Dr. V.K. Maheshwari, Ph.D

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Before the birth of the National Congress, a number of organisations were formed, but most of them had limited objectives .In order to draw the attention of the British public opinion towards the welfare of the Indians in 1866, Dadabhai Naroji established East Indian Association in London. Mahadeva Govinda Ranade formed the Madras Mahajana Sabha in 1881 and also the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha in 1867 for social reforms and national awakening. In 1885, the Bombay Presidency Association was formed under the leadership of persons like Feroz Shah Mehta, Badruddin Tayabji etc. with the aim of awakening national consciousness.

However, among all these organisations, the Indian Association established under the leadership of Surendra Nath Banerjee and Anand Mohan Bose, actively attempted to form a strong public opinion against the unjust policies of the British Government. It organised a number of peasant demonstrations demanding reduction of the rate of revenue. With a view of bringing representatives from all over India to a common platform, the Indian Association organised All-India National Conferences twice in 1883 and 1885. But the Indian public opinion could be organised and articulated only with the formation of Indian National Congress as a national forum.

A.O. Hume’s name shines like a star. His greatest contribution was his founding the Indian National Congress. Hume, the son of Joseph Hume, a prominent Scottish member of the House of Commons, was a brilliant civil service officer of the British Government, was loyal to his motherland and his government, but was equally sympathetic with the miserable predicament of Indians under the British regime. When he was posted as the Director-General of Agriculture ., he came into direct touch with the difficulties in which the farmers and farm workers of rural India lived. He took up the case of these poor people and argued for them in the Government. ‘Hints on Agricultural Reforms ’ was a report he prepared in which he discusses the urgent need for a change in the law and rule governing the agricultural life in . It is a valued document relevant even now. Soon Hume was appointed Home Secretary  in 1870. Though the administration was taken over from the East India Company by the Queen herself, the situation  was moving from bad to worse. More taxations, more police atrocities, and the people continued to live in abject poverty and slavery. This was too much for A.O. Hume and in protest against the government’s administrative policies, he resigned from service and entered into a life of peace, But he had already entered into an endeavour towards the formation of a national organization for forming a bridge between the rulers and the ruled.

Some of the Indian national leaders such as Dadabhai Naoroji, C. S. Subrahmoniya Iyer, Surendranath Banerjea, Dewan Bahadur Raghunatha Rao and others held a meeting in Madras and discussed the possibility of forming a national organization. This culminated in the birth of the Indian National Congress.

Allan Octavian Hume, was instrumental in the formation of Indian National Congress. The first session of the All India Congress began on 28th December 1885 at Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College. Eminent barrister of Calcutta, Mr. Woomesh Chandra Banerjee presided over it. Seventy two invited delegates from different parts of India assembled in this first session. Mr. Hume was elected as the first general secretary of the Indian National Congress.

In reality Indian National Congress was an English Product. It is an undisputed historical fact, that the idea of the Indian National Congress was a product of Lord Dufferin’s brain; that he suggested it to Mr. Hume to form an association which might function on the model of the opposition party of Britain, and that the latter undertook to work it out. We have no means of knowing whether Mr. Hume communicated the fact to all the Indian leaders who joined hands with him in organising it, but in all probability he told some of them. It leaked out, however, in Lord Dufferin’s lifetime, was published in the press, brought to his notice and never denied by him. Nor did Mr. Hume, who died only in 1912, ever deny it. It has since been admitted to be true by his biographer, another veteran Congress leader, Sir William Wedderburn.   (Sir William Wedderburn is also a retired member of the Government of Bombay, India.)   Sir William says on page 59 of his life of Mr. Hume : “Indeed in initiating the National Movement, Mr. Hume took counsel with the viceroy, Lord Dufferin; and whereas he was himself disposed to begin his reform propaganda on the social side, it was apparently by Lord Dufferin’s adznce that he took up the work of political organisation as the first matter to be dealt with.” We have no hesitation in accepting the accuracy of the statement made by Sir William Wedderburn as to what Lord Dufferin told Mr. Hume, because we have no doubt of Mr. Hume’s sincerity of purpose. Lord Dufferin did evidently tell Mr. Hume that “as head of the Government, he had found the greatest difficulty in ascertaining the real wishes of the people; and that for purposes of administration it would be a public benefit, if there existed some responsible organisation through which the Government might be kept informed regarding the best Indian public opinion.” Sir William Wedderburn assures us that “ these kindly counsels (i. e., those given by Lord Dufferin) were received with grateful appreciation by all concerned,” and “indeed so cordial were the relations” between the officials and the Congress leaders that “Lord Dufferin was approached with a view to the first Congress being held under the presidency of Lord Reay, then Governor of Bombay.” We are told that Lord Dufferin welcomed the proposal as showing the desire of the Congress to work in complete harmony with the Government, but he saw many difficulties in accepting the proposal, and so the idea was abandoned. “None the less the first Congress was opened with the friendly sympathy of the highest authorities.”

Hume, a Lover of Liberty

It is obvious that when Lord Dufferin expected a political organisation to represent the best Indian opinion, it was far from his mind to suggest an organisation that would demand parliamentary government for India, or self-government even on colonial lines. What he evidently aimed at was a sort of an innocuous association which should serve more as a “safety valve” than as a genuine Nationalist organisation for national purposes. Mr. Hume may have meant more. He was a lover of liberty and wanted political liberty for India under the cages of the British crown. He was an English patriot and as such he wanted the continuance of British connection with India. He saw danger to British rule in discontent going underground, and one of his objects in establishing the Congress was to save British rule in India from an impending calamity of the gravest kind which he thought was threatening it at that time. In his reply to Sir Auckland Colvin,( Sir Auckland Colvin was the Lieutenant Governor of the then North Western Provinces (now the United Province of Agra and Oudh). he admitted that “a safety valve for the escape of great and growing forces generated by” British “connection, was urgently needed, and no more efficacious safety valve than” the “Congress movement could possibly be devised.” This correspondence between Sir Auckland Colvin, then Lieutenant Governor of the United Provinces, and Mr. Hume, reveals the whole genesis of the Congress movement, and is so clear and illuminating that no student of Indian politics can afford to neglect it.

It leaves no doubt whatsoever that the immediate motive which underlay the idea of starting the Congress was to save the Empire from “the danger” that loomed ahead “tremendous in the immediate future,” “the misery of the masses acted on by the bitter resentment of individuals among the educated class.” In the words of Mr. Hume, “no choice was left to those who gave the primary impetus to the movement. The ferment, the creation of Western ideas, education, invention, and appliances, was at work with a rapidly increasing intensity, and it became of paramount importance to find for its products an overt and constitutional channel for discharge, instead of leaving them to fester as they had already commenced to do, under the surface.” Mr. Hume further adds that though “ in certain provinces and from certain points of view the movement was premature, yet from the most important point of view, the future maintenance of the integrity of the British Empire, the real question when the Congress started, was, not is it premature, but is it too late? will the country now accept it?” Indeed, by that test, the events have proved that the Indian National Congress has been a great success, and that either Mr. Hume’s reading of the political situation was exaggerated, or that his remedy has been amply justified.

Congress to Save British Empire from Danger

But one thing is clear, that the Congress was started more with the object of saving the British Empire from danger than with that of winning political liberty for India. The interests of the British Empire were primary and those of India only secondary, and no one can say that the Congress has not been true to that ideal. It might be said with justice and reason that the founders of the Indian National Congress considered the maintenance of British rule in India of vital importance to India herself, and therefore were anxious to do everything in their power, not only to save that rule from any danger that threatened it, but even to strengthen it ; that with them the redress of political grievances and the political advance of India was only a by-product and of secondary importance. If so, the Congress has been true to its ideal, and no one can find fault with it.

On the strength of an illuminating memorandum found among his papers, Hume’s biographer has stated the nature of the evidence that “convinced” Mr. Hume at the time (i. e. about 15 months before Lord Lytton left India) that the British were “in immediate danger of a terrible outbreak.” We will give it in Mr. Hume’s own words.

“I was shown seven large volumes (corresponding to a certain mode of dividing the country, excluding Burma, Assam, and some minor tracts) containing a vast number of entries; English abstracts or translations — longer or shorter — of vernacular reports or communications of one kind or another, all arranged according to districts (not identical with ours), sub-districts, sub-divisions, and the cities, towns and villages included in these. The number of these entries was enormous; there were said, at the time, to be communications from over thirty thousand different reporters. I did not count them, they seemed countless; but in regard to the towns and villages of one district of the Northwest Provinces with which I possess a peculiarly intimate acquaintance — a troublesome part of the country, no doubt — there were nearly three hundred entries, a good number of which I could partially verify, as to the names of the people, etc. “He mentions that he had the volumes in his possession only for about a week; into six of them he only dipped; but he closely examined one covering the greater portion of the Northwest Provinces, Oudh, Behar, parts of Bundelkund and parts of the Punjab; and so far as possible verified the entries referring to those districts with which he had special personal acquaintance. Many of the entries reported conversations between men of the lowest classes,( The quotations from Hume are taken out of W. Wedderburn’s Allan Octavian Hume, the parts enclosed in parenthesis are Wedderburn’s )  “ all going to show that these poor men were pervaded with a sense of the hopelessness of the existing state of affairs; that they were convinced that they would starve and die, and that they wanted to do something, and stand by each other, and that something meant violence,” (for innumerable entries referred to the secretion of old swords, spears and matchlocks, which would be ready when required. It was not supposed that the immediate result, in its initial stages, would be a revolt against the Government, or a revolt at all in the proper sense of the word. What was predicted was a sudden violent outbreak of sporadic crimes, murders of obnoxious persons, robbery of bankers, looting of bazaars). “ In the existing state of the lowest half-starving classes, it was considered that the first few crimes would be the signal for hundreds of similar ones, and for a general development of lawlessness, paralysing the authorities and the respectable classes. It was considered also, that everywhere the small bands would begin to coalesce into large ones, like drops of water on a leaf; that all the bad characters in the country would join, and that very soon after the bands obtained formidable proportions, a certain small number of the educated classes, at the time desperately, perhaps, unreasonably, bitter against the Government, would join the movement, assume here and there the lead, give the outbreak cohesion, and direct it as a national revolt.”

To this, Sir William Wedderburn adds further from his own personal knowledge : ‘ The forecast of trouble throughout India was in exact accordance with what actually occurred, under my own observation, in the Bombay Presidency, in connection with the Agrarian rising known as the Deccan riots. These began with sporadic gang robberies and attacks on the money lenders, until the bands of dacoits, combining together, became too strong for the police; and the whole military force at Poona, horse, foot, and artillery, had to take the field against them. Roaming through the jungle tracts of the Western Ghauts, these bands dispersed in the presence of military forces, only to reunite immediately at some convenient point ; and from the hill stations of Mahableshwar and Matheran we could at night see the light of their campfires in all directions. A leader from the more instructed class was found, calling himself Sivaji, the Second, who addressed challenges to the Government, offered a reward of 500 rupees for the head of H. E. Sir Richard Temple (then Governor of Bombay), and claimed to lead a national revolt upon the lines on which the Mahratta power had originally been founded.”

So in the words of these two leaders, the immediate motive of the Congress was to save the British Empire from this danger. There is, however, one difficulty in believing outright that this was the immediate reason of the birth of the Congress. Mr. Hume is said to have seen this evidence at the time he was in the service of the Government, viz., fifteen months before Lord Lytton left India. Between then and the first meeting of the Congress in 1885 intervened a period of about seven years. During this time Lord Ripon was viceroy for five years. The idea of starting a political organisation on the lines of the Congress is said to have originated with Lord Dufferin.

