Schools: Muni International

I visited many alternative schools and wrote short articles about them as part of a fellowship I had with Wipro Applying Thought In Schools (WATIS). These articles were later published as a regular column in the Teacher Plus magazine. I will post some of these articles here to highlight the variety of experiments going on in the alternative schools of India.

The first post in this series is about Muni International school. The original article is available on the Teacher Plus site here.

Among all the schools featured on my list, Muni International is undoubtedly the most politically incorrect one.

Consider the following:
– Their daily prayer asks for a blessing from Maa Saraswati.
– The school promotes Jeevan Vidya, Agrahar Nagraj’s system of spiritual thought, to all its students.
– Ashok Thakur, the founder/ principal, cheerfully claims ignorance of what most people would consider foundational aspects of education.
– The school website has videos of Ashok Thakur talking, sitting next to Swami Ramdev.

No, don’t stop reading just yet, because this is a heartening story of a departure from the norm so extreme that it may potentially switch on some dusty, unused light bulbs in your head.

I met Ashok Thakur when he was conducting a training session for teachers in a school run by a friend in Ahmedabad. Ashokji was talking about education and everything he said, even the radical things like not using any textbooks, seemed completely right, as he spoke with the conviction of a practitioner, using real examples from his school in Delhi. When the session was over and my friend and I asked him more about his interesting experiments in schooling, he invited both of us to come to Delhi and see for ourselves. So, it came about that, a few months later, we drove down potholed roads in a down-market part of West Delhi and reached the four-storied building that houses Muni International School.

This happened many years ago but the visit is bright in my memory. Bright with the vibrant brightness of the children we met, their bubbling enthusiasm and joy in showing off their school and their many talents, their comfort level with us as if we were close relatives visiting after a long time, and treating us as if we were on a short visit and were to be made the most of. The whole school seemed full of children comfortable with being around adults! One thing that Ashokji figured out early was that if you make small children speak more than one foreign language every day, by the time they finish school, their fluency will at least guarantee employment. Meanwhile the academic qualification needed could be worked on peripherally and without too much stress. So all the children we met spoke English but they also wanted us to hear German songs and French poems and wanted us to watch them enact Japanese skits. Even the very small ones from the primary section! It was truly breathtaking!

We started with a bullet-point list of ‘political incorrectness’ so perhaps it is fitting that we counterbalance that with a list of ‘educational correctness’. Here is a partial list:
– There are no textbooks used in the school. The syllabus from NCERT is used to anchor the learning and the children question, discover, and explore the subjects with the help of their teachers and using the available online and offline resources. The focus is on anchoring learning in experience. Ashokji mentioned that a tree that has its leaves arranged such that every leaf gets sunlight is a great way to learn geometry.
– The school parliament has school level MPs, class level MLAs, Councillors, judges, committee members, etc., who are elected from within the classrooms every month. The same child is not allowed to get elected to the same post more than once.
– The school caters to the underprivileged families in the neighborhood.

I remember Ashok Thakur saying that his 8th standard children competed with MA students from a nearby university, the task being to read from a book that nobody had read before and answer questions from it, and the children from Muni International, who had effectively learned how to learn, won hands down. I can well believe it!

Quick facts:

Name of school: Muni International school
Been around since: 2003
Number of teachers/ staff: 40
Number of children: 700
Classes handled: 1 to 12
USP: Caters to poor children. Emphasizes foreign language learning for livelihood security.
Location: Uttam Nagar, New Delhi
Website: http://www.muniinternationalschool.org/

Hind Swaraj: M K Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi’s collected works — writings, speeches, letters, interviews and telegrams — have been meticulously compiled with appendices of relevant background material by the publications division of the Government of India. The collected works runs into 100 volumes of some 500 pages each. The people who have read through or sampled these writings say that the best introduction to this huge compilation is the small, extremely influential booklet called ‘Hind Swaraj’. Hind Swaraj, written in 1908 and presented as a dialogue between a reader and an editor (Gandhiji) contains in compressed form many of the ideas that run through the collected works. You may find yourself disagreeing with many parts of it, but it contains a systematic deconstruction of modernity.

