deserved the imitation it has received in England.” What’s this? The “economical” teaching method in the indigenous Indian schools was so much to be praised that it had been imitated in England?
What was this teaching method? And how had it been “imitated” in England? This seemed to be another very exciting avenue of exploration opening up to me. Collector Campbell had given a very thorough description of the method itself: “When the whole are assembled, the scholars according to their numbers and attainments, are divided into several classes. The lower ones of which are placed partly under the care of monitors, whilst the higher ones are more immediately under the superintendence of the Master, who at the same time has his eye upon the whole schools. The number of classes is generally four; and a scholar rises from one to the other, according to his capacity and progress.”
What Campbell was describing is a peer-learning process combined with flexible performance-based grouping of students. The teacher instructs the brighter or older children, who then convey the lesson to their younger or less accomplished peers, so that all are taught. Campbell saw this method in action in Bellary, near the border between present-day Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Precisely the same method is described for the Malabar Coast—that part of India stretching from Goa down to its southernmost tip—by Peter Della Valle in 1623, some 200 years earlier! The explorer wrote how he “entertained himself in the porch of the Temple, beholding little boys learning arithmetic after a strange manner.” The method used a combination of four children gathered together “singing musically” to help them remember their lessons, and writing number bonds in the sand, “not to spend paper in vain . . . the pavement being for that purpose strewed all over with fine sand.”
In the same way, they were taught reading and writing. Peter Della Valle asked them, “If they happen to forget or be mistaken in any part of the lesson, who corrected them and taught them?” They said they all taught each other, “without the assistance of any Master.” For, “it was not possible for all four to forget or mistake in the same part, and that they thus exercised together, to the end, that if one happened to be out, the other might correct him.” It was, wrote the explorer, “indeed a pretty, easy and secure way of learning.”32
The Madras Method
But how did it come to be imitated in England? Dharampal gave a small hint in The Beautiful Tree that it had something to do with a Rev. Dr. Andrew Bell. I ordered his books and his biography from the British Library collection at Boston Spa. The beautiful slim, bound folios that arrived carried the exuberant titles so beloved by Regency period writers: his first book was entitled An Experiment in Education, made at the Male Asylum at Madras; suggesting a System, by which a School or Family may teach itself, under the Superintendence of the Master or Parent. The title to his magnum opus of 1823 was even more impressive: Mutual Tuition and Moral Discipline; or Manual of Instructions for Conducting Schools Through the Agency of the Scholars Themselves, For the Use of Schools and Families, with an introductory essay on the object and importance of the Madras System of Education; a brief exposition of the principle on which it is founded; and a historical sketch of its rise, progress, and results.
Bell’s biographer, however, went for the less flamboyant: An Old Educational Reformer: Dr Andrew Bell. It’s a curiously unfavorable biography, written by an author who oddly had little sympathy for his subject. The first page begins, “Andrew Bell was born in the city of St Andrews on the 27th of March 1753.” And that is the last we hear of Bell until page 6, when it is noted, “It is to golf that Andrew Bell most probably owes his moral education.” But this is the prelude to pages and pages about the virtues of the golf course at St. Andrew’s, not to Andrew Bell’s moral education. And it’s not very flattering about the poor reverend doctor either: “The fact is, that Dr Bell wrote in a terribly lumbering and painful style, and no one now can read his books; but then no one can speak for another as well as the man himself—however clumsily and stupidly he may speak.” Or again: “Dr Bell was, at no time of his life, a clear or methodical writer. He said the
same thing—he had only one or two ideas altogether in his head—over and over again in different ways, in long lumbering sentences, and with a ponderosity of manner that repelled and disenchanted.”33
I found I could read his books. And his “one or two ideas” seemed like dynamite to me. For they vividly showed how the “economical” method of teaching in the private schools for the poor in India became translated into a method that transformed education in Victorian England and beyond. And this borrowing from Indian education struck me as something that could also be relevant to England today.