This is a little inconsistent with the theory that the Congress was founded out of fear of a political out- break and only in the nature of a safety valve. Nor is the latter theory consistent with Mr. Hume’s first political manifesto addressed to the graduates of the Calcutta University in March, 1883. This document is so manly in its outspokenness, so true in its principles, that we will quote the whole of it (or at least as much of it as is given in Mr. Hume’s biography). Addressing the graduates of the university, Mr. Hume said : ” Constituting, as you do, a large body of the most highly educated Indians, you should, in the natural order of things, constitute also the most important source of all mental, moral, social, and political progress in India. Whether in the individual or the nation, all vital progress must spring from within, and it is to you, her most cultured and enlightened minds, her most favoured sons, that your country must look for the initiative. In vain may aliens, like myself, love India and her children, as well as the most loving of these; in vain may they, for her and their good, give time and trouble, money and thought; in vain may they struggle and sacrifice; they may assist with advice and suggestions; they may place their experience, abilities and knowledge at the disposal of the workers, but they lack the essential of nationality, and the real work must ever be done by the people of the country themselves.” “Scattered individuals, however capable and however well meaning, are powerless singly. What is needed is union, organisation and a well defined line of action ; and to secure these an association is required, armed and organised with unusual care, having for its object to promote the mental, moral, social and political regeneration of the people of India. Our little army must be sui generis in discipline and equipment, and the question simply is, how many of you will prove to possess, in addition to your high scholastic attainments, the unselfishness, moral courage, self-control, and active spirit of benevolence which are essential in all who should enlist?”

Even truer and nobler are the sentiments in the final appeal which ended this letter and which runs thus: “ As I said before, you are the salt of the land. And if amongst even you, the elite, fifty men can not be found with sufficient power of self-sacrifice, sufficient love for and pride in their country, sufficient genuine and unselfish heartfelt patriotism to take the initiative, and if needs be, devote the rest of their lives to the cause, then there is no hope for India. Her sons must and will remain mere humble and helpless instruments in the hands of foreign rulers, for ‘they who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.’ And if even the leaders of thought are all either such poor creatures, or so selfishly wedded to personal concerns, that they dare not or will not strike a blow for their country’s sake, then justly and rightly are they kept down and trampled on, for they deserve nothing better. Every nation secures precisely as good a government as it merits. If you, the picked men, the most highly educated of the nation, can not, scorning personal ease and selfish ends, make a resolute struggle to secure freedom for yourselves and your country, a more impartial administration, a larger share in the management of your own affairs, then we, your friends, are wrong, and our adversaries right ; then are Lord Ripon’s aspirations for your good, fruitless and visionary ; then, at present, at any rate, all hopes of progress are at an end, and India truly neither lacks nor deserves any  better government than she now enjoys. Only, if this be so, let us hear no more factious, peevish complaints that you are kept in leading strings, and treated like children, for you will have proved yourselves such. Men know how to act. Let there be no more complaints of Englishmen being preferred to you in all important offices, for if you lack that public spirit, that highest form of altruistic devotion that leads men to subordinate private ease to the public weal, that true patriotism that has made Englishmen what they are, then rightly are these preferred to you, and rightly and inevitably have they become your rulers. And rulers and taskmasters they must continue, let the yoke gall your shoulders ever so sorely, until you realize and stand prepared to act upon the eternal truth, whether in the case of individuals or nations, self-sacrifice and unselfishness are the only unfailing guides to freedom and happiness.”

Mr. Hume was too noble not to mean what he said, and the present writer has no doubt but that Mr. Hume was absolutely sincere in what he said. He had a passion for liberty. His heart bled at the sight of so much misery and poverty as prevailed in India, and which according to him was preventable by good government. He burned with indignation at the “cowardly” behavior of his countrymen towards Indians, and he could not help feeling ashamed at the way in which pledges given and  promises made were being ignored. He was an ardent student of history and knew full well that no government, whether national or foreign, had conceded to popular demands without pressure from below. In the case of an alien government, the chances were even still more meagre. He therefore wanted the Indians “to strike” for their liberty if they wanted it. The first step was to organise. So he advised organisation.

Nor are we prepared to believe that men like Ranade, Tilak, Naoroji, W. C. Bonnerjea, Ajudhia Nath, and Tyabji, were only tools in the hands of the Britishers. No, we do not think so. They were all true and good patriots. They loved their country and they started the Congress with the best of motives. It is possible that with some British sympathizers, the interests of the British Empire were primary, and they sided with the Congress because they believed that thereby they could best secure the Empire; but the writer of this book knows from personal experience how deeply the love of humanity and liberty is embedded in the hearts of some Britishers, and he is compelled to believe that at least some of those who showed their sympathy with the Congress were of that kind.

The Imperialist Junker and Jingo calls such men “Little Englanders,” but the truth is that their hearts are too big to be imperial. They believe in humanity, and in liberty being the birthright of every human being. In their eyes a tyrant, one who robs others of their liberty, one who bases his greatness on the exploitation of others, or deprives them of their rights by might or clever diplomacy, does not cease to be so by the fact of his being their countryman. They are patriots themselves and will shed the last drop of their blood in the defense of their liberty, and in the defense of their country’s liberty and independence, but their patriotism does not extend to the point of applauding their country’s robbing others of theirs. Yes, there are Britons who are sincere friends of the cause of liberty all over the globe. They deplore that their country should be ruling India at all, and if it were in their power, they would at once withdraw from India. Some of these sympathies with the Indian Nationalists in all sincerity, and have done so ever since the Indian National Congress was started, or even from before that time. It is no fault of theirs, if the Indian Nationalist Movement has not been such a success as they would have wished it to be, and if it has not been able to achieve anything very tangible. The fault is purely that of the Indians, and of the Indians alone, or of the circumstances.

Mr. Hume was quite sincere in his motives, but he forgot that a political organisation started at the instance or even with the approval of the rulers whose power and emoluments it proposed to curtail, whose despotism and principles it questioned, in short, whom it proposed to displace and dethrone, was an anomaly; it was unnatural. In their desire to have an easy and unopposed start, the Indian founders of the National Congress forgot their history, and consequently ignored the truth that “those who wanted to be free must themselves strike the blow,” and that it was monstrous to expect those against whom the blow was aimed to bless the striker and the striking. We do not agree with Mr. Gokhale that “no Indian could have started the Indian National Congress” and that “if the founder ofthe Congress had not been a great Englishman and a distinguished ex-official, such was the official distrust of political agitation in those days that the authorities would have at once found some way or other to suppress the movement.”

First, political agitation did not start with the Congress. It had been started before and no attempt to suppress it had succeeded. Second, the distrust of political agitation in India was not greater in those days than it is now and has been during the life of the Congress. But if it be true that the movement could not have been started by an Indian or by the combined efforts of many Indians, all we can say is that that itself would be proof of its having been started before time and on wrong foundations.

Had not Mr. Hume said that “whether in the individual or the nation, all vital progress must spring from within,” and that it was “to her own sons that the country must look for the initiative?” Did not Mr. Hume say in his manifesto of 1883 that “in vain may aliens like myself love India . . . in vain may they struggle and sacrifice . . . they may assist with advice and suggestion, but they lack the essential of nationality, and the real work must ever be done by the people of the country themselves?”

These may be only truisms, but they are fundamental and any political effort made in defiance of them must be futile and impotent. The Indian leaders of the Congress have never fully realised the absolute truth of these principles and the result is the comparatively poor record of the Congress. In his original manifesto issued in 1883, Mr. Hume wanted fifty Indians “with sufficient power of self sacrifice, sufficient love for and pride in their country, sufficient genuine and unselfish heartfelt patriotism to take the initiative and if needs be to devote the rest of their lives to the cause.”

Of course there were many times fifty men of that kind in the country, even then, who were devoting their lives to the service of their country, but not in the political line. It took the Congress and the country, by working on Congress lines, more than twenty years to produce fifty, many times fifty, such men to devote their lives to the political cause. But unfortunately these are neither in the Congress, nor of the Congress. Barring Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji and the late Mr. Gokhale, can be said to have devoted their lives, in the way Mr. Hume wanted them to do, to the Congress cause?. But very few of them have ever been active in the Congress or for the Congress. Within the same period many Indians have given away many hundreds of thousands of rupees, some the whole earnings of a lifetime, in aid of education or for other public or charitable purposes; but the Congress work has always languished for want of funds. The British Committee of the Indian National Congress, located in London, have never had sufficient money to do their work decently. The expenses of the British Committee have largely fallen on Sir William Wedderburn. He and Mr. Hume between them spent quite a fortune on the movement. No single Indian is said to have spent even a fraction of that. The question naturally arises,— why has it been so ? The answer is obvious. The movement did not appeal to the nation. The leaders lacked that faith which alone makes it possible to make great sacrifices for it.

In the early years of the Congress there was a great deal of enthusiasm for it among the English educated Indians. So long as no attempts were made to reach the masses and carry on the propaganda among the people, the officials expressed their sympathy with the movement. Lord Dufferin even invited the members as “distinguished visitors” to a garden party at Government House, Calcutta, when the Congress held its second session in that city in 1886. In 1887 the Governor of Madras paid a similar compliment to them at Madras,( These compliments have been renewed of late. The Congress held at Madras in 1914 was attended by the British Governor of the Presidency

The Congress Lacked Essentials of a National Movement

Ever since then the Congress has cared more for the opinion of the Government and the officials than for truth or for the interests of the country. Again the question arises, why ? And the reply is, because the leaders had neither sufficient political consciousness nor faith. They had certain political opinions, but not beliefs for which they were willing to suffer. They were prepared to urge the desirability of certain reforms in the government of the country, even at the risk of a certain amount of official displeasure, but they were not prepared to bear persecutions, or suffer for their cause. Either they did not know they had a cause, or they were wanting in that earnestness which makes men suffer for a cause. Or, to be charitable, they thought that the country was not prepared for an intense movement and considered it better to have something than nothing. They perhaps wanted to educate the country in political methods and bring about a political consolidation of all the national forces, before undertaking an intensified movement. But with the greatest possible respect for the founders of the Indian National Congress, or for those who a few years ago took up the control of the movement, we cannot help remarking that by their own conduct they showed that their movement lacked the essentials of a national movement.

A movement does not become national by the mere desire of its founders to make it so. It is a mistake to start a national political movement unless those who start it are prepared to make great sacrifices for it. A halting, half-hearted political movement depending on the sympathy and good will of the very class against whom it is directed, consulting their wishes at every step, with its founders or leaders trembling for their safety and keeping their purse strings tight, only doing as much as the authorities would allow and as would not interfere in any way with , their own personal interests and comforts and incomes, is from its very nature detrimental to real national interests. A political movement is mischievous in its effects if its leaders do not put a sufficient amount of earnestness into it to evoke great enthusiasm among their followers.

It is a fact that the English friends of the movement showed more earnestness than many of the Indian leaders. They spent their own money over it and they incurred the displeasure of their countrymen and the odium of being called traitors to their own country. Mr. Hume was “ in deadly earnest.” He started the movement with the good will of the authorities and waited for results for two years. When, however, he found that “ the platonic expressions of sympathy by the authorities were a mockery,” that nothing was done to lessen the “ misery of the masses” and to relieve their sufferings and redress their grievances, he decided to put more intensity into the movement. He undertook to instruct the Indian nation and rouse them to a sense of their right and to a sense of the wrong that was being done to them. In his opinion, “ the case was one of extreme urgency, for the deaths by famine and pestilence were counted not by tens of thousands or by hundreds of thousands, but by millions.” ( Mr. Hume’s biography by Sir William Wedderburn, p. 62. ) He concluded that “ in order to constrain the Government to move, the leaders of the Indian people must adopt measures of exceptional vigour, following the drastic methods pursued in England by Bright and Cobden in their great campaign on behalf of the people’s food.” So, like Cobden, Hume decided that since the attempt of the Congress leaders to instruct the Government had failed and since the Government had refused to be instructed by them, the next step was “ to instruct the nations, the great English nation in its island home, and also the far greater nation of this vast Indian continent, so that every Indian that breathes upon the sacred soil of this our motherland, shall become our comrade and coadjutor, our supporter and if need be our soldier, in the great war that we, like Cobden and his noble band, will wage for justice, for our liberties and our rights.” ( Mr. Hume’s biography by Sir W. W., p. 63.)

