EDUCATE ALONG NATIONALISTIC LINES BUT BEWARE OF PAROCHIALISM

EDUCATE ALONG NATIONALISTIC LINES BUT BEWARE OF PAROCHIALISM

The entire education system has to be overhauled. This sort of unpatriotic negation of Indian culture that is consequent on imported western education lacking in indigenous anchor is making our younger generations rootless. What we need is an enlightened awakening to our cultural roots and that is entirely embedded in the spiritual soil of the Sanatan Dharma. To bring about its sprouting, to quicken consciousness of our spiritual heritage, to enliven the polity with its civilisational awareness we need to make Sanskrit compulsory in the school curricula and widely propagate the message of Swami Vivekananda, one of the foremost makes of modern India in all her comprehensive and catholic greatness. Only then will the youth of India be enthused to serve the country with a genuine patriotic pride. Then alone will real nationalism emerge from the shadows of the present perfidies that have apparently eclipsed it. Thus, we need rewriting of our history books along nationalistic lines without bias or specific slant as such but in a manner that will emphasize our glorious past achievements as a race, the torments we have suffered at the hands of invaders and colonisers, and the torments we have inflicted on our own people for ages, reducing them to subhuman status. All of it must come out in clear light.

When nationalism goes purely political and in a democracy garners votes through propaganda, there lurks ever the danger of subverting the academic curricula to suit political ends. This in effect reduces education to becoming a tool in the hands of the political masters and reduces the students to becoming robotic pawns in their hands through a carefully crafted doctrinaire academic programme that is subtly injected into the system. Here truth is covered under a freshly spread pseudonationalistic sheet.

Travesty of truth is not due historical narrative and does a nation no good as it obscures perspective and reduces intellectual discourse to one-sided falsification of events as they were. Here lies the fine line of demarcation as to limits in nationalising education, especially history. Truth must be adhered to at all costs and falsehood never projected in the name of nationalistic fervour. Truth ever triumphs and if it is suppressed by false narratives, the people who are subjected to them are perverted in the long run leading to decline of the race. Truth is invigorating and must ever be the gold standard for any academic programme or project that may be undertaken. 

Written by Sugata Bose