We just had the Teachers’ Day.
It was to pay tribute to India's second President Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. He was also a great educationist.
India must be ready for an education revolution—but that revolution must be about creating better human beings, not merely better examination scores.
Beyond marks and coaching
The real crisis in Indian education is not simply whether the system is modern or traditional. It is whether education is producing thinking human beings.
A child should not be reduced to a percentage, a rank or an entrance-examination score. A teacher should not be reduced to someone who completes a syllabus. And a university should not become merely a credential-distribution centre.
India needs an education system that combines scientific temper with civilisational awareness, modern technology with ethical responsibility, and professional excellence with social purpose.
The Gurukul idea, therefore, deserves to be discussed without either romanticising it or dismissing it.
India does not have to choose between the past and the future. It can learn from the past while building the future.
The bigger battle is over the purpose of education
At the heart of the current debate is a much larger question: What should education actually achieve? India has increasingly become an examination-oriented society. Marks determine opportunities, competitive examinations determine career paths, and the coaching industry has become deeply embedded in the education ecosystem.
The result is a system in which learning can sometimes become secondary to scoring. This is where the idea of the Gurukul system deserves a serious discussion.
The Gurukul model cannot simply be transplanted into the 21st century. India today requires modern schools, modern universities, technology, laboratories, coding, artificial intelligence and scientific research.
But modernisation should not necessarily mean abandoning the civilisational values associated with the traditional Indian approach to education. The distinction between commercialisation and modernisation therefore needs to be clearly understood.
What happened to the Guru-Shishya relationship?
The traditional idea of the Guru was not merely that of a teacher preparing a student to clear an examination. The Guru was expected to shape character, discipline, intellectual curiosity and a sense of responsibility. The story of Dronacharya and Arjuna, regardless of how one interprets the Mahabharata tradition, provides an interesting illustration of the idea of identifying and nurturing exceptional ability.
The broader lesson is that a teacher should be committed to the potential of the student.
Education cannot be reduced to the ability to produce high-scoring candidates. This is particularly important in the era of the coaching economy. In places such as Kota, the intense pressure associated with competitive examinations has repeatedly triggered concerns over student wellbeing and the broader culture surrounding entrance examinations.
Parents naturally want their children to succeed. But the question is: What kind of success are we preparing them for?
Do we want doctors who simply pursue lucrative careers, or doctors who also see service to society as part of their professional responsibility? Do we want engineers who merely obtain degrees, or innovators capable of solving real problems?
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| Blogger 'under a tree' : In search of a Gurukul |
Do we want civil servants trained only to clear examinations, or public servants equipped with judgement, integrity and empathy?
That is the real education debate.
India’s civilisational knowledge deserves serious study. The proposed incorporation of traditional Indian concepts into mathematics and related disciplines has inevitably generated debate.
Concepts associated with Bharatiya Bijaganita, including traditional methods such as the Paravartya Yojayet sutra, can be studied as part of the history and development of mathematical thought.
Similarly, the study of the panchanga, Indian calendrical systems and traditional approaches to measuring time can provide students with an opportunity to understand the intersection of mathematics, astronomy, culture and civilisation.
Ancient Indian observatories, the historical significance of Ujjain as a reference point in Indian astronomy, and traditional time units such as ghati and vighati can also be examined alongside modern systems such as GMT and IST.
The purpose should be neither to reject modern science nor to claim that every traditional practice was scientifically superior.
The purpose should be to study, compare, question and understand. That is what a modern education system should encourage.
Society has become obsessed with preparing young people for success while often neglecting a more fundamental question: What will they do with that success?
India’s National Education Policy (NEP) itself recognises that mathematics and mathematical thinking will play an increasingly important role in the country’s future and its leadership in emerging fields.
The NEP places particular emphasis on professions and disciplines involving artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science.
It also states that mathematics and computational thinking should receive greater emphasis throughout the school years, beginning at the foundational stage, through innovative methods such as puzzles and games that make mathematical thinking more engaging.
Coding activities are also envisaged from the middle stage of schooling. So, the larger question goes well beyond the recent political debate over the education portfolio or the change of an Education Minister.
There is another story unfolding in India’s education system.
Under the Modi government, the education sector has been undergoing a process of restructuring, including work around:
A new mathematics curriculum;
New NCERT textbooks for Classes IX to XII; and
Changes in the teaching of history and India’s civilisational heritage.
The proposed undergraduate mathematics curriculum has also generated interest because of its references to traditional Indian mathematical knowledge, including sutra literature and calendrical systems.
The objective should not be to romanticise the past. Rather, India needs to ask whether its ancient intellectual traditions can be studied alongside modern mathematics, science and technology.
For centuries, Indian mathematicians worked with the decimal place-value system and developed sophisticated approaches to arithmetic and astronomy. These traditions form an important part of the history of mathematics and deserve serious academic examination.
Why does the Gurukul debate make some uncomfortable?
The debate becomes politically charged when questions of history, civilisation and cultural memory enter the classroom. Critics of changes in history textbooks fear ideological rewriting. Supporters argue that Indian history has sometimes been presented through frameworks that underplayed indigenous traditions and perspectives.
The controversy over the history of medieval India and the Ayodhya dispute illustrates how deeply contested historical narratives can become.
Former Archaeological Survey of India archaeologist K.K. Mohammed, for instance, has publicly criticised the role played by sections of historians in the Ayodhya debate and argued that the issue was complicated by competing interpretations of historical evidence.
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| RSS chief Bhagwat being welcomed in London |
Such claims, however, should be examined through evidence and scholarship rather than political slogans. The same principle should apply to the rewriting of history today.
A curriculum should neither become a vehicle for ideological indoctrination nor a mechanism for erasing uncomfortable aspects of history. Students should be given the intellectual tools to examine evidence and reach informed conclusions.
From knowledge to civilisational confidence
In his address to a gathering in Toronto, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat spoke about India’s historical civilisational role in spreading knowledge. Whatever one’s political or ideological position, there is a larger point worth considering.
India’s education tradition historically placed considerable emphasis on knowledge, teachers, discipline and intellectual inquiry.
The challenge before contemporary India is to determine how those principles can coexist with the demands of a modern economy driven by AI, machine learning, mathematics, computational thinking and data science.
There is no contradiction in studying both. In fact, India may need precisely such a synthesis.
ends
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