Hume’s Political Movement

Now these were noble words, pointing out the only political weapon that ever succeeds against autocratic governments. We are told by Mr. Hume’s biographer that “ in pursuance of such a propaganda in India, Mr. Hume set to work with his wonted energy, appealing for funds to all classes of the Indian community, distributing tracts, leaflets and pamphlets, sending out lecturers and calling meetings both in large towns and in country districts. Throughout the country over one thousand meetings were held, at many of which over five thousand persons were present, and arrangements were made for the distribution of half a million pamphlets, translations into twelve Indian languages being circulated of two remarkable pamphlets, showing by a parable the necessary evils of absentee state landlordism, however benevolent the intention.” ( Biography, p. 63.)

That was true political work, done with a real political insight. If it had been persevered in, the history of the Congress would have been different and perhaps the revolutionary party would never have been born or would have been born earlier. In either case the country would have been farther ahead in politics than it is now. What, however, actually happened was that the Government was at once moved to hostility. Lord Dufferin spoke of the Congress in terms of contempt “as the infinitesimal minority,” at a Calcutta dinner. Sir Auckland Colvin stirred up the Mohammedans, organised an Anti-Congress Association and denounced the Congress in no measured terms, as mischievous, disloyal, and much before the time.

Congress Overawed

Mr. Hume started to explain in an apologetic tone. It was at this time that he came out with the “safety valve” theory. The propaganda was at once abandoned, never to be resumed in the history of the movement. The movement in England failed for want of funds. The movement in India collapsed for want of perseverance, vigour and earnestness. Here again we are disposed to think that Mr. Hume’s subsequent conduct was influenced more by the fears and half heartedness of the Indian leaders than by his own judgment. If the Indian leaders had stuck to their guns and pushed on their propaganda, the country would have supplied funds and would have rallied round them. Perhaps there might have been a few riots and a few prosecutions. But that would have drawn the attention of the British public to Indian conditions more effectively than their twenty-eight years of half-hearted propaganda in England did. The political education of the people would have been more rapid and the movement would have gained such a strength as to make itself irresistible. It is possible, nay, probable, that the Government would have suppressed the movement. But that itself would have been a victory and a decided and effective step in the political education of the people.

No nation and no political party can ever be strong enough to make their voice effective, unless and until they put forward a sufficient amount of earnestness (not bluff) to convince their opponents that in case their demands are trifled with, the consequences might be serious to both parties. No political agitation need be started unless those who are engaged in it are prepared to back it by the power of the purse and the power of conviction.

Congress Agitation in England

The Congress overawed in 1888 and 1889, failed in both respects. So far as the first is concerned, why, that has been a theme of lamentation, appeals, and wailings from year to year. Friends in England, whether in or outside the British Committee, have lamented it in pathetic terms. The Congress agitation in England has never been effective. The Congress has had precious little influence on English public opinion, and although the British Committee of the Congress have had an office and an organ in London for the last 25 years or more, their influence in English politics has been almost nil. But for the generosity of Mr. Hume and Sir William Wedderburn, the Congress office in London might have been long ago closed. The leaders of the Congress have talked very much of their implicit faith in the English nation; they have held out hopes of our getting a redress of our wrongs if we could only inform the British people of the condition of things prevalent in India; yet the efforts they have put forward to achieve that end have been puerile and paltry. There is a party of Indian politicians who do not believe in agitation in England, but the leaders of the Congress and those who have controlled the organisation in the last 30 years do not profess to belong to that party. We shall now try to explain why this has been so.

Causes of Failure of the Congress

( 1 ) The movement was neither inspired by the people nor devised or planned by them. It was a movement not from within. No section of the Indian people identified themselves with it so completely as to feel that their existence as honourable men depended on its successful management. The movement was started by an Englishman, at the suggestion of an English pro-consul. The Indians, who professed to lead it, were either actually in government service or in professions allied to government service and created by the Government.They were patriotic enough to give a part of their time and energy to the movement, so long as it did not clash with their own interests, so long as they were not required to mar their careers for it, or so long as it did not demand heavy sacrifices from them.

(2). The movement lacked the essentials of a popular movement. The leaders were not in touch with the people. Perhaps they did not even want to come in touch with them. Their propaganda was confined to a few English-educated persons, was carried on in English and was meant for the ears of the authorities rather than for the people. The leaders always felt shy of the masses, made no efforts to reach them, and systematically discouraged the younger men from doing the same. Some of them have openly opposed efforts in this direction.

(3). The leaders failed to inspire enthusiasm among the people, either by their own failure to make sacrifices, or by the triviality of their sacrifices. Their ordinary life, their income, their prosperity, and their luxuries were in no way affected by the movement. There were only two exceptions to this, viz., Dadabhai Naoroji and Gokhale.

(4). The movement was neither confined to a select few, nor open to all. While the people were expected to add to the spectacular side of the show by their presence in large numbers, by crowded meetings, by cheers and applause, they were never given a hand in the movement. Differences of opinion were always discouraged and free discussion was never allowed.

(5). A national movement, demanding only a few concessions and not speaking of the liberties of the nation and of its ideals, is never an effective movement. It is at best an opportunist movement. It is mischievous in so far as it diverts attention from substantial nation building and character making. It brings fame without sacrifice. It opens opportunities for treacheries and hypocrisies. It enables some people to trade in the name of patriotism.

So this is the genesis of the Congress, and this alone is sufficient to condemn it in the eyes of the advanced Nationalists. There is no parallel to this in the history of the world. Who has ever heard of a movement for political liberty being initiated by a despotic government, which is foreign in its agency and foreign in its methods?

Reference-

LALA LAJPAT RAI: YOUNG INDIA-AN INTERPRETATION AND A HISTORY OF THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT FROM WITHIN

First Published in 1916

 

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Lala Har Dayal was an Indian nationalist revolutionary and a scholar who dedicated himself to the cause of Indian Freedom. He traveled to many parts of the world and helped to spread the freedom movement.

He comes from a Kayastha family of Delhi and received his education in a mission school and a mission college under Christian influence. He was a member of the Young Men’s Christian Association when he graduated. Then he came to Lahore and joined the government college there, as a stipend holder, where he took his Master of Arts degree in English Literature  in 1903, standing at the top of the list. His subject was “ English language and literature” and so thorough was his mastery of the language that in some papers he obtained full marks. He continued there for another year and took his M.A. degree a second time in History. All this time he was a cosmopolitan, more of a Brahmo than a Hindu or a Nationalist. Then he left for England, having secured a Government of India scholarship, and joined the St. John’s College at Oxford. It is needless to say that even here he maintained his reputation for brilliant scholarship, but what is remarkable is, that it was here that he became a Nationalist.

Apart from his political and patriotic contribution, Lala Har Dayal has contributed a lot in the field of Literature and earned his Doctorate on Buddhist Sanskrit Literature

While in England he involved himself into the Indian struggle for freedom .In England he came in close contacts with revolutionaries and reformers like C.F.Andrews, S.K.Verma and Bhai Permanand.

Such was the charm of their company that Har Dayal threw away the scholarship, declaring that “No Indian who really loves his country ought to compromise his principle and barter his rectitude for any favor whatever at the hands of alien oppressive rulers of India.”

He raised his voice against the British Oppression of Indians and resigned from his scholarship. He returned to India and dedicated himself to political activities in Lahore. He left his family life to adopt the life of a monk. During this period, he contributed articles to the Modern Review and The Punjabi and his association with the Revolutionaries became prominent. He left India for London in 1908 as the situation in India was very tense. In order to propagate the freedom movement further, Lala Har Dayal crossed the borders of Paris, West Indies and South America to reach USA.

He went to Lahore in 1908, stayed with Lala Lajpat Rai, met his associates and suggested ‘passive resistance’ as a weapon of struggle against the British. In this he anticipated Mahatma Gandhi by ten years.

In 1911, Lala Har Dayal moved to the United States and joined the Stanford University as Professor of Sanskrit and Philosophy. He was the secretary of the San Francisco chapter of the Industrial Workers of the World. The body was granted land in Oakland and he helped set up the Bakunin Institute of California there. His association with the Indian immigrants had also been growing. To encourage young Indians to come to the United States, he convinced Jawala Singh, a wealthy farmer, and set up the Guru Gobind Singh Scholarships for higher education at Berkeley in USA. On the lines of the home of Shyamji Krishna Verma in London, he opened his own rented accommodation house for these scholars, this was known as India House. Events in India, especially the assassination attempt on the Viceroy, further fuelled his nationalist fever. He addressed Indian community groups and exhorted them to liberate mother India with the force of arms. During his visit to Astoria, Oregon, Gadar Movement was born with Sohan Singh Bhakna as president and Har Dayal as secretary general. The movement spread like wildfire in the United States with large number of immigrant Indians joining – these included the students as well as the workers. To spread their message, the Gadarites brought out a newsletter in different languages. The newsletter, also called Gadar, talked of revolution and a violent overthrow of the British from India. They also gave instructions on bomb manufacture and use of explosives.

Sensing trouble, the British Government pressed the U.S Government to arrest him. Hence he migrated to Germany and further to Sweden and England only to go back to USA.

The last years of Lala Har Dayal were wrapped in mystery. He breathed his last in Philadelphia on March 4, 1939. In the evening of his death he delivered a lecture as usual where he had said “I am in peace with all”.

Lala Har Dayal’s Nationalistic Doctrine

In the early period of 1900 century ,the nationalist in India do not believe in individual murders or dacoities. They would not murder British officers or Indians in the service of the Government; nor would they rob private persons. They are for organised rebellion, for tampering with the army, for raising the standard of revolt, and for carrying on a guerrilla war. For the purposes of this rebellion or war they may do and will do anything that is necessary to be done; but otherwise they would neither murder nor loot.