Here is an extract from the beginning of chapter 18 to intrigue you:

READER: In the whole of our discussion, you have not demonstrated the necessity for education: we always complain of its absence among us. We notice a movement for compulsory education in our country. The Maharaja Gaekwar has introduced it in his territories. Every eye is directed towards them. We bless the Maharaja for it. Is all this effort then of no use ?

EDITOR: If we consider our civilization to be the highest, I have regretfully to say that much of the effort you have described is of no use. The motive of the Maharaja and other great leaders who have been working in this direction is perfectly pure. They, therefore, undoubtedly deserve great praise. But we cannot conceal from ourselves the result that is likely to flow from their effort.

What is the meaning of education? It simply means a knowledge of letters. It is merely an instrument, and an instrument may be well used or abused. The same instrument that may be used to cure a patient may be used to take his life, and so may a knowledge of letters. We daily observe that many men abuse it and very few make good use of it; and if this is a correct statement, we have proved that more harm has been done by it than good.

The ordinary meaning of education is a knowledge of letters. To teach boys reading, writing and arithmetic is called primary education. A peasant earns his bread honestly. He has ordinary knowledge of the world. He knows fairly well how he should behave towards his parents, his wife, his children and his fellow villagers. He understands and observes the rules of morality. But he cannot write his own name. What do you propose to do by giving him a knowledge of letters? Will you add an inch to his happiness ? Do you wish to make him discontented with his cottage or his lot? And even if you want to do that, he will not need such an education. Carried away by the flood of western thought we came to the conclusion, without weighing pros and cons, that we should give this kind of education to the people.

Now let us take higher education. I have learned Geography, Astronomy, Algebra, Geometry, etc. What of that? In what way have I benefited myself or those around me? Why have I learned these things? Professor Huxley has thus defined education: “That man I think has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will and does with ease and pleasure all the work that as a mechanism it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine with all its parts of equal strength and in smooth working order…whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the fundamental truths of nature . . . whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience . . .who has learnt to hate all vileness and to respect others as himself. Such a one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education, for he is in harmony with nature. He will make the best of her and she of him.”

If this is true education. I must emphatically say that the sciences I have enumerated above I have a never been able to use for controlling my senses. Therefore, whether you take elementary education or higher education, it is not required for the main thing. It does not make men of us. It does not enable us to do our duty.

(The booklet is available for free download here)

On Education: J Krishnamurti

The following are three excerpts from chapter 1 of ‘On Education’ by J Krishnamurti. The full book is available for download here.

Excerpt 1:

Education is not only learning from books, memorizing some facts, but also learning how to look, how to listen to what the books are saying, whether they are saying something true or false. All that is part of education. Education is not just to pass examinations, take a degree and a job, get married and settle down, but also to be able to listen to the birds, to see the sky, to see the extraordinary beauty of a tree, and the shape of the hills, and to feel with them, to be really, directly in touch with them. As you grow older, that sense of listening, seeing, unfortunately disappears because you have worries, you want more money, a better car, more children or less children. You become jealous, ambitious, greedy, envious; so you lose the sense of the beauty of the earth. You know what is happening in the world. You must be studying current events. There are wars, revolts, nation divided against nation. In this country too there is division, separation, more and more people being born, poverty, squalor and complete callousness. Man does not care what happens to another so long as he is perfectly safe. And you are being educated to fit into all this.

Excerpt 2:

Do you know what it means to attend, to pay attention? When you pay attention, you see things much more clearly. You hear the bird singing much more distinctly. You differentiate between various sounds. When you look at a tree with a great deal of attention, you see the whole beauty of the tree. You see the leaves, the branch, you see the wind playing with it. When you pay attention, you see extraordinarily clearly. Have you ever done it? Attention is something different from concentration. When you concentrate, you don’t see everything. But when you are paying attention, you see a great deal. Now, pay attention. Look at that tree and see the shadows, the slight breeze among the leaves. See the shape of the tree. See the proportion of the tree in relation to other trees. See the quality of light that penetrates through the leaves, the light on the branches and the trunk. See the totality of the tree. Look at it that way, because I am going to talk about something to which you have to pay attention. Attention is very important, in the class, as well as when you are outside, when you are eating, when you are walking. Attention is an extraordinary thing.

