WE MAY BEGIN by admitting, what is well known to every experienced educationist, that the European system of the professor delivering lectures and his pupils immediately writing down the main points of his discourse in their own words, is impossible here.
No Indian student below the Honours standard can profitably follow a discourse rapidly delivered in English on a subject just then introduced to him, and any notes he may jot down on the occasion are likely to be scrappy, incoherent, and useless for the purpose of self-instruction.
The European system of lecturing requires for its success that the student should have a perfect mastery of the language of the lecture, he should carefully read the subject up at home in advance of the lecture, and he should have sufficient leisure to read in it afterwards in order to verify references and correct his mistakes. The two insuperable difficulties here are the weakness of our average students in English composition and the absence of advanced historical works in our vernaculars.
When, however, the lectures are delivered in the boys’ mother tongue they can take notes of their own.
A case within my own knowledge illustrates this point. I once discoursed on the Renaissance to the B. A. Students of our college; the language used was English, and on examining their notebooks, I found that only two of my pupils —who were up to the Honours standard — had taken down an intelligent and useful summary of my lecture in English. Sometime afterwards, I spoke on the same subject, but in Bengali, to the boys of Rabindranath’s school at Bolpur, and and though my second audience was very much younger than my first, they wrote excellent connected reports of my discourse, in their mother tongue.
Hence, all practical teachers in India are driven to throw their imported notions overboard and to dictate to their classes, word for word what they wish them to learn. They sometimes deliver “lectures” in the English sense of the term; but these merely introduce and explain the subject; the students listen and ask questions if they have any difficulty, but they do not write down anything at this stage. Then these lectures are crystalised in the form of Professor’s “notes,” to which the students pin their faith, and which, when well written, circulate from College to College usually in Manuscript copies and some times in print.
Addressing students in a tongue not their own, the Professor must supplement or rather consolidate the spoken word by the written note. This course of action is dictated by common sense and the necessities of the case, and not by the “perversity of the native professors,” nor by the “mediaeval spirit of the Calcutta University.”
Notes, then, must be dictated if the lecture is not intended to vanish like the passing breeze. If we decline to dictate notes we must, as an alternative, see to it that every boy of the class makes an English summary of the subject on the basis, of our lectures or his text-books. We must examine, and correct such summaries from the beginning to the end.
In few Indian Colleges are tutors employed for such correction of home exercises, and the work must be done by the professor if it is to be done at all. No man with the least, knowledge, of the conditions of our colleges—their large classes and small staffs—can expect any professor to find time for this work in respect of all his pupils.
What, then, would be the inevitable result of delivering “lectures” of the English type, unsupplemented by work like that’of the English, “tutors”? Our boys would be driven to seek their salvation in the printed “notes” and “summaries” available in the bazar. A good professor’s own notes are usually very much better than these cribs; at all events he has no means of examining the help-books that his boys read at home and of guiding them to, the best “note” in print.
FOR SOME YEARS I had to teach Student's Modern Europe (by Lodge), a highly accurate and informing work no doubt, but a most unsuitable text-book for Indian youths,— 750 closely printed pages bristling with thousands of proper names. I dictated “notes” on nearly all the important epochs and events embraced in it…but certain portions were purposely left to be prepared by my boys by their own efforts. To test their work I examined them…and found to my disappointment that several of them had merely quoted from a pestilent summary available in the local bazar.
I may here explain that the college time-table at that time made it impossible for me to go through the home-work of my boys, and an examination in the class was the only means of testing whether they had worked at home or not. I could punish them afterwards for not having done so, but my other college duties left me no time to see to it that every boy did write his own summary at home.
But if professor here dictate notes, it does not necessarily follow that our boys do not understand what they write as answers, that they are ‘mere gramophones’ reproducing their master’s voice. It is not true that Indian professors confine themselves to the delivery of written notes which their boys cram. We do explain what we dictate; our discourses cover a good deal more than what is embodied in our notes. If some of our pupils write irrelevant answers, or make a mess of what they reproduce from memory, the phenomenon is not unknown in other countries among students of a certain type. It is not in India alone that a candidate proves the binomial theorem when he is asked to write an essay on the common pump.
To be continued
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