To this class, belongs  Lala Har Dayal. It is very interesting to note the development of this man. He is a man of strong impulses. For him, to believe is to act. It appears that within a short time he developed ideas of a rather extreme type. He came to believe that the English were undermining Hindu character; that their educational policy and methods had been designed to destroy Hinduism and to perpetuate the political bondage of the Hindus, by destroying their social consciousness and their national individuality. He studied the history of the British rule and British institutions in India from original documents, parliamentary blue books and varied other sources, and came to the conclusion that the British were deliberately Anglicising the Indians with a view to destroying their nationalism and to impressing them with the inferiority of their institutions, so that they might value the British connection and become Britishers. He thought it wrong to study in their institutions, take their degrees, and otherwise benefit from anything which they did as rulers of India. As we have said above, for him to believe was to act. As soon as he formed the above opinions, he made up his mind to resign his stipend, give up his studies, and return to India, which he did towards the end of 1907. Even before he reached India, he gave up English dress and began to eschew all the peculiarities of English life. He took to Indian shoes, Indian cap, Indian Kurta (shirt), Indian Pajama (trousers) and wrapped himself in an Indian shawl. He would not even mix with Mohammedans and Christians. For a time he was a strict Hindu in form, though not in religion. When his old master, Principal Rudra of the Delhi St. Stephen’s College, called on him at Lahore, he would not shake hands with him nor offer him a seat on his mat, because he was a Christian (he had no chairs). His cult at that time was a wholesale and complete boycott of British government and British  institutions. He aimed to establish an order of Hindu ascetics to preach his ideas and to spread his propaganda. With that view he collected about half a dozen young men about him, who, under his inspiration, left their studies as well as their homes and showed their readiness to do as he would wish them to do. He lived a life of purity and wanted others to do the same. At that time he did not believe in or preach violence. He discussed, argued, preached, and wrote for the press. His writings began to attract attention, and so did his activities, and it was feared that the Government would soon find some means of putting him out of the way. So he decided to leave the country, and in the beginning of the second half of the year 1908 left India for good. He went to England, with the idea of preaching his gospel among the Indian students in England. He stayed there for some time and found out that there was not much scope for his type of nationalism. He also feared that the British Government might arrest him. So he left England and for about two years traveled, to and fro, to find a place where he could live very cheaply and without fear of molestation from the British Government and carry on his propaganda. He was for over a year in France, where he came in contact with the best political thought of Europe. Here he made friends with Egyptian nationalists and Russian revolutionists. His knowledge of the French language was good. He could not only speak that language fluently, but could compose in it. He used to write occasionally for the French press. He can use the German language also. Eventually he came to America and settled here. The contributions that he made to the Indian press during the first year of his sojourn in the United States did not indicate any very great change in his views on Nationalism, but a year after he was quite a different man. His political nationalism remained the same, but his views on social questions, on morality, on Hindu literature and Hindu institutions, underwent a complete metamorphosis. He began to look down upon everything Hindu and developed a great admiration for Occidental ideas of freedom. There is, however, one thing about him that has stuck fast, and that is his hatred of British rule in India. His present cult is to dissuade Indians from engaging in any work except that of political propaganda. We are told by him (that was what he said to American journalists at the time of his arrest in San Francisco as an undesirable alien) that he is not an anarchist and that he does not advocate the use of bomb and of revolver for private murders or for the murders of individuals. We have no reason to disbelieve him. Nobody, however, knows what changes are yet to take place in his views. He is a quite uncertain item. He is an idealist of a strange type. He is simple in his life and apparently quite indifferent to the opinions of others about him. He does not court favor at the hands of any one and would go out of his way to help others. He is loved and respected by hundreds and thousands of his countrymen, including those who do not agree with his views or his propaganda or his programme. Even the late Mr. Gokhale admired him.

Hardayalism

Har Dayal is an advocate of open rebellion; he does not advocate the use of the bomb or the revolver for killing individuals, but he admires and glorifies those who have risked their lives using the same. Neither of these classes is prepared to make any compromise with the British. They stand for absolute independence; full Sivaraj. They know, perhaps, that they have a very difficult task before them, but they have confidence in themselves and believe that the difficulties are not insuperable. They do not believe that in order to gain Swaraj, India should have more widespread education, or that social reform and social consolidation must precede political freedom. They consider that these are all fads, ideas with which the British have inoculated the Indians in order to keep them busy with nonpolitical activities and to keep down their manhood. It is a part of the imperial game that the rulers should manage to fill the ruled with the idea of their own incompetence to manage their affairs, of their inability to unite, of many differences and divisions among them, and of their incapacity to win their freedom. These nationalists deprecate communal or sectional activities. They do not countenance the organisations engaged in religious and social reform. In their opinion all these so-called reform organisations are doing positive mischief in keeping the nation engaged in less important matters and in directing the nation’s mind from the all important question of national freedom. They want to concentrate the nation’s mind on this one point.

Political Freedom the First Condition of Life

According to them life in political bondage or in political subjection is a negation of life. Life signifies power and capacity to grow and progress. A slave, a bondsman, is not free to grow. His interests are always subordinate to those of his master. He must give the best in him to the service of the latter. His will must always be under his master’s will, who is practically his conscience’s keeper. No man can grow to the full stature of his manhood ; no man can rise to the best in him; no man can make the best use of his faculties and opportunities; no man can develop either his body or his soul according to his liking, under these circumstances. Whatever he does, he does for his master, in his name and in his interest. The credit and the glory and the benefit of it, all accrue to him.8 If this is true of an individual slave, it is equally true of a nation in political bondage.

As a proof of the truth of their statements, they point to the history and activities of the Indian National Congress. The Congress people ask for Universal Primary Education ; the Government says no. They can not find money for it ; “ the country is not prepared for it; nor is it good for the people at large.” If the masses are educated, they might become discontented and create trouble for the Government. The Congress wants a repeal of the Arms Act; the Government says no. The people might use the arms against the Government, and that is a calamity to be avoided. The Congress desires that Indians be enrolled as volunteers; the Government says no. It is not desirable to give military training to the Indians. They might use it against the Government. It is not desirable to have companies of volunteers composed of Indians only, as they might conspire against the reigning power. It is equally undesirable to force them on European and Eurasian companies against their wishes, as that would wound their social and imperial susceptibilities. The Congress politician wants to protect Indian industries; the Government says no. That will injure Lancashire. The Congress wants more of technical education; the Government says, the country does not need it and they can not spare funds for it. The Congress wants national schools and national universities; the Government says no, “ you may misuse them.” The keynote of the situation is, that India must exist in the interests of England and Englishmen; or at any rate England and English politicians know what is good and useful for India, how much she should and how much she should not have; in what line she should advance and in what she should not. India and Indians have no right to think for themselves. Anything they think or decide to do must be tested by Englishmen according to their standards and in the way they think it is likely to further the interests of their empire.

These nationalists therefore maintain that the first condition of life,—life with respect and honor, life for profit and advantage, life for progress and advancement,— is political freedom. Life without that is no life. It is idle therefore to think of matters which are manifestations or developments or embellishments of life.

Education can only profit a living being. A human being instructed on the lines on which certain beasts or animals are instructed, can, like the latter, only respond to the calls of his master. The master wants them to salute; they salute. The master wants them to dance; they dance. The master wants them to do any other job for him; they do it. Their will and intellect are always subordinate to the master. Independent of the master, they have neither will nor intellect. Education under these circumstances, they maintain, is a degrading- of human faculties, and a travesty. In their opinion it would be best for their people to remain uneducated, rather than be educated only for the benefit and use of their masters.

Similarly they think that all the schemes for social reform, for sectarian advancement, for commercial interests, are nothing more than so many devices for dividing the nation and keeping them engaged in never-ending internecine quarrels. They consider this to be a misplaced dissipation of energies and a misuse of opportunities. They wish that every man and woman in India should for the present think of nothing else but political freedom. The first thing is to get rid of the foreigner. Who will rule India and how, what shape will the government of the country take, how will the different religions and different interests be represented therein? — these and other cognate questions do not trouble them. They believe that as soon as England leaves India, some one will rise sphinxlike who will establish some form of national government. The time will produce the man. It would be then time to think and discuss how to improve it. They do not mind if the Hindus or the Mohammedans or the Sikhs or the Gurkhas rule India ; nor whether it is the Maharaja of Nepal or that of Odeypore, or that of Baroda, or that of Patiala, or the Nawab of Hyderabad, or that of Bhawalpore, who becomes supreme; nor whether the form of government is monarchical or oligarchic, or republican. These questions do not trouble them. They do not, of course, want any foreign government, but if the way of eventual national freedom lies that way, they do not mind even that. Anything would be better than the present government. The British Government is slowly dissolving the nation. If they have to die, they would rather die of plague or cholera, than of typhoid or consumption. The apprehensions of disturbances of peace do not frighten them. They are sick of peace. Peace under existing conditions has unmanned the nation ; it has emasculated the people and sapped their manhood. Anything rather than peace at such price. The desire for peace on any terms, has been the curse of British rule. It has done them more harm than disorder or anarchy ever did. Blessed was the disorder that preceded the rise of the Mahratta power or the establishment of the Sikh commonwealth. Blessed were the conditions of life that produced a Partap, a Sivaji, a Durga Dass, and a Govind Singh.( Indian heroes.) Cursed are the conditions of peace that can only produce Daffadars and Jamadars or at the most Risaldars( Non-commissioned officers of the native Indian army.) or Kaiser-Hind-medalists.

This is Hardayalism. Most of the Nationalists of the two classes described above belong to this school, but there are some among them who do not wholly fall in with this view. They are prepared to agree that the political question must always be in the forefront, and that nothing should be done which may in any way overshadow this or relegate it to a secondary position  but they do not believe that politics alone should usurp the whole thought and life of the nation. It would not be right to conclude from the above description that the Indian Nationalists have no constructive programmer for the future, but it is obvious that in the absence of freedom and opportunities to discuss it openly, opinions on the subject can not be crystallized.

 

 

 

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph. D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

“Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.”
― Sophia Loren

Before we discuss the psychology of aesthetics, it is necessary to make few things clear about the concept of beauty.

The first and foremost is to define the concept of beauty. From the lay-man point of view ,beauty is the effect one  feel after receiving or perceiving any stimulus, concrete or abstract. This effect can be pleasing or repulsive.

Actually the above point refers only about the effect of beauty, but” what” aspect of the basic question is still unanswered. Actually beauty is nothing but an equilibrium among the various inherent components in anything, may it be music. Painting, literary work , a thought in philosophy or anything in nature including biological structure or social and cultural impact factors.

This topic is certain to lead to furious discussion, as the idea that objects of beauty, as well as their creation and appreciation, are subject to scientific scrutiny appears abhorrent to most people,  There appears to exist a fear that clumsy handling might crush the butterfly’s wings; an idea that analysis may destroy what it is intending to study.

Associated with this fear is perhaps another. Most people hold views regarding aesthetics which they are extremely unwilling to give up. Indeed, the very idea that one’s views ought to be related to factual evidence is usually dismissed, and it is asserted that subjectivity reigns supreme in this field. This, of course, is a tenable view; it is contradicted, however, by the well-known tendency of most people to argue about their aesthetic views, often with great acerbity, always with great tenacity. If aesthetic judgement are completely subjective, there would appear as little point in argument as in scientific experiment. Perhaps the objection to scientific investigation is in part due to a fear that facts may be more potent than arguments in forcing one to give up a cherished position, and to acknowledge certain objective factors which one would prefer to overlook.

However that may be, there can be little doubt about the hostile reaction which psychology has experienced on all sides when it attempted to introduce scientific methods into the study of aesthetics. A good deal of this hostility is probably based on misunderstanding.

We observe that certain types of judgement are made frequently for certain objects, and are phrased in terms of ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’, or some synonymous terms, and apply to various combinations of colors and shapes, as in the visual arts; words, as in poetry; or sounds, as in music. The essential datum with which we deals, therefore, is a relation – a relation between a stimulus (picture, poem, piece of music) and a person who reacts to this stimulus in certain conventional ways. Along with  the usual  verbal response , it is desirable, and useful in certain situations, to record physiological reactions indicative of emotion, such as heart- beat, pulse-rate, skin temperature, or changes in the electric conductivity of the skin.

