A K Gopalan
We are republishing below a few observations made by A K Gopalan (AKG) on the education system in our country and the SFI’s resolution On education. Student Struggle has been fortunate to retrieve these notes that AKG jotted down sometime during the latter part of 1974. The journal published this article for the first time, one decade later this was written down. AKG needs little introduction. He was one of the foremost leaders of the people’s struggle against all forms of exploitation actively participating in the national movement, he is considered as one of the founders of the Indian Communist movement. He was elected to the Lok Sabha uninterruptedly from 1952 until his death in 1977. He was the leader of the opposition in the Parliament and was the voice of the toiling people particularly during the early days of the Emergency. This article was written almost five decades ago but still remains relevant. In fact, some of the observations made here are more relevant in today’s scenario. Readers must bear in mind that the statistics given pertain to the early period of the ’70s. At the time of his death, AKG was a Polit Bureau Member of the CPI (M), President of the All India Kisan Sabha and Leader of the Opposition at the Lok Sabha.
I am putting down a few thoughts on education in India, as one who began his adult life as a school teacher and as one who has been engaged, in a small way over the last 47 years, in the task of educating workers, peasants and other sections of the people of India in the great struggle to break their chains and to change this society from top to bottom. I have not graduated from any academic university, but I have taken some lessons from the University of toiler’s struggles.
In Muhamma, in Alleppey District, where I had to spend some weeks in enforced idleness recovering from my recent (serious illness, I had the pleasant experience of reading the SFI’s new resolution — ON EDUCATION — adopted at its second All India Conference. I went through this resolution with much attention. I found in it, a new seriousness about education, an understanding more mature than before, worthy of resolute young fighters for new education, a new culture, and a new society. Hence, my desire to highlight some of the issues and concrete demands you have raised, and to put these in the perspective of a revolutionary struggle for people’s democracy and socialism.
The Situation Today
The disease of our educational system is to use the words of Lenin; “the rift between books and practical life“. Today, almost everyone reproaches our schools and colleges; accuses them of failure and impotence. Education Commissions and Committees have gone into the problem laboriously; found much in it that is unsatisfactory, and made their recommendations and proposals in bulky volumes containing innumerable appendices. In many States and regions, despair with the present state of education has reached a stage when the elementary ground-rules of the system have begun to break down.
No sensitive student or youth can conceal his indignation at the easily observable fact that the masses of the people of India are robbed on such a vast scale of education, light, and knowledge.
India leads the world in the total number of literates. There are more illiterates in this country today than the total population on the eve of independence. This number is growing from day to day.
More deplorable than all the other aspect is the picture of cynicism, hypocrisy, humiliation and suppression that emerges from a system of education that to use Lenin’s words once again, “derides youth and jeers at the people’s thirst for knowledge.”
There is the problem of dropping out of primary schools and of irregular attendance, which calls for concrete and immediate measures to enable the pupils to attend. What is to be done about this? There is the problem of our many-sided training of the student, including the teaching of physical education in the interest of lifelong physical and sports activities and wholesome habits. Has any advance been made in this field? These students are to form correct study habits; these teachers are to be guided on the aptitude of students, on the objectives sought to be achieved by the studies, and on the elimination of senseless cramming. Has any serious attention been paid to this? There is the problem of Promoting scientific and technological education, research and experimentation, and of developing a capacity for criticism that makes it possible for students to have a vision of modern processes of production and a trained mind. What concrete steps are proposed in this regard? There are thousands of students in schools and colleges needing financial assistance to buy textbooks, to eat and live in hostels. Are educational authorities and the Government ever bothered by this? There is the problem of examinations reduced to a farce. What is the solution? Here is the education system breaking down and depriving thousands of young men and women of the opportunity to learn. What has the Congress Government done about this, beyond giving more police support to the Congress gangster elements who forcibly close down the schools and colleges?
These are problems of staggering proportions. Every democratic minded boy and girl can see the lack of national educational policy, and the criminal apathy and the cynicism that the government and the top public and private educational authorities have cultivated and bring to bear on every problem of education.
A Vast Problem
Education is a problem affecting very vast numbers in India. According to the Government of India’s claims, the number of pupil’s ‘on the roll’ in schools in India exceeds 830 lakh; and the number of students enrolled in colleges and universities exceeds 33 lakh.
The claims of enrolment in schools are, without doubt, exaggerated. However, whatever the truth of these figures, it is clear that the number of boys and girls of different ages knocking at the doors of education is growing rapidly, and will continue to grow. On the one hand, more and people in India are thirsting for education, light, and knowledge. On the other hand, the Congress Government, in its Fifth Plan, proposes to curb, restrict and rarefy educational opportunities severely and to attack even the existing facilities.
Ultimately, education is a basic question to be decided by the vast millions in India, the 30 per cent literates as well as the 70 per cent illiterates, all the boys and girls as well as their parents. It is this great question-an education worthy of the millions of the people, especially the toiling people, of India that should be the SFI’s prime concern.
