The Beautiful Tree

by James Tooley

  Enter Macaulay

  It seemed that there was one final possible criticism of the indigenous private education system. Its quality, whatever its critics claimed, was not suspect—in fact, villagers created schools that adequately reflected the conditions of the villages and used what was available in an economical and efficient manner, so much so, that their successful methods influenced the way education was delivered in Britain and around the world. But it is true, the schools didn’t reach everyone. While they may have reached as many children as were reached in European countries, including England, and reached children of all castes, coverage was certainly not universal. Could it be that the British style of intervention of publicly funded and provided education was the only way that universal education could be achieved?

  This counterfactual question of course cannot be answered definitively. But there are interesting indicators as to what the answer might be. For we can see what growth was brought in by the system the British did impose, with its new public schools. And we can look at what happened in England during the same period to gauge what might have happened if the British had not imposed their system in India.

  Because of the lack of success of Munro’s reforms, a new approach, with a new style of reformer, was introduced. Enter Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), the British poet, historian, and Whig. Between 1834 and 1838, he took up residence in Calcutta, serving as president of the General Committee of Public Instruction for the British presidency. Everyone in India knows his name. For it is to him more than any other that we owe the public schooling system that still prevails in India today.

  Macaulay’s famous minute of February 2, 1835, set the seal on a different kind of state intervention in education.39 He was totally dismissive of Indian indigenous scholarship: “It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected in all the books written in the Sanscrit [sic] language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England.” Indian history abounded “with kings thirty feet high, and reigns thirty thousand years long.” Indian astronomy “would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school.” Indian geography was “made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.” And he totally ignored any contribution that the indigenous private schools might be making to education in India. Instead, he opined, “The great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India, and that all the funds appropriated for the purposes of education would be best employed on English education alone.”

  Macaulay laid the foundations for the public education system that is still in place in India today—with similar state systems in place across the developing world where the British had influence. He proposed a new centralized system of education, with publicly funded universities in the presidency towns, publicly funded teacher-training institutions, public funds to maintain existing colleges and high schools, establishment of new public middle schools, and the introduction of grants-in-aid to bring some private schools under government control. It set out completely to supersede any existing indigenous provision.

  How did it work in practice? Under Macaulay’s system, the first publicly funded village school was set up in April 1854; by October, there were 54. Even then, some villagers were reluctant to send their children to the new state schools: “The village priests foreboded evil, and their representatives produced an undefined feeling of dread in the minds of the most indifferent and ignorant people of the lower orders.”40 Possibly from what we saw concerning the Munro schools, this sense of foreboding was justified.

  By 1858, this new system had delivered 452 schools and colleges with a total enrollment of 20,874 in the 21 districts of the Madras Presidency. But 36 years earlier, Munro had found a total of 11,575 schools and 1,094 colleges, with 157,195 and 5,431 students, respectively! That is, the new system had led to a huge decline in provision (see Table 4). Now it may be that, just as today, the new inspectors were simply disregarding, either through ignorance or because they weren’t considered appropriate, the indigenous private schools in the villages. In any case, the official figures were certainly nothing to boast about.

  Table 4.

  GROWTH IN SCHOOLING, MADRAS PRESIDENCY, 1822-1900

  SOURCE: Y. Vittal Rao, Education and Learning in Andhra under the East India Company (Secunderabad: N. Vidyaranya Swamy, 1979), p. 68.

  By 1879, the official figures had recovered somewhat, but still showed a significantly lower percentage of the population in school than had been found in 1822-1825. Only six years later, in 1885, do we see the figure reaching what it had been over 60 years before. And it continued to grow thereafter. So did British education—Macaulay’s education—increase the percentage of the population in school? Well, yes, it did, at least it did 60 years later. But should this be a cause of satisfaction and celebration of Macaulay’s intervention? The answer to that depends on the crucial question: what would have happened to the numbers in the indigenous system had the British not intervened?