There is a twofold problem in analyzing this relation. In the first place, the psychologist must ask himself: Just what is the physical property of the stimulus which causes a favorable reaction as opposed to an unfavorable reaction in the majority of the subjects. In the second place, he must ask himself: Just what is the reason why one person reacts favorably to a given stimulus, while another person reacts unfavorably? Possible answers to the first question might be in terms of certain ‘laws of composition’. Answers to the second question might be in terms of temperamental traits or types; thus it might be argued that introverts prefer classical, extroverts romantic music

Inevitably, the psychologist will start his work by experimenting with the simplest possible stimuli – simple colors and color combinations, simple proportions of lines, and so forth. In doing this he is following the usual path of scientific progress from the simple to the complex. It is here that he frequently encounters the first serious objection on the part of the philosopher and aesthetician, who claims that judgement regarding the relative beauty of simple colors or lines are not in any way related to judgement of more complex stimuli, and that consequently rules and laws derived from simple stimuli can have no relevance to what are considered ‘real’ works of art. No proof is offered for this rejection of evidence, other than the subjective feeling of the critic that these judgement are ‘qualitatively’ different

To design his experiment psychologist will provide a series of stimuli whose physical properties are known, and ask his subjects to rank these in order of aesthetic merit, i.e. from best liked to least liked. Alternatively he may offer his subjects two stimuli at a time, with the request to say which of the two is more pleasing aesthetically; all possible combinations of stimuli are shown in this manner. Either procedure will result in an average order of preference, and experience has shown that this order will be pretty much the same regardless of the exact method used for deriving it. From this average order of ‘aesthetic’ merit, certain deductions may be made regarding the physical properties associated with high-ranking and low-ranking objects respectively.

It is here that a second objection will often be made. Psychologists, are treating the perception of ‘beauty’ as if it were essentially similar to some ‘objective’ property like greenness, or size, or shape. Surely ‘beauty’ is not a property belonging to an object in the same way that one might say the color green, or the triangular shape, belonged to the object. Beauty, in other words, is essentially subjective; color, shape, and other properties of a stimulus are objective. The objection is how can one reasonably use methods appropriate to the study of one type of stimuli in the study of other, different types?

This objection is based on an essential fallacy. An object does not ‘contain’ the color green in any meaningful sense of the term; it reflects light of a certain wavelength which some people experience as ‘green’, others, who happen to be color- blind, as ‘grey’. Similarly, an object does not ‘contain’ beauty in any meaningful sense of the term ; it reflects light in certain combinations of wavelengths which some people experience as ‘beautiful’, others as ‘ugly’ or ‘indifferent’.

Some people, would say, there is complete correspondence between stimulus and experience ; everyone sees a circle as round, a triangle as different from a square. But, the facts contradict even this confident assertion. Experiments with people whose congenital blindness was re- moved surgically in later life, and who thus experienced sight for the first time, have shown them to be quite incapable of distinguishing between a circle and a square, or of recognizing triangles and other simple figures. Many months of learning were needed for them to make even such very simple discrimination, and the disheartening slowness with which such learning proceeded bore ample testimony to the absurdity of the notion that ‘ roundness ‘ or ‘ squareness’ were inherent qualities in the object, just waiting to be perceived. Rules for the perception of these qualities had to be acquired, without these rules there is literally no perception at all.

This fact was brought out with clarity in experiments on animals, mainly chimpanzees and rats, where the animal was reared in darkness. Although there was no interference whatever with the physiological apparatus of vision, the animals, when brought into the light, behaved to all intents and purposes as if they were blind; they could not learn to avoid a large, distinctive object they failed to learn to recognize the white-clad attendant to whom they were attached, in spite of the fact that he stood out conspicuously from the uniform grey background. Perception of colors, shapes, and other physical properties is a learned activity, and what is perceived depends very strongly on the type of learning and the amount of learning which the animal – or the human – has gone through. In this respect the perception of ‘beauty’, therefore, is no different from the perception of other qualities.

Now it necessary to inquire into the precise meaning of those terms, ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, so often used to mark the distinction between properties such as color and shape – and others which are not – such as beauty. ‘Objective’ is usually taken as synonymous with ‘real’, ‘subjective’ with ‘unreal’. But we have shown that to call a stimulus ‘green’ is far from being an ‘objective’ description; all that we can say objectively is that the stimulus object reflects light-waves of a certain periodicity. The experience ‘green’ is subjective, i.e. inherent in the observer rather than a characteristic of the stimulus. If it is permissible to link up the subjective experience and the objective stimulus in the case of color or form perception, it is beyond comprehension  why it should not be permissible to do the same in the case of  perception of ‘beauty’.

Here the argument often changes its content, and the term ‘objective’ assumes a different meaning. It is said that everyone is agreed on the experience of ‘green’ when his eyes are stimulated by a light of the wavelength of 515 millimicrons, while he will report an experience of ‘red’ when the wavelength changes to 650 millimicrons. But there is no such agreement with respect to experiences of ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’; one man’s meat is another man’s poison. In other words, ‘objectivity’ is now defined in terms of agreement among observers; where such agreement obtains, as it does in the case of color judgement among individuals with perfect color vision, the judgement is said to be objectively based. Where there is no agreement, judgement is said to be subjective. We may accept this type of definition, but we should be aware that in so doing we abandon the absolute distinction be- tween ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, and recognize instead degrees of ‘objectivity’ depending on the amount of agreement observed among our subjects. In other words, our decision as to the ‘objectivity’ of a judgement ceases to be determined by philosophical argument, and becomes instead an empirical and experimental question, to be settled by observations regarding the degree of agreement found. This is the sense in which the term will be used here.

As an example of experimental work in this field, let us take the numerous studies on color preferences. In order to appreciate their outcome, we must first of all be able to specify exactly the color stimulus; unless we can do this. Now essentially there are three dimensions along which colors can differ from each other (black, white, and grey are called ‘colors’ here in addition to red, green, yellow, blue, and the other chromatic colors) . These three dimensions are known as hue, saturation, and brightness . Hue refers to the chromatic quality which distinguishes red from yellow, or blue from green; it is measured in terms of wavelength. Brightness refers to the amount of light reflected by the color, while saturation refers to the amount of chromatic color shown (its vividness) . Hues are arranged in a circle (the so-called ‘color-circle’) in such a way that colors at opposite poles of the circle (complementary colors) give grey when mixed together.

If we take colored chips representing the various parts of the color circle, being careful to have them all of the same brightness and saturation, and ask a number of people to rank them in order of preference by means of either of the two methods described earlier, we find that there is considerable agreement between different people. This agreement is still manifest when we are less careful to keep brightness and saturation equal for all our colors, but it is much less strongly marked, because judgement are now based not on one characteristic (hue) only, but on a combination of several.

There seems to be a definite physical property in the stimulus which is responsible for this universal order of preference. Short wavelengths are generally preferred to long wavelengths; the correlation between wavelength and preference is almost perfect. For young children this relation- ship does not appear to hold, but for adolescents and adults it appears to constitute a natural law.

If people differ in their preference judgement, then it would follow that some people’s judgement are more in accord with the average order of colors than are the judgement of other people. If, in accordance with our definition of the term ‘objective’, we call this average order of color preferences the ‘ objective’ or ‘true’ order, then we can perhaps call those who agree with it most the ‘best’ judges, and those who agree with it least the ‘poorest’ judges. Alternatively, we may say that our ‘best’ judges have good taste, while our ‘poorest’ judges have had bad taste.

What happens if we extend our work to color combinations – say combinations of two colors of equal brightness and saturation, to keep the problem at a manageable level? The answer to this question is important, for two reasons. In the first place, aestheticians often maintain that judgement regarding single colors are not aesthetic judgement at all ; it is at the level of complexity represented by color combinations that the simplest form of aesthetic judgement begins. Thus a demonstration that what is true of simple color is also true of judgments regarding color combinations is important in showing that the aestheticism’s argument is possibly wrong, and that we may generalize from simple color experiments to more complex stimuli.

Even more important is another argument. There is an important school in psychology, the holistic or ‘Gestalt’ school, which maintains that complex units or ‘gestalten’ are not built up atomistically from simpler units or ‘atoms’ ; rather, the more complex unit shows ‘emergent’ qualities which cannot be predicted from knowledge of the simpler constituents and the relations obtaining between them. Here we have an ideal testing ground for the ‘atomistic’ hypothesis. If we can predict preferences for color combinations on the basis of knowledge of preferences for single colors, and knowledge of the relation on the color circle between the colors in each combination, then we would have disproved the ‘ Gestalt’ argument, and might with reasonable assurance go on with our general plan. If such prediction should prove impossible, then we would have to abandon our ‘ atomistic’ approach, and look around for a different methodology.

First of all, let us note that with respect to color combinations we again find a certain marked degree of agreement or ‘objectivity’. Secondly, let us note that again those who prove to be ‘good’ judges on one test involving color combinations also turn out to be ‘good’ judges on other tests involving color combinations. Thirdly, let us note that these ‘good’ judges of color combinations are precisely those who earlier on were found to be good judges of single colors and their aesthetic values. Whatever constitutes ‘good taste’ in the one experiment obviously constitutes ‘good taste’ in the other; we can justifiably generalize from simple to more complex stimuli.

It is possible to show that preference judgments of color combinations depend on two factors. The first is the simple sum of the preferences for the individual colors ; if both the individual colors making up the combination are liked, then the combination will on the whole be liked. If both colors are disliked, the combination will tend to be disliked. If one color is liked, the other disliked, or if both are neutral, then the affective value of the combination will tend to be neutral.

The second factor relates to the position of the two component colors on the color circle. The closer together the two colors are on that circle, the lower will be the aesthetic ranking of the combination ; the further apart they are, the higher will be the ranking of the combination. Best liked of all are pairs of complementary colors, i.e. colors exactly opposite each other on the color circle.

If we combine these two factors – liking of the individual colors, and knowledge of their separation on the color circle – then we can predict with very great accuracy indeed the aesthetic ranking of the color combination.

Fortunately there exist tests constructed for the express purpose of obtaining a measure of this ability to judge the factors entering into good composition. Great care is taken in the construction of these tests to obtain the best advice available from artists, art teachers, and art critics Here, then, we have rather a different criterion of ‘good taste’, one much nearer to the way in which the term is used in ordinary speech. It would of course still be possible to argue that the unanimous verdict of all the experts who had devoted their lives to the practice and study of painting was mistaken, and that their standards were quite arbitrary ; such a nihilistic view would find it very difficult indeed to account for some of the findings to be reported presently.

In the first place, tests of this type predict with considerable accuracy which students in the arts school make a success of their studies, and which fail ignominiously. They merely predict that he is likely to paint well regardless of the particular manner he chooses, or the style which he finally adopts. The controversy over ‘modern’ painting has blinded many people to the fact that paintings differ in quality as well as in style, and that one can paint well or badly in any style; it is this quality which tests attempt to predict, and the evidence shows that they are successful in doing so at least to some extent.

In the second place, it has been found that people who show good taste in their judgement of simple colors and of color combinations also do well on these completely achromatic tests of composition. This finding must certainly be somewhat unexpected to the subjectivist; it is accountable in terms of the hypothesis that there exists some property of the central nervous system which determines aesthetic judgments, a property which is biologically derived, and which covers the whole field of visual art. People would on this hypothesis be expected to differ with respect to ‘good taste’ in the same way in which they are known to differ with respect to acuity of vision, ranging from an extreme of Philistine lack of all aesthetic appreciation – a true ‘ blindness’ to all that is beautiful – to the other extreme of almost instinctive appreciation of the good and beautiful, and abhorrence of the bad and ugly.  This appears to be the only hypothesis to account for all the facts, and it is scientifically valuable in that verification or disproof can be very easily arranged. One deduction, for instance, might be that this ability should be very strongly determined by heredity.

Another deduction might be that a person who showed good taste (as defined) with respect to one type of visual art should also show good taste with respect to any other type of visual art. This deduction has been verified by constructing tests involving a great variety of different types of visual stimuli – portraits, landscape paintings, book-bindings, silverware, statues, landscape photographs, carpets, and many more. In each case it was found that the person showing good taste on one test tended also to show good taste on the others, just as predicted by our hypothesis.

It might be argued, this agreement may be due entirely to intelligence; the more intelligent may also be the more ‘artistic’, and perhaps the more knowledgeable regarding aesthetic values. This hypothesis falls to the ground because intelligence correlates only to a very slight extent with ‘good taste’; certainly the correlation is much too low to account for the findings.