Excerpt 3:

Learn about everything in yourself, because if you learn from yourself about yourself, then you will not be a secondhand human being. So you should, if I may suggest, from now on, find out how to live entirely differently and that is going to be difficult, for I am afraid most of us like to find an easy way of living. We like to repeat what other people say, what other people do, because it is the easiest way to live – to conform to the old pattern or to a new pattern. We have to find out what it means never to conform and what it means to live without fear. This is your life, and nobody is going to teach you, no book, no guru. You have to learn from yourself, not from books. There is a great deal to learn about yourself. It is an endless thing, it is a fascinating thing, and when you learn about yourself from yourself, out of that learning wisdom comes. Then you can live a most extraordinary, happy, beautiful life.

Links for further study:

There are many talks by J Krishnamurti available on YouTube. The following are relevant examples:
What Is The Point of Education?
Is there such a thing as right education?

The Renaissance in India: Sri Aurobindo

The following are three excerpts from the long essay ‘Renaissance in India’ by Sri Aurobindo. I hope that these excerpts add to your understanding of education and modernity in the Indian context.

Excerpt 1:

An ingrained and dominant spirituality, an inexhaustible vital creativeness and gust of life and, mediating between them, a powerful, penetrating and scrupulous intelligence combined of the rational, ethical and aesthetic mind each at a high intensity of action, created the harmony of the ancient Indian culture.

Excerpt 2:

When we look at the past of India, what strikes us is her stupendous vitality, her inexhaustible power of life and joy of life, her almost unimaginably prolific creativeness. For three thousand years at least, — it is indeed much longer, — she has been creating abundantly and incessantly, lavishly, with an inexhaustible many-sidedness, republics and kingdoms and empires, philosophies and cosmogonies and sciences and creeds and arts and poems and all kinds of monuments, palaces and temples and public works, communities and societies and religious orders, laws and codes and rituals, physical sciences, psychic sciences, systems of Yoga, systems of politics and administration, arts spiritual, arts worldly, trades, industries, fine crafts, — the list is endless and in each item there is almost a plethora of activity. She creates and creates and is not satisfied and is not tired; she will not have an end of it, seems hardly to need a space for rest, a time for inertia and lying fallow. She expands too outside her borders; her ships cross the ocean and the fine superfluity of her wealth brims over to Judaea and Egypt and Rome; her colonies spread her arts and epics and creeds in the Archipelago; her traces are found in the sands of Mesopotamia; her religions conquer China and Japan and spread westward as far as Palestine and Alexandria, and the figures of the Upanishads and the sayings of the Buddhists are reechoed on the lips of Christ. Everywhere, as on her soil, so in her works there is the teeming of a superabundant energy of life.

Excerpt 3: (This is how the long essay ends)

India can best develop herself and serve humanity by being herself and following the law of her own nature. This does not mean, as some narrowly and blindly suppose, the rejection of everything new that comes to us in the stream of Time or happens to have been first developed or powerfully expressed by the West. Such an attitude would be intellectually absurd, physically impossible,and above all unspiritual; true spirituality rejects no new light, no added means or materials of our human self-development. It means simply to keep our centre, our essential way of being, our inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive, and evolve out of it all we do and create. Religion has been a central preoccupation of the Indian mind; some have told us that too much religion ruined India, precisely because we made the whole of life religion or religion the whole of life, we have failed in life and gone under. I will not answer, adopting the language used by the poet in a slightly different connection, that our fall does not matter and that the dust in which India lies is sacred. The fall, the failure does matter, and to lie in the dust is no sound position for man or nation. But the reason assigned is not the true one. If the majority of Indians had indeed made the whole of their lives religion in the true sense of the word, we should not be where we are now; it was because their public life became most irreligious, egoistic, self-seeking, materialistic that they fell. It is possible, that on one side we deviated too much into an excessive religiosity, that is to say, an excessive externalism of ceremony, rule, routine, mechanical worship, on the other into a too world-shunning asceticism which drew away the best minds who were thus lost to society instead of standing like the ancient Rishis as its spiritual support and its illuminating life-givers. But the root of the matter was the dwindling of the spiritual impulse in its generality and broadness, the decline of intellectual activity and freedom, the waning of great ideals, the loss of the gust of life.