  The Galloping Horses

  There are some indications as to what the answer might be—by looking not to India but to what happened in England itself during that period. My journey here took me to the E. G. West Archives at Newcastle University. The late Professor E. G. West had made his name by suggesting that universal primary education was achieved in the West not through public intervention, as was commonly supposed, but predominantly through private provision. His seminal book Education and the State points to a situation that was peculiarly similar to that which we’ve explored in India before the British took control of education. Before the state got involved, West’s research shows that the vast majority of provision was private—by small-scale entrepreneurs (e.g., “dame” schools), churches, and philanthropy. The state intervened with small subsidies to a tiny minority of schools from 1833, but major state involvement came only in 1870. Long before this, in writing that echoed what the British collectors observed in India only a decade later, James Mill, father of John Stuart Mill, wrote in the October 1813 Edinburgh Review: “From observation and inquiry . . . we can ourselves speak decidedly as to the rapid progress which the love of education is making among the lower orders in England. Even around London, in a circle of fifty miles radius, which is far from the most instructed and virtuous part of the kingdom, there is hardly a village that has not something of a school; and not many children of either sex who are not taught more or less, reading and writing.”41

  How were such schools funded? Predominantly, it turns out, through school fees. These were very much private schools for the poor, in Victorian England. Mill noted: “We have met with families in which, for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.” But we don’t have to be satisfied with Mill’s anecdotes. Using official census data and reports, West was able to show that, by 1851, there were 2,144,278 children in day schools, of which over 85 percent were in purely private schools, that is, as the census put it, “schools which derive their income solely from (fee) payments or which are maintained with a view to pecuniary advantage” (see Table 5). The remaining 15 percent were subsidized by government, but only to a minuscule extent. And the “mammoth report” of the Newcastle Commission on Popular Education, convened in 1858 and reporting in 1861, estimated that about 95 percent of children were in school for an average of nearly six years. And it was clear where the funding for this schooling came from: even in the minority of schools that received some state funding, two-thirds of the funding came from nonstate sources, including parents’ contributions to fees, and church and philanthropic funds. Even here, parents provided most of the school fees.

  For England and Wales, E. G. West memorably remarked, “When the government made its debut in education in 1833 mainly in the role of subsidiser it was as if it jumped into the saddle of
a horse that was already galloping.” Without government, he suggests, the “horses” (private schools) would have continued to gallop.

  Table 5.

  GROWTH IN SCHOOLING, ENGLAND, 1815-1858

  SOURCE: E. G. West, Education and the State, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1994), p. 187.

  For our purposes, what is important to grasp is the huge growth of private school enrollment in England, before the state got involved. In the 40 years from 1818 to 1858, enrollment in private schools in England had grown by 318 percent. But in the 60 years from 1825 to 1885, half of which was taken up with Macaulay’s new state system, enrollment in schools in the Madras Presidency increased by less than this, 265 percent. That is, growth was slower in school enrollment under the new British system in India than the equivalent growth in private schools in England. Or to put it another way, suppose that school enrollment in the Madras Presidency had grown at the same rate as in England in an equivalent period. In the 40 years from 1825 to 1865, this would have led to the school population in Madras rising from 162,626 (as found by Munro) to 517,151. But this school population wasn’t reached even by 1885 under Macaulay’s system, some 20 years later, and was only to be exceeded by 1896, some 71 years later! If the dynamics of the Indian private education system had been anything like those of the parallel system in England, we would have seen a much larger growth in enrollment than had the British not intervened at all.

  An Unexpected Ally

  Far from bringing education to India, as the British congratulated themselves on doing, they instead crowded out the already-flourishing private education system. The critics of the Indian indigenous education system seem wrong on every count. There is no substantial evidence that it was of low quality—indeed, the opposite seems to be true, that it had found an organic and economical way of educating the population that was good enough in its major principles to be exported, via England, to the rest of the world. It had intrinsic strengths that the British system ignored at its peril, in particular concerning the market rate for teachers and the accountability that came with parents’ paying fees.

  But the British saw the village schools, and deemed them, as Gandhi put it, “not good enough.” No, the British insisted that “every school must have so much paraphernalia, building, and so forth. . . .” So they established the new, centralized state system emanating from Macaulay. And this is the type of system that is the norm in developing countries today. But this system was simply “too expensive for the people.” As Gandhi wrote, “This very poor country of mine is ill able to sustain such an expensive method of education.”42 It hasn’t led to universal public education even now. In India today, there are still millions of children out of school. Would the indigenous private education system have been better? Based on my own and others’ recent research, there is every reason to suppose that the system that depended on parental fees would have been able to expand to cater the increased demand, particularly as the wealth of the people increased.