Dr. Bell had arrived in India in 1787 to take up position as the principal of a school, the Military Male Orphan Asylum, in Fort St. George, now Chennai (previously Madras), to teach the abandoned progeny of British soldiers and native women.34 He found that the (expatriate) teachers in the asylum “had no knowledge of their duties, and no very great love for them.” But then he had his moment of insight: “One morning, in the course of his early ride along the surf-beaten shore of Madras, he happened to pass a . . . school, which, as usual with Indian schools, was held in the open air. He saw the little children writing with their fingers on sand, which, after the fashion of such schools, had been strewn before them for that purpose.” He also saw them peer teaching, children learning from one another rather than from their masters. “He turned his horse, galloped home, shouting, ‘Heureka! Heureka!’ and now believed that he . . . saw his way straight before him.”35
Bell first tried an experiment. He got one of the older boys who knew his alphabet to teach one of the classes that “the master had pronounced impossible” to teach. But this boy managed to teach the class “with ease.” Bell appointed him the class’s teacher. “The success exceeded expectation. This class, which had been before worse, was now better taught, than any other in the school.” He tried it in other classes, and it worked again. So Bell sacked all his teachers, and the school “was entirely taught by the boys” under his supervision. 36
Bell returned to London in 1797 and published the description of his “Madras Method.” Following that, he was in great demand to introduce the system in British schools. First was St. Botolph’s, Aldgate in East London, followed swiftly by schools in the north of England. The method was adopted by the new National Society for the Education of the Poor in 1811. By 1821, 300,000 children were being educated under Bell’s principles. As it became widely emulated, Bell was asked to write an extended outline of the system, which he published in 1823. His ideas were adopted around Europe, and as far away as the West Indies and Bogotá, Colombia; the educational reformer Pestalozzi was apparently even using the Madras Method.
And Joseph Lancaster, who created the famed Lancastrian schools across Britain—and with whom Bell was to have a furious dispute about who really invented the system—introduced peer learning in his first London school, in Borough Road, in 1801. The system transformed education in the Western world and was arguably the basis by which mass literacy in Britain was achieved. But in its fundamental, “economical” principles, it wasn’t invented by either Bell or Lancaster. It was based precisely on what the Rev. Dr. Andrew Bell had observed in India.
Far from being a weakness of the indigenous (private) education system, the cost-effective teaching methods used in the indigenous private schools of 19th-century India were in fact a manifest strength; so much so, as the supposedly critical Campbell noted, they were imitated in Britain, then across Europe and the world, and did so much to raise educational standards.
The Strengths of the Indigenous System
None of the key “problems” with the quality of the indigenous private education system appeared substantial. However, Munro instituted reforms in Madras, with similar reforms copied in the Bengal and Bombay presidencies, to overcome these supposed “problems.”’ But the way these reforms were instituted does much to show the strengths of the indigenous system, rather than its purported weakness. The way the solutions brought their own problems again eerily resonates with what is happening in developing countries today. Again, it didn’t seem as though we’d learned much from history.
Munro recommended several reforms. To the problem of the inadequate number of schools—for they didn’t reach every child, only as many as in other European countries—he proposed “the endowment of schools throughout the country by Government.”37 That is, creating new state schools. Doing so would also begin to solve the problem of inadequate school buildings, as they would each be in its own modern purpose-built settings, properly funded. The “problem” of inadequate teaching methods would be met with the provision of enough teachers to get rid of the (as it turns out, even by contemporaneous observers, highly effective) pupil-teacher system. And to the major problem that bothered all the critics, the inadequacy of teachers’ pay, Munro proposed paying salaries of 9 rupees per month in the village schools to 15 rupees per month in the towns, out of government coffers: “These allowances may appear small,” he noted (in fact, they are considerably higher than the contemporaneous salaries), but, supplemented by fees from students, the schoolteachers’ situation “will probably be better than that of a parish schoolmaster in Scotland.” Quite why this was deemed necessary for poor India was not explained.
Furthermore, he proposed creating a teacher-training college, and to ensure quality, a new Committee of Public Instruction would oversee “the establishing of the public schools” and would fix the curriculum and teaching methods to be used in them.