Perhaps there was too much of religion in one sense; the word is English, smacks too much of things external such as creeds, rites, an external piety; there is no one Indian equivalent. But if we give rather to religion the sense of the following of the spiritual impulse in its fullness and define spirituality as the attempt to know and live in the highest self, the divine, the all embracing unity and to raise life in all its parts to the divinest possible values, then it is evident that there was not too much of religion, but rather too little of it—and in what there was, a too one-sided and therefore an insufficiently ample tendency. The right remedy is, not to belittle still farther the age long ideal of India, but to return to its old amplitude and give it a still wider scope, to make in very truth all the life of the nation a religion in this high spiritual sense. This is the direction in which the philosophy, poetry, art of the West is, still more or less obscurely, but with an increasing light, beginning to turn, and even some faint glints of the truth are beginning now to fall across political and sociological ideals. India has the key to the knowledge and conscious application of the ideal; what was dark to her before in its application, she can now, with a new light, illumine; what was wrong and wry in her old methods she can now rectify; the fences which she created to protect the outer growth of the spiritual ideal and which afterwards became barriers to its expansion and farther application, she can now break down and give her spirit a freer field and an ampler flight: she can, if she will, give a new and decisive turn to the problems over which all mankind is labouring and stumbling, for the clue to their solutions is there in her ancient knowledge. Whether she will rise or not to the height of her opportunity in the renaissance which is coming upon her, is the question of her destiny.

(‘The Renaissance in India and Other essays on Indian Culture’ is available for download as volume 20 of the collected works of Sri Aurobindo here)

The history of Bharatvarsha: Rabindranath Tagore

“The kind of unity that the European Civilization has opted for is discord-centered; the kind of unity that Bharatavarshiya Civilization has opted for is concord-centered.”
– From ‘The history of Bharatvarsha’ by Rabindranath Tagore

The article from which the above quote is taken reminds us to stay grounded in an Indian perspective when we try to make sense of our Indian history. I hope the extracts given below encourage you to read the full article.

Extract 1: The history of India that we read and memorize for our examinations is really a nightmarish account of India. Some people arrive from somewhere and the pandemonium is let loose. And then it is a free-for-all: assault and counter-assault, blows and bloodletting. Father and son, brother and brother vie with each other for the throne. If one group condescends to leave, another group appears, as if, out of the blue; Pathans and Mughals, Portuguese and French and English together have made this nightmare ever more and more complex.

But if Bharatavarsha is viewed with these passing frames of dreamlike scenes, smeared in red, overlaid on it, the real Bharatavarsha can not be glimpsed. These histories do not answer the question, where were the people of India? As if, the people of India did not exist, only those who maimed and killed alone existed.

Extract 2: However, while the lands of the aliens existed, there also existed the indigenous country. Otherwise, in the midst of all the turbulence, who gave birth to the likes of Kabir, Nanak, Chaitanya, and Tukaram? It was not that only Delhi and Agra existed then, there were also Kasi and Navadvipa. The current of life that was flowing then in the real Bharatavarsha, the ripples of efforts rising there and the social changes that were taking place, the accounts of these are not found in our history textbooks.

Extract 3: What is the chief significance of Bharatavarsha? If a precise answer to this question is sought, the answer is available. And the history of Bharatavarsha upholds that answer. We find that a single objective has always been motivating Bharatavarsha. This objective has been to establish unity among diversity, to make various paths move towards one goal, to experience the One-in-many as the innermost reality, to pursue with total certitude that supreme principle of inner unity that runs through the differences. It has also been her endeavor to achieve these without destroying the distinctions that appear in the external world.

Extract 4: It needs talent to make outsiders one’s own. The ability to enter others’ beings and the magic power of making the stranger completely one’s own, these are the qualities native to genius. That genius we find in Bharatavarsha. Bharatavarsha has unhesitatingly entered other’s beings, and has effortlessly accepted things from others. Bharatavarsha has not discarded anything and has made everyone her own after accepting him or her.