  I bring us back to Gandhi’s quote at the beginning of this chapter: “Our state would revive the old village schoolmaster and dot every village with a school both for boys and girls.” What I see this means now is that, when Gandhi said that he wished to return to the status quo ante, he was saying he wanted to return to a system of private schools for the poor, funded in the main by fees and a little philanthropy. Not only has my journey into Indian history provided unexpected evidence of private education for the poor in India before the British took over, it has also provided me with an even more unexpected ally.

  The Modern Macaulays

  Development experts today, academics, aid agency officials, and the pop stars and actors who encourage them are modern-day Macaulays. They are well intentioned, as was Macaulay. They believe in the fundamental importance of education, as did Macaulay. But they believe that the poor need their help educationally, and can’t be trusted to do anything on their own, as did Macaulay. And just as Macaulay denied the significance of indigenous Indian education in the 19th century, during his lifetime apparently failing to take note of what his contemporaries had observed, so too do the Modern Macaulays fall into denial about what the poor are already doing for themselves. Macaulay thought that only one system could help those in India, the model that suited the British upper classes. The Modern Macaulays think the same, only the publicly funded and provided systems that serve Britain and America are good enough for the poor. My journeys—across Africa and India, and into history—lead me to believe that they are as mistaken today as Macaulay was then.

  Not Just in India

  I’ve looked at India in some detail. But I could instead have turned to China and found a vibrant private education system dating back to Confucius and before. During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods (770-221 B.C.), when war led to the collapse of officially sponsored schools, the first private schools were launched by fugitive officials, among whom was Confucius. Perhaps the earliest private school was run by Deng Xi, a former senior official in the state of Zheng, who taught students how to engage in the practice of law with his book Zhu Xing (“Laws on Bamboo Slips”). And private education flourished, supplemented by the mission schools, well into the 20th century, serving all classes of people, until they were dramatically “crowded out” by Chairman Mao’s instruction of June 14, 1952, to nationalize all private schools.43

  Or I could have turned to Kenya, or elsewhere in Africa—where the lessons to be learned again have extraordinary resonance today. It’s true, the Africans didn’t have schools before the British came, unlike the Indians. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t educate their children—it’s a peculiarly modern and unhelpful mistake to conflate education with schooling. Anthropological studies point to the ways in which children were educated in traditional African society, in their family and kinship groups. Jomo Kenyatta, who was to become the first president of independent Kenya, studied at the London School of Economics under renowned anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. In 1938, he published Facing Mount Kenya, which described traditional Kikuyu society and criticized some of the disruptive changes brought about by colonialism. Kenyatta was at pains to stress, contrary to what the colonialists were claiming, that African society had its own tradition of universal education that “begins at the time of birth and ends with death. The parents take the responsibility of educating their children until they reach the stage of tribal education. . . . There is no special school building . . . the homestead is the school.”44

  Kenyatta believed that this education system had some advantages over what the British were imposing. It emphasized acquiring practical knowledge in its context, using what he called “the indirect method,” where “instruction is given, as it were, incidentally, as a mere accompaniment to some activity,” which he believed was superior to the rote-learning methods, removed from reality to the classroom, that the British were imposing. Furthermore, traditional education gave primacy of place “to personal relations,” which was far removed from what he saw in British education. In short, he suggested that there was a fitness of purpose in traditional education, which “may not have some valuable suggestions to offer or advice to give to the European whose assumed task it is in these days to provide Western Education for the African.”

  It had a fitness for purpose when it came to traditional African society, but perhaps it wasn’t suitable for a modern society like the one Kenya was to become? Perhaps this is true—and perhaps Kenyatta came to realize it on his return to Kenya. But it’s particularly interesting to note that the system the British sought to impose on the Africans in Kenya was strongly resisted and the resistance took the form of creating private schools.

  The European model of schooling was introduced in Kenya toward the end of the 19th century when the Christian Missionary Society opened the first school near Mombassa in 1846. In response to increasing demand for education, the colonial authorities established a Department of Education in 1911. Missionary societies
were given government grants to help fund the building of new schools. However, they wanted to give academic education only to European and Asian children—African children were to receive only industrial and agricultural training. Christian teachings became compulsory and African customs and traditions were played down, or banned altogether from the publicly funded schools. African children were also barred from learning English until the last year of primary school.