The SFI should stand firmly with the people of India and with the working class and the democratic movement in demanding an expansion of educational opportunities, and real facilities to study for all the people of India. Equally, it must fight against the reactionary attitude of the Central and State Governments to the education of the masses, and against their plan to curb educational opportunities further.
Fight Imperialism
Imperialism is the enemy of the peoples of the world. U. S. Imperialism is their chief enemy. No honest student or youth today can be blind to the imperialist penetration in our education, particularly through organizations such as USIS and the United States Educational Foundation of India (USEFI). The eagerness with which the academic frauds sent out by imperialism are accepted, and the increasing dependence on textbooks and other material specially prepared by imperialism for backward countries such as India is a matter of the gravest concern. The work of these enemies of the people in academic disguise is aimed at injecting in the minds of students and youth anti-democratic, anti-socialist, pro-imperialist and degenerate ideas. At the same time, outside, the strictly academic sphere, intensive attempts are being made through the mass media through films, through pornography and through a personal example to disseminate among Indian students and youth certain forms of extravagant behaviour, including the indiscriminate aping of Western fashions, exhibitionism, and habits such as drug-taking and hippiedom.
The obvious aim is to soften up youth, to disarm potential fighters for democracy and socialism. To ignore these pernicious forces, or to take them lightly, is to retire at the start from the battle to create a new education worthy of a new man.
Draw Inspiration From Socialism
The socialist world calls out to us as a bird calls out to the world at dawn-by its rich experience of developing an education worthy of the people. In China, in the USSR, in North Korea, in Vietnam, in Cuba and every other socialist country, education is considered a battlefront. Nowhere has the battle to wipe out illiteracy and ignorance been more vigorously carried to success than in these countries where the picture before liberation resembled or was even worse than, the picture in India today. Nowhere else has the content of education been refashioned according to social reality. Nowhere else, has real success been achieved in linking theoretical study with production work. Nowhere has the practice of indulging in abstractions and vulgarisms in the name of academic study been more decisively combated. Nowhere else has education truly concentrated, not merely on developing precise and useful scientific knowledge, but on the social, political and moral formation of a new generation ready to shoulder new tasks. Nowhere else have students, teachers, and parents been so happily involved in developing among the youth a new attitude towards work, made of courage, creative spirit, and love of work and the working people. Nowhere else have the doors of education from the lowest to the highest level been thrown wide open in practice to the children of workers and peasants, to the children of the toiling people.
Priorities in Our Country
Education, like culture, is not and can never be apolitical or neutral, because it is conditioned by the needs of social classes and their movements. It can only reflect class interests in a class society. To assert otherwise, to maintain an air of impartiality, is a trap, a lie.
Education in India reflects the fact that the capitalists and landlords are the ruling classes in this society, that political power is in their hands.
India is poor in providing a need-based minimum wage and a decent life to its workers and employees. It is extremely rich in the matter of providing profits and super profits to the foreign, and the big Indian concerns, or in allowing crores of rupees to accumulate in the hands of the big exploiters as black money.
India is poor in providing land and livelihood to the millions of toilers who live below subsistence in the villages. It is extremely rich when you consider the land and wealth accumulated in the hands of landlords and big traders and money-lenders.
India is a beggar when it comes to wiping out the curse of illiteracy or providing free and universal school education to all its children or offering scholarships and facilities to study to poor students and boys and girls coming from Scheduled Castes and Tribes. It is a reckless spendthrift in the amount spent on non-development expenditure, on the bureaucracy, on Ministers and the apparatus on repression.
Education, an Instrument of Struggle
Are students and youth taking this situation lying down? During the last three years, democratic student struggles have burst out in different parts of India, spontaneously and in an organized way, and many places at the initiative of the Students’ Federation of India. Noteworthy among these struggles have been those which the student masses have conducted for their educational, economic and other demands related to their student’s life.
Since its founding Conference at Trivandrum in December 1970 (in which I participated) the SFI as the fighting centre of democratic students in the country has paid serious attention to the educational situation. It passed a resolution On Education at its founding Conference, which proved useful in taking a democratic stand and outlook on education among the student masses and in mobilizing their support.
At its Second Conference held at Calcutta, a stronghold of the revolutionary movement in India, the SFI has adopted an important new resolution On Education. It is more clear that this, more concretely than the earlier resolution, incorporates the theoretical and practical experience of SFI units in different states in formulating and fighting for a new and just system of education for the people of India. The resolution, representing a deeper understanding of the problem of education in a backward country’s presents, in a capsule, our democratic and scientific alternative to the present system of education.
The SFI starts, in its resolution, with an observation, criticism an indictment of those aspects of the educational situation which have come to the forefront. In other words, it takes up what the Congress Government Processes, especially in its Fifth Year Plan document, with what happens and continues in reality.
Following from this, the resolution sketches out an alternative system of education provides some important guidelines and makes concrete demands. It makes it clear beyond doubt that this system of education, for which the SFI has resolved to campaign and fight resolutely must be integrated with the needs and aspiration of the Indian people. The guiding principle of the democratic and scientific attitude to education is that education must be developed, not for the benefit or enlightenment of a few, not to create islands of knowledge and skill but as an instrument of struggle to solve the basic problems of our toiling millions.