Extract 5: Amongst the civilizations of the world Bharatavarsha stands as an ideal of the endeavor to unify the diverse. Her history will bear this out. Amidst many travails and obstacles, fortunes and misfortunes, Bharatavarsha has been seeking to experience the One in the universe as well as in one’s own soul and to place that One in the variegated, to discover that One through knowledge, to establish that One through action, to internalize that One through love, to exemplify that One through one’s own life. When through the study of her history we would be able to realize this everlasting spirit of Bharata, then the rupture of our present with the past will disappear.

The full article is available here. Let me know what you think.

Microschools: Networks

The current schools seem to contain the following components:

– The area of land on which the school stands
– The classrooms, labs, library etc., the academic infrastructure
– The playground, swimming pool etc., the sports infrastructure
– The office and other administrative infrastructure, the engine that runs the school

Except for sitting in the classrooms for most of their school day, the children get to use this infrastructure only minimally. However, the parents are willing to pay high fees for this real-estate package deal. Strange!

Let us try a thought experiment…

The classrooms inside a school are insular and don’t interact with each other too much. If we took the classrooms and physically moved them far from each other and still managed to run the administrative engine, it may be possible to have a fully functional school.

Imagine:
– Many microschools with a common name who identify themselves as part of the same networked school
– They function independently but meet at regular intervals in a rented or public space
– They are managed by an online administrative engine that allows things like co-ordination, scheduling and monitoring
– The children create and manage their own independent time-tables and record/ monitor their academic progress using this online tool
– The parents and facilitators have admin access and can see the progress of their children
– The children learn on their own and the facilitator understands and encourages this process

The networked microschools can be thought of as a distributed version of the current schools with the focus shifted from infrastructure and regimentation to relaxed learning. The saving in fees and the reduction in travel-time, stress etc. will be substantial. I think it is an exciting vision. What do you think?

Microschools: The future of education?

I wrote a blog post titled ‘The educational institution of the future: A fantasy’ in January 2009. Some days ago I discovered that the idea put forward in this post became what are now being called microschools. And Wikipedia tells me that the name microschools was put forward for the first time in February 2010. A full year after my blogpost! 🙂

The wikipedia article defines microschooling as:
“Micro-schooling is the reinvention of the one-room school house, where class size is typically smaller than that in most schools (15 students or less in a classroom) and there are mixed-age level groupings. Generally, micro-schools do not meet all 5 days of the school week, and their schedules look different than a traditional public or private school.”

My blog post talking about a very similar idea is reproduced below:

—– My 2009 blog post —–

Add another adult facilitator or so and add not more than a couple of children and there you have the prototype for the school of the future.

What fun!

It is foolish from our fast changing perspective today to predict the contours of a future even a few years ahead in time. But we have to begin the discussion somewhere. So listed out below is a random, incomplete look at the practical details of a school of the future.

– No school has more than 10 students.
– There are no teachers (Only facilitators who speak when they are spoken to 🙂 ).
– The facilitators direct the efforts of the students when they can or pass them on to other facilitators who can guide them.
– Anybody above the age of 14/15 and who has been a student of this type of school from their first school days is considered qualified to become a facilitator (Till we get the first batch of such facilitators any industrial era trained person who has a high school certificate can become a facilitator).
– All schools run in their local communities in a house or community area not more than a ten minute walk for any child.
– The minimum infrastructure in a school is an internet ready computer.
– The thousands of school buildings and their administrators that mushroomed across the world for the industrial era become sports and other similar educational infrastructure providers.
– The education of the future focuses on body, mind and spirit development (Includes things like sports, yoga, CBSE text books, meditation etc).
– The education of the future also focuses on social and cultural development (Includes interpersonal growth, music, social service activities etc).

—– End of my 2009 blog post —–

My blog with the above and other education related posts is available here.

I think that after last year’s Covid-impacted school experience, many parents and children will be ready to shift to microschools. What do you think?

If education has to happen?