A more reasonable hypothesis might be one which referred the observed correlations to cultural factors entirely; the argument might run something like this. A person who is knowledgeable with respect to current views about the aesthetic value of certain paintings would also be knowledgeable with respect to current views about the aesthetic value of different types of carpets, or statues. Thus the tests might merely measure ‘cultural knowledge’, rather than something more fundamental.

This point should not be stretched too far; it certainly is not denied that cultural influences have very great importance indeed. When we look at the factors which determine the judgments of many people in the field of art, we find that some of these factors are not of an aesthetic nature at all. The monetary value of the picture, its fame, and many other extraneous considerations determine what people will say when asked : ‘ Do you like this picture? ‘ But the psychologist – no more than the aesthetician and the philosopher – is not particularly interested in these irrelevant factors; he wishes to isolate the determinants of genuinely aesthetic responses. In order to do that he has to select his material carefully, so that considerations of the type described cannot influence his subjects. Such control of irrelevant factors is absolutely essential ; without it we would be lost in a welter of contradictory and non-aesthetic determinants.

We cannot neglect such important factors as those associated with the Ancient vs. Modern controversy? The answer is surely that we cannot neglect them in any orderly description of the whole of aesthetic appreciation, but that we must pass them by in our attempt to isolate and measure one particular aspect of aesthetics, namely the qualitative one, which appears to be largely independent of the controversy .What we want to measure depends upon our purpose. If quality and style of painting are independent variables – and the evidence in favor of this view is very strong – then we must measure them independently and in isolation. If there are still other factors, then they also must be investigated and measured, each in its turn.

In actual fact, measurement of style preferences is very much easier than measurement of quality judgments. The usual method has been to select sets of two pictures, both of which depict a similar scene, a windmill, say, or a waterfall ; one of these is taken from the paintings of a well-known modern painter, the other from the paintings of an equally well-known classical painter. In this way we may hope to keep under control interest in the subject-matter, the quality of the painting, and the acceptability of the artist’s name; preference judgments as between the two paintings should then be strictly a measure of ‘style’ preferences. Studies along these lines have shown fairly convincingly that these preferences are related to temperament; introverts tend to prefer the older, extraverts the more modern works.

It may be said, in a way, to have taken the average order of preference of the population as our standard of ‘good taste’. This motion is so alien to the most cherished tenets of aestheticians and philosophers that it is liable to be ridiculed on irrelevant grounds.

This criticism misses the whole point of the argument. The average rank order of works of art is a good criterion of excellence only under carefully specified conditions’, all irrelevant and extraneous factors must first be ruled out before we can accept the average judgement as having any value at all. The usefulness and value of an average in science depend entirely on the question asked, the conditions of the experiment, and the precise nature of the figures averaged; under appropriate conditions.Criticisms of the notion that the average ranking of aesthetic objects can furnish us with an acceptable criterion of aesthetic value are usually based on examples in which all the rules for obtaining a meaningful average are broken; this may make for a good knock-about argument, but it does not help much in the search for scientific criteria of ‘ beauty.

One last point should be considered. In addition to general ‘good taste’ and style preferences, aesthetic judgments are often determined by highly individualistic and idiosyncratic factors.These are extraneous factors which may be of interest in themselves, but which do not affect the determination of our average order; being specific to one individual, they tend to cancel out over large numbers. Essentially, this type of preference determinant is non-aesthetic in nature, being mainly based on associations with particular events which have brought happiness or pain to the individual concerned.

On the whole, we may say that experimental work in aesthetics has unearthed a number of facts which cannot be disregarded by anyone interested in the problem of the formation of aesthetic judgement, and that these facts all point with remarkable unanimity to a theory of aesthetics which is firmly anchored in biology and derives judgments of ‘beauty  from inherited properties of the central nervous system. Over-simplified and inadequate to deal with the tremendous complexities of great works of art?

It would be useless to review the whole history of attempts of this kind, but we must mention one psychologist who may be said to have elevated the study of aesthetics into a scientific discipline. Fechner was particularly interested in the experimental determination of preferences for proportions, and tried to relate these to a well-known aesthetic doctrine; namely, that of the golden section. This section of a linear segment is that which divides it into two segments in such a way that the longer segment is the mean proportional between the shorter segment and the whole segment. Fechner’s particular interest concentrated in the so-called golden rectangle’, i.e. a rectangle whose sides are in the ratio of the golden section. These rectangles, with the ratio of the longer to the shorter side of 1-618, or very nearly 8 to 5, were supposed to have some occult beauty by philosophers and aestheticians, which made them quite outstandingly superior to other types of rectangles.

Experimental work by Fechner, and many of his successors, has shown that rectangles having proportions some- what similar to the ‘golden rectangle’ are indeed well liked. It has also been found, however, that the exact proportion of the sides required by the alleged law is not conspicuously superior to neighbouring ratios, and, in fact, it is often found to be inferior to them. Thus, there appears nothing very occult or mystic about this ratio, and the general theory endowing it with special beauty must remain very suspect.

In addition, there is some evidence to suggest that practice and familiarity also play a part in determining a person’s appreciation Apparently, familiarity itself must be counted as an additional order element in the formula,so that simple repetition, of viewing, or hearing, may change the aesthetic measure of a given object. These additional complications can all be taken into account in the final formula, of course.

Unfortunately, there is at present little interest among psychologists in the experimental study of aesthetics, and the very promising beginning made in the fields of colour preferences and the aesthetic measure are not likely to be followed up on a sufficient scale to make rapid progress in this very difficult field likely.

Throughout we have been concerning ourselves with formal aspects of art. These have always been of major interest to psychologists because they alone lend themselves easily to measurement and, hence, to the formulation of laws and the accumulation of experimental evidence so desirable when exact statements of relationship are required. However, rightly or wrongly, the man in the street, the literary critic, and the artist have usually shown much more interest in a rather different kind of analysis. This type of analysis deals with content rather than with form. It is subjective rather than objective. It does not make exact statements in a numerical form, but rather tries to convey impressions by means of words. These features, which render it somewhat suspect to the scientist, make it much more readily acceptable to a wide variety of people who are more interested in the humanities than in science, and who do not look kindly upon any attempt to make aesthetic experiences amenable to scientific laws.

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mankind has always been interested in dreams, and many attempts have been made to interpret the meaning of them. The reasons for this interest are not difficult to find. Dreams are odd and striking phenomena, similar to waking thought in some ways, but quite dissimilar in others. The objects which enter into the dream are usually everyday kinds of objects; similarly, the place where the dream occurs is usually a familiar one. Yet what happens in the dream is often quite unlike the happenings of everyday life. People may change into each other or into animals; the dreamer may be wafted through the centuries or across the oceans in no time at all, and the most frightful and wonderful events may happen to him.

In addition, dreams often have a very strong emotional content. This is obvious enough in the case of the nightmare, but even in the case of more ordinary dreams, strong emotions, both pleasant and more usually unpleasant, may be called forth.

Factual information is quite scant. When large numbers of dreams of people are examined, the settings in which the dreams occur, the characters appearing in them, the actions through which they go, and the emotions which they betray. Most dreams have some fairly definite setting, where the dreamer is in a conveyance such as an automobile, a train, an airplane, a boat or is walking along a street or road. Few dreams are set in recreational surroundings: amusement parks, at dances and parties, on the beach, watching sports events, and so on. More frequent than any of these settings, however, is the house or rooms in a house; Apparently the living-room is – the most popular, followed in turn by bedroom, kitchen, stairway, basement, bathroom, dining-room, and hall. Another are set in rural and out-of-doors surroundings. Men’s dreams tend to occur more frequently in out-of-door surroundings, women’s more frequently indoors. The remainindreams are difficult to classify with respect to their settings.

By taking into account the setting, Psychoanalysts often try to interpret certain aspects of the dream. The dream occurs in a conveyance, for instance, is interpreted in terms of the fact that the dreamer is going somewhere, is on the move; movement represents ideas such as ambition, fleeing from something, progress and achievement, breaking family ties, and so forth. Trains, automobiles, and other vehicles are instruments of power, and are thus interpreted as symbols for the vital energy of one’s instinctual impulses, particularly those of sex.

Recreational settings are usually sensual in character, being concerned with pleasure and fun, and imply an orientation towards pleasure rather than work.

A symbolic interpretation of this kind may be even more highly specialized; thus a basement is supposed to be a place where base deeds are committed, or it may represent base unconscious impulses. We shall be concerned with the validity of such interpretations later on; here let us merely note the fact that interpretations of this type are made by some people.

All kinds of emotions are attached to the actions and persons making up the dream, as well as to the settings. Quite generally unpleasant dreams are more numerous than pleasant ones, and apparently as one gets older the proportion of unpleasant dreams increases. The unpleasant emotions of fear, anger, and sadness are reported twice as frequently as the pleasant emotions of joy and happiness. Emotion in dreams is often taken to be an important aid in interpreting the dream. In this it differs very much from color; about one dream in three is colored, but the attempt to find any kind of interpretation whatsoever for the difference between colored and black-and-white dreams has proved very disappointing.

In addition to a setting, the dream must also have a cast. Sometime in dreams no one appears but the Dreamer himself. Sometimes two characters appear. Most of these additional characters are members of the dreamer’s family, friends, and acquaintances. Sometimes the characters in our dreams are strangers; they are supposed to represent the unknown, the ambiguous, and the uncertain ; sometimes they are interpreted as alien parts of our own personality which we may be reluctant to acknowledge as belonging to us. Prominent people are seldom found in dreams ; this may be because our dreams are concerned with matters that are emotionally relevant to us.

As far as actions in dreams are concerned, in dreams some cases are engaged in some kind of movement, such as walking, driving, running, falling, or climbing. Mostly these changes in location occur in his home environment. In another, passive activities such as standing, watching, looking, and talking are indulged in. There appears to be an absence of strenuous or routine activities in dreams – there is little in the way of working, buying or selling, typing, sewing, washing the dishes, and so forth. When energy is being expended in the dream it is in the service of pleasure, not in the routine duties of life. Women, generally speaking, have far fewer active dreams than men.

For majority of dreams such explanations are clearly insufficient, and we encounter two great groups of theories which attempt to interpret and explain dreams.

According to the first of these theories, dreams are prophetic in nature ; they warn us of dangers to be encountered in the future, they tell us what will happen if we do this or -that; they are looked upon as guide-posts which we may heed or neglect as we wish. This is probably the most common view of dreams which has been held by mankind.

If we take this hypothesis at all seriously, then a study of the art of dream interpretation clearly becomes of the greatest possible importance. The pattern was set by an Italian scholar called Artemi- dorus, who lived in the second century of the Christian era. His book was called Oneirocritics, which means The Art of Interpreting. Essentially, books of this nature are based on the view that the dream is a kind of secret language which requires a sort of dictionary before it can be understood. This dictionary is provided by the writer of the dream book in the form of an alphabetical list of things which might appear in the dream, each of which is followed by an explanation of its meaning. Thus, if the dreamer dreams about going on a journey, he looks up ‘Journey’ in his dream book and finds that it means death. This may of course be rather disturbing to him, but he may console him- self by the consideration that it need not necessarily be his own death which is being foretold in this fashion.

Few people would take this kind of dream interpretation very seriously; it is obviously analogous to astrology,   and palmistry, in its unverified claims and its generally unlikely theoretical basis. Nevertheless, some scientists have taken the possibility of precognition seriously, One of the best known of these is J.W.Dunne, whose book An Experiment with Time was widely read in the twenties and thirties of 19th century.