Viewing the whole question from this perspective, the SFI has highlighted its key demands about education for the people:
- Free and Universal Education up to the Secondary Stage: around this slogan is built a whole concept of a new structure of education to meet the needs of the Indian people. The student community, in common with all democratic forces and the toiling people, must fight for the urgent and immediate liquidation of the curse of mass illiteracy in this country. The Student community must campaign and fight for a minimum seven-year primary education for all boys and girls who have reached the age of five–this being de first step towards the early introduction of universal, free and compulsory secondary education of three years, and vocational training institutes. The student community must campaign and fight for an immediate increase in educational facilities at the secondary stage, at the two-year post-secondary stage and the College and University stage. It must demand more scholarships and hostel facilities for needy and poor children, and especially for the children of the scheduled castes and tribes. It must demand that school and college fees, where levied, must be brought down to the level of fees in Government institutions. It must campaign and fight for educational opportunities for everyone including those who are employed to improve their knowledge and skills and to acquire diplomas and degrees of the higher levels of education by studying privately, or after work, or in other ways.
- All Education Through the Mother Tongue and a Scientific Syllabus: around this slogan is built the important concept that education for the people must be imparted at all stages through their mother tongue, and that the content of education must make sense in the modern world, in other words, must be scientific and relevant. The student community must fight for the abolition of the bankrupt three-language formula and to ensure that all the State languages must be given at the Government level. It must campaign and fight for uniform syllabi and standards of education in all States, and a syllabi at all levels by chopping off the abundant deadwood and by introducing modern scientific principles into the content of education. The student community must oppose the frequent and senseless changing of textbooks; must demand, nevertheless, that the textbooks be brought up to date on the latest developments in science and history; and must wage war on obscurantism and unscientific influences, especially the decadent cultural ideas which U. S. imperialism injects into our educational system.
- The state must take over all educational institutions and ensure democratic administration at all levels: around this slogan is built the idea that education for the Indian people cannot be allowed to remain a source of profit for the various vested interests.
- Ensure the Democratic Rights of All Students: around this slogan is built a most important platform of the SFI and the democratic student movement. All those above 18 years of age must be given the franchise. Students must have the right to form their fighting unions, elected by themselves, which must be given all the necessary facilities to function as student unions. Students must be given representation in the administrative and academic bodies of colleges and universities and the management of educational institutions. Students and teachers should pay great attention to the improvement of their mutual relations. It is essential for an education worthy of the people and for the democratic movement that the relation between the teacher and the student is based on mutual respect and cooperation. It is equally essential that students develop a close relation with the people, especially with the toiling people, and work in solidarity) with them.
- Provide Employment for All: this slogan expresses a burning demand of the student masses all over India. The student community must fight resolutely for the guarantee of jobs –with salaries and allowances which provide a decent living– after every stage of education; till jobs are given. Unemployment relief must be given.
These slogans express concretely the basic democratic attitude to education. We want students to learn, and learn better, and to educate themselves scientifically, not merely to get themselves jobs and careers, but to fight for and get for themselves and of all the people of India the advantage of an education which can be used as an instrument of democratic and revolutionary struggle.
No Mere Academic Campaign
In order to be able to grip the masses-the masses of students and the masses of the people of India-the SFI’s resolution On Education must not be allowed to be a mere academic scheme or an approach of propaganda designed to impress students or attract them some way or the other. You must believe in it, you must take it seriously, and you must be confident that the understanding it expresses concretely will serve the revolutionary purpose we are interested in.
To start with, this means that all SFI members must be clear on the scope and purpose of the important resolution On Education. The democratic and scientific alternative to the present system of education that the SFI presents do not represent a blueprint or programme for a system of education which will be implemented after a people’s democratic, or socialist state, is established. At the same time, the SFI should be under no illusion that the democratic and scientific alternative it presents will be implemented by the state of the Capitalists landlords, within the confines of the present economic and political system.
The SFI can win these demands and implement its resolution only to the extent that it is clear-sighted; take these ideas effectively, and simply, among the masses of students; mobilize them around these issues; and succeed in unifying them in the fight for our alternative. This, then, is a resolution of an immediate and urgent campaign, a campaign here and now around clearly defined and concrete issues, a struggle for limited and partial demands and the realization of a new perspective.
I hope all SFI activists and members, the members of other democratic student organisations, and all democratic students will go through the SFI resolution On Education carefully; will discuss and explain it widely among the masses of students and the people; and will start campaigns and struggles to implement this resolution. We must invite workers-peasants, middle-class employees and other sections of the people to examine our democratic resolution and to give it their wholehearted practical support.
In the ultimate analysis, the basic demands of the students can be won only to the extent that the democratic student movement links up with the democratic movement; integrates itself general with the masses of workers and peasants and their problems; and approaches the fight for a democratic and scientific education as an inseparable part of the revolutionary people’s struggle to overthrow the present exploitative order.
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