(This Monday’s post is a slight twist on a short story written by my favourite author – Vaikkom Muhammad Basheer. The story is called ‘Yuddham avasanikkanamenkil?’ or ‘If war has to end?’. I replaced ‘If war has to end’ with ‘If education has to happen’ and made some other trivial changes to get the story in this format. Here is an excerpt to get you interested…)

“If education has to happen!” – with his teeth clenched, the left corner of his lips twisted and giving out a “shh” sound, happily scratching his eczema, lying spread out on a deck chair, the deep-thinker, the mighty man, the one with the terrible rage, the outstanding author, answered the young journalist’s question with his own:

“You mean, what should I do to make education happen?”

“You don’t have to do anything,” explained the journalist, “What we would like to know is your opinion about all of this. What should people do to make education happen once and for all?”

“Nothing! It’s enough if you go away from here: fool!”

“You must say something. The world is suffering very much. Terrible destruction is occurring in the world. All of this must stop. Calm and peace must rule in the world now. Your valuable advice in this regard is asked for. If education has to happen?”

“Go and ask the other idiotic thinkers; don’t trouble me!

“We already asked them”, said the journalist sheepishly, “Don’t we all know of your rage? It’s only that you were the last in line. Of course we know that your opinion is more important than the opinions of the others.”

“Well, what did the others say; if education has to happen…?”

“The world should accept Krishnamurti, the world should accept Waldorf, the world should listen to the tune of Rabindranath, the world should follow Gandhiji, the world should follow Sri Aurobindo, the world should believe in Montessori, the world should follow Ramakrishna… and so on and so forth.”

“Is that it!”, that one with the terrible rage asked while scratching his eczema furiously, “Didn’t the other set say anything?”

“They did. If education has to happen, the world should accept communism; so said one person. Others said, anarchism should be accepted. Another thinker said that fascism should come. Yet another person said that the principle of non-violence should be accepted. And what do you say- if education has to happen?”

(The full story is available here.

The translation from the original Malayalam to English is done by my son, Srikant. His translation is available here)

About Vaikkom Muhammad Basheer:
I grew up in Delhi but, fortunately, went to a school where they taught me how to read and write Malayalam. Much later, when I was going through a phase of reading Malayalam literature, I came across an intriguing book title, ‘Ntuppuppakkoranendarnnu’ or ‘My-Grandad-Had-An-Elephant’. Written in colloquial Malayalam, it is a gentle, masterful, wisely-told love story. I read it and was hooked! I went through everything Basheer had written and his wise, gentle voice has been a part of my life and a source of inspiration.

Links for further study:
Please read the other stories on my Basheer translations blog linked earlier and available here.
I plan to translate Basheer’s ‘Maantrikappoochcha’ or ‘Magic-cat’ and upload it on this blog soon. This is the best novel I have read. Ever!

The cheerful pandit: Kapil Kapoor

“In Patanjali’s words, all great thinkers of India were Shishtas, cultured people. A cultured person in our tradition is one whose worldly goods are constituted by a jar of grain. And without motive or purpose a Shishta devotes himself to a branch of knowledge and excels in it. Today he will be called a moorkh.”
– Professor Kapil Kapoor speaking about the obsessions of Indian Intellectuals in the video linked below

In this talk, Dr. Kapil Kapoor talks about the obsessions of Indian Intellectuals. He says that Indian Intellectuals are Rudaalis, professional mourners. The caste system, our bad treatment of minorities, the way we treat our women etc., our intellectuals are constantly, publicly, mourning such issues. Professor Kapoor then goes on to list out the main traits of the Indian intellectuals:

– They are always worried (chinta-grasth)
– They have a feeling of inferiority (heen-bhavana-grasth)
– They suffer from Hanuman syndrome (Hanuman lost his powers because of a curse and, years later, had to be reminded by Jambhavan)
– They suffer from the Tittiri complex (The Tittiri is a very small bird that sleeps on its back with its feet up in the air in an attempt to stop the sky from falling down)

This is the skeleton on which Professor Kapoor weaves a deeply interesting story. Enjoy!