Finally appointed on June 1, 1826, the Committee of Public Instruction included one A. D. Campbell, the erstwhile Bellary district collector, whose criticisms of the indigenous system had clearly done him no harm. By 1830, however, only 84 schools had been established—14 in the towns and 70 in the villages. These must be contrasted with the 11,575 schools provided by the indigenous system, as reported by Munro. And only four years later, the Committee of Public Instruction was receiving complaints about the system’s inadequacies. By 1835, it was recommended that the new schools be abolished, something that was effected in 1836. At the same time, the Committee of Public Instruction was replaced by the Committee for Native Education. In just a decade, Munro’s reforms had failed.
The reasons for the failure are edifying—suggesting that the kind of state system being imposed was inferior to the indigenous system that it was brought in to replace. Five reasons for the failure stood out for me.
First, it became apparent that the hoped-for improvement in the quality of teachers, by training them through the expensive teacher-training school and paying them much higher wages, failed. Contrary to what Munro and others had supposed, there simply wasn’t a large group of better-educated people willing to become school-masters in the poor villages, whatever the pay. According to statements submitted to the Committee of Public Instruction, the village schools “were rather prematurely introduced before a proper class of teachers for them had been available.”38 Just as in the private schools for the poor today in India and elsewhere, the level of teachers’ pay in the indigenous schools reflected teacher availability. The low wages were, if this observation is correct, not low at all, but simply reflected the market rate.
Second, in the new government-funded schools, it soon became apparent that political patronage, not teaching commitment and skill, influenced the way teaching appointments were made. The Committee of Public Instruction heard that “personal or local influence would necessarily often supersede individual qualification or merit under such a mode of election.” Now the collectors were reporting that the new state teachers were “inferior on the whole to the common village school masters, and, in general, ignorant also.” In other words, the good pay and job security made the positions attractive—not to those who wanted to teach, but to those who could be bought for political patronage. An exactly parallel criticism is raised today of teachers paid by the state, in India and elsewhere.
Third, completely against the committee’s explicit intentions, the new schools were excluding ever
yone apart from the elite, the Brahmins. Why? One source suggested that the government “was uneasy about low-caste people being admitted to the . . . Schools. It was feared that, if they were encouraged, the upper classes would show resentment and withdraw their support.” So the new public schools became a vehicle to promote caste privilege, rather than a vehicle for improvement of all. Again, it would seem that the indigenous system had unnoticed strengths in promoting education of all, including the lowest castes.
Fourth, one of the great problems reported to the committee was the lack of efficient supervision. The new state schools became accountable to no one. The collectors, who should have been supervising them, were reportedly too busy with other business. One collector’s assessment is stark: he “doubted the efficiency of the schools which in effect were in no way superior to the already existing private schools.” Munro had taken for granted that the success of his public schools could be guaranteed—after all, they would be better funded and equipped than the indigenous private schools. He didn’t take into account the problem of supervision and accountability. What he failed to consider was the way that indigenous village schools were already accountable, but not to any central administration. He had failed to note the missing ingredient of accountability in the private system, the same one that so perplexes educational reformers to this day.
Fifth, the new schools were designed to be much larger than the small, “inefficient” private schools—they had to be large because teachers were paid much more, and so economies of scale were required to make them viable. But parents didn’t like their size. One collector observed that parents “complained of too great a number of students for the teacher to give proper attention. Hence parents wished to send their children to schools with fewer number [sic]. There were 150 private schools in the District.” In other words, it was an overlooked hidden strength of the indigenous system that it reflected parental desires for small schools and small classes. The indigenous system had organically evolved to reflect parental choice; the imposed system did not. And because the new schools were designed to be larger, so (theoretically) more efficient, there couldn’t possibly be one in every village. One collector reported that “the Schools were very remote from each other,” which was a problem for inspection (the collector’s concern), but obviously for parents too—the schools were too inaccessible to their children. This conjecture is supported by evidence from elsewhere: “Schools in the district were not in a flourishing condition. Children were unable to attend from a distance.” Again, it seems a strength of the indigenous system that schools’ small size—based on the reality of low teacher pay—reflected what parents wanted, namely, a school in their own village, not one to which their children had to commute a long distance. Again, we see parallels with what private schools for the poor are providing today, in contrast to what public schools are providing. Then as now, parents preferred small schools close to their homes, not large remote schools designed for the convenience of bureaucrats.