The article by Rajendra Bhatia (`This is science, children', February 24)successfully highlighted how science education is neglected in India. Infact, our entire educational system is living under the curse ofalienation.Take history. When a 10 or 15-year-old takes up a course in history he findshis knowledge to be a total mismatch to what his textbooks say. While athome he was told that his ancestral past can be traced to the Mahabharata,in his textbooks he mostly learns about Copernicus and Columbus but notAryabhatt and Durvasa. Geography, on the other hand, is loaded with heavyfigures about forests and mineral resources of India. Not only is the dataabout 10 to 15 years old, but the most vital aspect interpretation of thisdata is missing.In civics, while a lot is written about the political and administrativesystem of the whole world there's not a word on the rich systems of medievalIndia. The student learns that the concept of Republic was first conjecturedin the West, the fact lies that the term `Republic' or `Ganatantra' hasfound mention even in the Mahabharata.Much has been said about science textbooks in the article. I would like toadd that after completing a tenth class course in science, most students canrecognise Isaac Newton, but hardly 5 per cent would be able to identify thedisciplines in which Ramanujan or Vikram Sarabhai worked.But the point lies not in just criticising the system, but in findingsolutions. I would like to refer to Mahatma Gandhi, the least challengedreformer of our times. In a 1921 article, titled `National Education' inYoung India, he wrote:``. the existing system of education is defective inthree most important matters - it is based upon foreign culture to almostentire exclusion of indigenous culture, it ignores the culture of heart andhand (ie, despises labour) and confines itself one, to the head and realeducation is not possible through a foreign medium.''Shamefully enough, the same defects persist even today. There seems to beonly one reason, according to me, for this malfunctioning of our system. Anindividual who studies abroad naturally reflects the values and beliefs ofthe country in which he grew to maturity, small wonder, then that in thesystem created by Nehru, the curricula were dominated by alien textbooks andforeign thoughts. Further, the men of wisdom who framed our educationalpolicy in the beginning were neither scholars from the Banaras HinduUniversity or the Aligarh Muslim University. They were either men from theIndian Civil Service or those whose source of enlightenment emanated fromalien institutions like Trinity College, Cambridge.It's time we hear more from Gandhiji. I quote:``.I would certainly destroythe majority of textbooks and cause new ones to be written with a bearing onand correspondence with home life.in India where a larger part of ourpeople's time is devoted to labour for earning our bread, our children mustfrom their infancy be taught the dignity of such labour.For education tobe universal it should be free.``Still, I should reiterate that I am not hostile to a English. I regardEnglish as the language of international commerce and diplomacy. It'sknowledge on the part of some of us is essential as it contains the richesttreasures of thought and knowledge from the world. But I expect such men outof us to translate those treasures for the nation in its vernaculars.``I respectfully contend that an appreciation of other cultures can fitlyfollow, never precede, an appreciation and assimilation of our own''.It is high time the nation made a correct interpretation of Gandhiji'sthoughts and used them for national welfare.The writer is an engineering student, based in Bhilai