About Kapil Kapoor:
Kapil Kapoor is an Indian scholar of linguistics and literature and an authority on Indian intellectual traditions. He is former Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and served as professor at the Centre for Linguistics and English, and at the Centre for Sanskrit Studies there before retiring in 2005. He is Editor-in-Chief of the 11-Volume Encyclopedia of Hinduism published by Rupa & Co. in 2012.
– From the Wikipedia article about Professor Kapoor available here

Links for further study:
Myths about Sanskrit
Panorama of India’s knowledge traditions

A mathematical genius: C.K. Raju

“Education today is unfortunately seen as a process of learning to ape the West, a la Macaulay, so math is taught from a purely Western perspective. This way of teaching math retraces the European experience of learning math: so the historical difficulties experienced by Europeans are replayed in the math classroom.

The solution to this difficulty is to throw out the religious beliefs that have crept into mathematics, and to go back to something very close to the original understanding in which things like the calculus developed as primarily a tool for calculation. This makes math very simple, and also makes it ideally suited to the present-day technology of computation which has greatly enhanced the ability to calculate.

Some philosophical adjustments are required in the understanding of math; but this should not be a serious problem for anyone except those who are currently regarded as math experts!”
– From ‘A new way to teach Math’ by C.K. Raju available here

The video linked above is an easy-to-understand and very enlightening talk by Professor C.K. Raju. To get you interested in listening to the full talk, I will just reproduce the bullet points he uses to make his introductory points. Enjoy!

– The Math we teach in school and college today is formal math. Which is also known as axiomatic math. This differs from traditional (pre-colonial) ganit. How exactly does ganit differ from math? Isn’t 1+1=2 in both?
(The answer to that is that, no, it is different in both. But you will have to listen to the full talk to understand why)

– Consider the elementary concept of angle (as defined in the Hindi NCERT text). It uses a term called ubhaynishth for the common initial point of an angle made by two straight lines (rays).
(ubhaynishth prarambhik bindu waali do kiranon se eik kon banta hai)

– Ubhaynishth is not there in the Hindi or Sanskrit dictionary. Student must infer its meaning from ubhay and nishth (in Sanskrit) as ‘loyal to both’. Use of such a complicated term suggests that the corresponding concept is absent in Hindi. Is it? What is the Hindi word for angle? kon? Wrong!

– Word ‘kon‘ is not found in Hindi before the 18th century. (Used by Samrat Jagannath 1723 in Rekhaganit, a Sanskrit translation of “Euclid’s” Elements from Farsi)

– So, did Indians have no concept of an angle, earlier? They did. RgVeda divides the circle into 360 degrees or 720 half degrees. The Vedanga Jyotish has even finer divisions of around 0.1 degrees. The concept of the angle in India was different. Chaap is the correct traditional term for “angle”. Angle = relative length of an arc.

– If an angle is about two straight lines, why do we need a semi-circular protractor to measure it? And, what instrument in a geometry box can be used to measure angle in the sense of chaap? None. The two concepts of angle require different instruments for their measurement. The chaap definition requires a flexible string.

– Immediate point is this: Math is NOT universal.

(The rest of this talk is about a more difficult problem, 1+1=2 🙂)

About C.K. Raju:

“Mr Raju has shown that he has great initiative and has worked extremely hard. He is the sort of student one wants to help…. He is working on excessively difficult problems. No one knows the correct lines on which they should be solved.”
– P.A.M. Dirac (Nobel Prize 1933) on a paper by Prof Raju that was later expanded to become Prof Raju’s Ph.D. thesis

“Chandra Kant Raju (born 7 March 1954) is a computer scientist, mathematician, educator, physicist and polymath researcher. He received the Telesio Galilei Academy Award in 2010.”
– From the Wikipedia article available here

Bernardino Telesio and Galileo Galilei are both symbols of resistance to authority. Therefore, it is apt that a key reason why the award is being given to me is for having pointed out Einstein’s mistake, and for having corrected it—for Einstein is one of the greatest figures of scientific authority today.
– From Prof Raju’s acceptance speech of the Telesio Galilei award (full speech available here)

“C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing), Pune and Delhi, Member Technical Staff 1988-95. As head of initial Application Development Group, played a lead role in building the first Indian supercomputer PARAM.”
– From Prof Raju’s website linked below

Links for further study:

Dr C.K. Raju’s website
Four part interview with Claude Alvares – Part1 . Part 2 . Part 3 . Part 4
Another interesting talk: A tale of two calendars