We must turn to the quite different type of dream interpretation which is current. This is the theory propounded by Sigmund Freud. According to the Freudian theory dreams do not reveal anything about the future. Instead, they tell us something about our present un resolved and unconscious complexes and may lead us back to the early years of our lives.

There are three main hypotheses in this general theory. The first hypothesis is that the dream is not a meaningless jumble of images and ideas, accidentally thrown together, but rather that the dream as a whole, and every element in it, are meaningful.

The second point that Freud makes is that dreams are always in some sense a wish fulfillment; in other words, they have a purpose, and this purpose is the satisfaction of some desire or drive, usually of an unconscious character.

Thirdly, Freud believes that these desires and wishes, having been repressed from consciousness because they are unacceptable to the socialized mind of the dreamer, are not allowed to emerge even into the dream without disguise. A censor or super-ego watches over them and ensures that they can only emerge into the dream in a disguise so heavy that they are unrecognizable.

The idea that the dream is meaningful is, follows directly from the deterministic standpoint: i.e. from the view that all mental and physical events have causes and could be predicted if these causes were fully known.

Freud’s argument of the meaningfulness of dreams is directly connected with his general theory that all our acts are meaningfully determined; a theory which embraces mispronunciations, gestures, lapses, emotions, and so forth.

The second part of Freud’s doctrine, view that the dream is always a wish fulfillment. – This is linked up with his general theory of personality.

Roughly speaking, Freud recognized three main parts of personality : one, which he calls the id, is a kind of reservoir of unconscious drives and impulses, largely of a sexual nature; this reservoir, as it were, provides the dynamic energy for most of our activities. Opposed to it we have the so-called super-ego, which is partly conscious and partly un- conscious and which is the repository of social morality. Intervening between the two, and trying to resolve their opposition, is the ego(like the servant in between the two masters) i.e. the conscious part of our personality.

Connecting the Freud’s theory of personality and his theory of dream interpretation is quite simple: the forces of the id are constantly trying to gain control of the ego and to force themselves into consciousness. During the individual’s waking life, the super-ego strongly represses them and keeps them unconscious; during sleep, however, the super-ego is less watchful, and consequently some of the desires start up in the id and are allowed to escape in the form  of dreams. However, the super-ego may nod, but it is not quite asleep, and consequently these wish-fulfilling thoughts require to be heavily disguised. This disguise is stage- managed by what Freud calls the DreamWorks. Accordingly, it is necessary to distinguish between the manifest dream, i.e. the dream as experienced and perhaps written down, and the latent dream, i.e. the thoughts, wishes, and desires ex- pressed in the dream with their disguises removed.

For the task of the analyst and interpreter on this view is to explain the manifest dream in terms of the latent dream, Freud uses two methods. The first  is the method of symbolic interpretation. The other method, – of much greater general interest and importance, is the method of association.

Freud uses the theory of Symbolism, very much like the old dream books, Freud provides whole lists of symbols standing for certain things and certain actions. Freud concentrates almost exclusively on sex and sexual relations. The male sex organ is represented in the dream by a bewildering variety of symbols. Anything that is long and pointed – a stick, a cigar, a chimney, a steeple, the stem of a flower – is so interpreted because of the obvious physical resemblance. A pistol, a knife, forceps, a gun – these may stand for the penis because they eject and penetrate; similarly a plough may become a sex symbol because it penetrates the earth. Riding a horse, climbing stairs, and many, many other common-sense activities stand for intercourse. Hollow objects and containers are feminine symbols: houses, boxes, saucepans, vases – all these represent the vagina. Members of the family are frequently said to be symbolically represented in the dream; thus the father and mother may in the dream appear as king and queen.

A more reasonable alternative theory is based on the method of free association. The technique of free association is based on the belief that ideas became linked through similarity or through contiguity and that mental life could be understood entirely in terms of such associations. If ideas are linked in a causal manner, as is suggested by this theory, then we should be able to find links between manifest and latent phenomena by starting out with the former and, through a chain of associations, penetrate to the latter. In other words, what is suggested is this : starting out with certain unacceptable ideas which seek expression, we emerge finally with unintelligible ideas contained in the manifest dream. These, having been produced by the original latent ideas, are linked to them by a chain of associations, and we shall be able to re-discover the original ideas by going back over this chain of ideas. In order to do this, Freud starts out by taking a single idea from the manifest dream and asking the subject to fix that idea in his mind and say aloud any- thing that comes into his mind associated with that original idea. The hope is that in due course a chain of associations will lead to the latent causal idea.

Nevertheless, the idea of using the method of association in exploring the contents of the mind is a highly original and brilliant one, and much credit must go to the man who first introduced it into psychology. This man, contrary to popular belief, was not Freud, however, but Sir Francis Galton. Galton’s name is probably best known through his initiation of the Eugenics movement, but his claims to fame extend in many different directions. He has many claims to be called the founder of modern psychology Galton tried out on himself an elaborate system of word association tests and reached conclusions very similar to those later popularized by Freud and Jung.

Making use, then, of these methods of symbolic interpretations and of association, both discovered long before his time, Freud proceeded to analyse the nature of the dream. He discusses his discoveries in terms of so-called- mechanisms which are active in the dream. The first of these mechanisms he calls that of dramatization. This simply de- notes the fact, already familiar to most people, that the major part in dreams is played by visual images, and that conceptual thought appears to be resolved into some form of plastic representation. Freud likens this to the pictorial manner in which cartoons portray conceptual problems. The cartoonist is faced with the same difficulty as the dreamer. He cannot express concepts in words, but has to give them some form of dramatic and pictorial representation.  In addition to visual images, verbal ones also may appear, and here the material meaning of words may often be associated with a rather uncommon meaning.

Closely related to the mechanism of dramatization is that of symbolism, which we have already discussed. Here is an example which will illustrate the general mechanism of dramatization and also that of symbolism in dreams. In this dream a young woman dreamed that a man was trying to mount a very frisky small brown horse. He made three un- successful attempts; at the fourth he managed to take his seat in the saddle and rode off. Horse-riding, as was mentioned earlier, often represents coitus in Freud’s general theory of symbolism. What happens when we look at the subject’s associations? The horse reminded the dreamer that in her childhood she had been given the French word ‘ chevaV as a nickname; in addition, this woman was a small and very lively brunette, like the horse in the dream. The man who was trying to mount the horse was one of the dreamer’s most intimate friends. In flirting with him she had gone to such lengths that three times he had wished to take advantage of her but each time her moral sentiments had got the upper hand at the last moment. Inhibitions are not so strong in the dream, and the fourth attempt therefore ended in a wish fulfillment.

Another mechanism acting in the dream work is said to be that of condensation. The manifest content is only an abbreviation of the latent content. As Freud puts it ‘The dream is meager, paltry, and laconic in comparison with the range and copiousness of the dream thoughts.’ The images of the manifest content are said by Freud to be over-determined: i.e. each manifest element depends on several latent causes and consequently expresses several hidden thoughts.

The last dream mechanism is that of displacement. It is a process whereby the emotional content is detached from its proper object and attached instead to an unimportant or subsidiary one; the essential feature of the latent content of the dream accordingly may sometimes be hardly represented at all in the manifest content, at least to outward appearances; it has been displaced under some apparently innocuous object.

Now, it will be remembered that the central piece of Freud’s whole theory, the one bit that is original and not derivative, is the notion that symbols and other dream mechanisms are used to hide something so obnoxious, so contrary to the morality of the patient, that he cannot bear to consider it undisguised, even in his dream. This notion seems so contrary to the most obvious facts that it is difficult to see how it can ever have been seriously entertained.

Let us list some of these objections. In the first place, the notion which is expressed symbolically in one dream may be quite blatantly and directly expressed in another. We have a highly symbolic and involved dream which is interpreted as meaning that we want to kill a relative or have intercourse with someone, only to find that in another dream these ideas are expressed perfectly clearly in the sense that we do actually kill our relative or have intercourse with this girl. What is the point of putting on the masquerade on one occasion, only to discard it on another?

A second objection is that the symbols which are supposed to hide the dream-thought very frequently do nothing of the kind. Many people who have no knowledge of psycho-analysis are able to interpret the sexual symbols which occur in dreams without any difficulty at all. After all, let us face the fact that there are many slang expressions in use referring to sexual activities and sexual anatomy, and that these slang terms are only too often identical with Freudian symbols. There seems to be little disguise in a person’s dreaming about a cock, symbolizing the penis, when the very same person would not even know the term penis and always refers to his sex organ as his ‘cock’. Freud seems to have been singularly remote from the realities of everyday life.

A last point of criticism has been raised by Calvin S.Hall, He asks why there are so many symbols for the same referent. In his search of the literature he found 102 different dream- symbols for the penis, ninety-five for the vagina, and fifty five for sexual intercourse. Why, he asks, is it necessary to hide these reprehensible referents behind such a vast array of masks?

Let us see to what extent Freud’s theory is in fact supported by the dream we have quoted. First of all let us take the young lady nicknamed ‘ ChevaP, who at the last moment frustrated three determined efforts at seduction by her boy friend, only to have the success of the enterprise presented to her in a dream in symbolic form. According to the Freudian theory, we would have to believe that the notion of actually having intercourse with her boy friend was so shocking to this young lady, and so much outraged her moral instincts and training, that she could not even contemplate the idea in her sleep, thus having to disguise it in symbols. This, surely, is a very unconvincing argument; to imagine that a young girl, who would several times running indulge in such heated love-making that she was on the point of losing her virginity, could not bear to contemplate the possibility of having intercourse, and had to repress it into her unconscious, could surely not be seriously maintained, even by a psychoanalyst following obediently in the steps of the master.

Is it possible to substitute a more plausible theory.An interesting move in this direction has recently been made by C.S.Hall, a well- known American psychologist. His argument is as follows. The same objective fact – say sexual intercourse may have widely different meanings to different people. One conception might be that of a generative or reproductive activity; another one might be that of an aggressive physical attack. It is these different conceptions of one and the same objective fact which are expressed in the special choice of symbolism of the dream. Dreaming of the ploughing of a field or the planting of seeds is a symbolic representation of the sex act as being generative or reproductive. Dreaming of shooting a person with a gun, stabbing someone with a dagger, or running down with an automobile, symbolizes the view of the sex act as an aggressive attack. According to this theory, symbols in dreams are not used to hide the meaning of the dream, but quite on the contrary, are used to reveal not only the act of the person with whom the dreamer is concerned, but also his conceptions of these actions or persons.

If a person dreams of his mother, and if his mother in the dream is symbolized by a cow or a queen, Freud would interpret this to mean that the dreamer is disguising his mother in this fashion because he cannot bear to reveal, even to him- self, the wishes and ideas expressed in the dream and connected with the mother figure. In terms of Hall’s theory, the interpretation would be that the dreamer not only wishes to represent his mother, but also wants to indicate that he regards her as a nutrient kind of person (cow), or a regal and remote kind of person (queen). The use of symbols, then, is an expressive device, not a means of disguise, and it is note-worthy that in waking life, symbols are used for precisely the same reason: a lion stands for courage, a snake for evil, and an owl for wisdom. Symbols such as these convey in terse and concise language abstruse and complex conceptions.

Certain symbols, on this theory, are chosen more frequently than others because they represent in a single object a variety of conceptions. The moon, for instance, is such a condensed and over-determined symbol of woman; the monthly phases of the moon resemble the menstrual cycle ; the filling out of the moon from new to full symbolizes the rounding out of the woman during pregnancy. The moon is inferior to the sun; the moon is changeable like a fickle woman, while the sun is constant. The moon controls the ebb and flow of the tides, again linking it to the family rhythm. The moon, shedding her weak light, embodies the idea of feminine frailty. Hall concludes : ‘Rhythm, change, fruitfulness, weakness, submissiveness, all of the conventional conceptions of woman, are compressed into a single visible object.’

This suggests that all theories of dream interpretation may have a certain limited amount of truth in them, but that they do not possess universal significance, and apply only to a relatively small part of the field. This conclusion is strengthened when it is further realized that quite probably the person whose dreams are being analysed begins to learn the hypothetical symbolic language of the analyst and obediently makes use of it in his dreams. This may account for the fact that Freudian analysts always report that their patients dream in Freudian symbols, whereas analysts who follow the teaching of Jung report that their patients always dream in Jungian symbols, which are entirely different from the Freudian symbols.

There is one further difficulty in accepting the symbolic interpretations presented by so many dream interpreters. How, it may be asked, do we know that a motor-car stands for the sexual drive; might it not simply stand for a motor-car? In other words, how can the poor dreamer ever dream about anything whatsoever, such as a house, a screw, a syringe, a railway engine, a gun, the moon, a horse, walking, riding, climbing stairs, or indeed anything under the sun, if these things are immediately taken to symbolize something else? What would happen if you took a very commonplace, everyday event such as a train journey and regarded it as an account of a dream? The reader will see in the following paragraph how such a very simple and straightforward description is absolutely riddled with Freudian symbols of one kind or another. Relevant words and phrases have been italicized to make identification easier.

To begin with, we pack our trunks, carry them downstairs, and call a taxi. We put our trunks inside, then enter ourselves. The taxi surges forward, but the traffic soon brings us to a halt and the driver rhythmically moves his hand up and down to indicate that he is stopping. Finally we drive into the station. There is still time left and we decide to write a postcard. We sharpen a pencil, but the point drops off and we test our fountain pen by splashing some drops of ink on to the blotting-paper. We push the postcard through the slot of the pillar-box and then pass the barrier and enter the train. The powerful engine blows off steam and finally starts. Very soon, however, the train enters a dark tunnel. The rhythmic sounds of the wheels going over the intersections send us to sleep, but we rouse ourselves and go to the dining-car, where the waiter pours coffee into a cup from a long- nosed coffee-pot. The train is going very fast now and we bob up and down in our seats. The semaphore arms on the signal masts rise as we approach and fall again as we pass. We look out of the window and see cows in the pasture, horses chasing each other, and farmers ploughing the ground and sowing seeds. The sun is setting now and the moon is rising. Finally the train pulls into the station and we have arrived.

It will be clear that there is practically nothing that we can do or say on our journey which is not a flagrant sex symbol. If, therefore, we wanted to dream of a railway journey, the thing would just be impossible. All we can ever dream about, if we follow the Freudian theory, is sex, sex, and sex again.

The critical thinker may feel at this point that while the discussion may have been quite interesting at times, it has not produced a single fact which could be regarded as having scientific validity. Everything is surmise, conjecture, and interpretation; judgements are made in terms of what seems reasonable and fitting. This is not the method of science, and that is precisely what is missing in all the work we have been summarizing so far.

There is always a necessity of having control groups in psychological investigations. No control group has ever been used in experimental studies of dream interpretation by psychoanalysts, yet the necessity for such a control would be obvious on reflection. According to Freud’s theory, the manifest dream leads back to the latent dreams in terms of symbolization and in terms of free association. This is used as an argument in favour of the view that the alleged latent dream has caused the manifest dream, but the control experiment is missing. What would happen if we took a dream reported by person A and got person B to associate to the various elements of that dream? Having performed this experiment a number of times, I have come to the conclusion that the associations very soon lead us back to precisely the same complexes which we would have reached if we had started out with one of person B’s own dreams. In other words, the starting point is quite irrelevant; so a person’s thoughts and associations tend to lead towards his personal troubles, desires, and wishes of the present moment.

Many other alternative theories could be formulated and would have to be tested before anything decisive could be said about the value of the Freudian hypothesis. In the absence of such work, our verdict must be that, such evidence as there is leads one to agree with the many judges who have said that what is new in the Freudian theory is not true, and what is true in it is not new.

Actually it would not be quite correct to say that no experimental work on dreams had been done. There are a number of promising leads, but, as might have been expected, these have come from the ranks of academic psychologists and not from psychoanalysts themselves. Of particular interest is the work of Luria, a Russian psychologist who attacked the problem of dream interpretation as part of a wider problem, namely the experimental investigation of complexes. His technique consisted in implanting complexes under hypnosis and observing the various reactions, including dreams, of the subjects after they had recovered from the hypnotic trance. The implanted complexes were of course unconscious in the sense that the subject knew nothing about them on being interrogated, and had no notion of anything that had transpired during the hypnotic trance.

An example may make clearer just what the procedure is. It is taken from a study of  H. J. Eysenck carried out to check some of the findings reported by Luria. The subject, a thirty-two-year-old woman, is hypnotized and the following situation is power- fully impressed upon her as having actually happened. She is walking across Hampstead Heath late at night when suddenly she hears footsteps behind her; she turns and sees a man running after her; she tries to escape but is caught, flung to the ground, and raped. On waking from the hypnosis, she is rather perturbed, trembles a little, but cannot explain the cause of her uneasiness ; she has completely forgotten the event suggested to her under hypnosis. She is then asked to lie down and rest; after a few minutes she falls into a natural sleep, but is immediately woken up and asked to recall anything she might have been dreaming of. She re- counts that in her dream she was in some desolate spot which she cannot locate and that suddenly a big Negro, brandishing a knife, was attacking her; he managed to prick her thigh with it. The symbolic re-interpretation of the hypnotic trance in the dream is clear enough and tends to substantiate the fact that dreams express in dramatized and symbolic form certain thoughts which in the waking state would probably be conceptualized in a more direct form.

This method of investigation has considerable promise, but unfortunately very little has been done with it. Realizing, then, that nothing certain is known, can we at least propound a general theory which summarizes what we have said and is not contradicted by any of the known facts? Such a theory might run as follows : The mind tends to be constantly active. In the waking state most of the material for this activity is provided by perceptions of events in the outer world; only occasionally, as in problem-solving and day-dreaming, are there long stretches of internal activity withdrawn from external stimulation. During sleep such external stimulation is more or less completely absent, and consequently mental activity ceases to be governed by external stimulation and becomes purely internal.

In general this mental activity is very much concerned with the same problems that occupy waking thought. Our wishes, hopes, fears, our problems and their solutions, our relationships with other people – these are the things we think about in our waking life, and these are the things we dream about when we are asleep. The main difference is that mental activity in sleep appears to be at a lower level of complexity and to find expression in a more archaic mode of presentation. The generalizing and conceptualizing parts of the mind seem to be dormant, and their function is taken over by a more primitive method of pictorial representation. It is this primitivization of the thought processes which leads to the emergence of symbolism, which thus serves very much the function Hall has given it in his theory.

This symbolizing activity is, of course, determined to a large extent by previous learning. In general, symbols are relative to the education and experience of the dreamer, although certain symbols, such as the moon, are very widely used because they are familiar to almost all human beings.

Until evidence of a more rigorous kind than is available now is produced in favour of this hypothesis, we can only say that no confident answer can be given. If and when the proper experiments are performed, due care being given to the use of control groups and other essential safeguards. At the moment the only fit verdict seems to be the Scottish one of ‘not proven’.

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

The  measurement  of personality in an universally accepted technique is really a tough job. Even since time immemorial numerous efforts are made. The basic difficulty in personality measurement is due to two reasons-

1-     No universally accepted unit for measurement.

2-    No starting zero point.

Even than numerous techniques are developed,. These techniques can be classified into two groups-

1-           Pseudo- scientific techniques-Like, Numerology , Palmistry, Astrology, Physiognomy techniques etc

2-          Scientific techniques.

The scientific techniques can further divided into two forms-

A-Objective techniques- Like, Observation techniques ,  Interviews techniques , Personal documents techniques ,and Questionnaires techniques

-B-Projective techniques- Like, Thematic Apperception Test, House-Tree Person techniques ,  Free Association techniques, Dream Analysis techniques , Word Association techniques and Rorschach ink blot technique.

- The  ‘projective techniques’, try to deal not with certain traits in isolation but with what is often called the ‘total personality’. The typical result of an examination by means of one of the projective techniques is not a rating of a given trait or a given set of traits, but a personality description in which an attempt is made to convey a total impression of the person who has been tested.

The actual term ‘projection’, as used in connection with these tests, is something of a misnomer. Originally, the term was used by Freud to characterize the tendency to ascribe to the external world repressed mental processes which we not consciously recognized ; as a result of this repression the content of these processes was supposed to be experienced as part of the outer world.

As Freud would have put it, having repressed any knowledge of this reprehensible trait in them- selves, they tended to project it outwards and found evidence for it in other people, contrary to objective fact.

While this was the original meaning of projection, the term was broadened and now means simply a tendency on the part of an individual to express his thoughts, feelings, and emotions, whether conscious or unconscious, in structuring some relatively unstructured material, for example  If you’ve ever looked to the sky and saw images in the clouds, then you can appreciate the idea behind the Rorschach.  If the cards have no specific shape (see example to the left), just like the clouds, the shapes we see are projections from our unconsciousness.  In other words, it is not uncommon for children to see bunny rabbits, kitty cats and monsters in the clouds.  These images represent their needs for life and love as well as their underlying fears about death and aggression.

It is in this that the projective tests differ most from the objective tests . In an objective test there is a correct answer, a right and wrong way of doing things, or at least a numerical measure of success and failure. In the projective test all this vanishes. The subject may be shown a picture and asked to write a story about the contents; what situation is depicted in the picture; how the situation came about ; how it will end ; what will happen to the main characters, and so on.

The Rorschach is the most commonly used projective technique.  The test consists of ten white cards with blots of ink on them in either black, black and red, or multi colour.  These inkblots were originally random in design and these have been maintained although much research has gone into each card.

These ink blots are shown to the subject, who is given the following instructions.  People see all sorts of things in these ink blots ; now tell me what you see, what it might be for you, what it makes you think of ?.’

Interpretation of the results is attempted by noting four things;

First, is called analysis by location, where on the card does the subject see whatever he claims to see? Does he make use of the whole card, or does he just see a tiny detail somewhere in the corner?

Second, is called finding the determinants of the ink blot which the subject has used in constructing a response, such as the form, the colour, the shading, and so forth.

Third, is called the detailing the content of the response, i.e. what kind of thing did the subject see.

Fourth is, the popularity or originality of the response is taken into account; some people give only stereo- typed replies, others see highly original and unusual things in the ink-blot.

Few relationships have been worked out between these various categories and personality characteristics. Thus, a tendency to give responses based on the whole card rather than on parts of it is supposed to indicate a tendency towards making broad surveys of presented material, a tendency which, if exaggerated, indicates a person fond of expansive generalities and neglectful of obvious detail. Conversely, great attention to small details in the blot is sup- posed to denote habitual attention to the concrete and a more practical approach. Taken to extremes it is supposed to indicate pedantry and obsessions of thoroughness and cautiousness.

The tendency for responses to be dominated by colour is supposed to indicate habitual impulsiveness, eccentricity, capacity for intense emotional experiences, and in extreme cases violence and flightiness. Attention to form rather than to colour is supposed to indicate intellectual steadiness or introversion. Determination of responses by the shading characteristics of the blot is supposed to indicate a considerable degree of repression.

A whole mythology has grown up around the Rorschach test to such an extent that many psychiatrists, despairing of ever en- compassing the complexities of neurotic behaviour in the interview situation, have grasped at the Rorschach as the proverbial man grasps at a straw, and pay considerable attention to its verdict.

H.J.Eysenck, the famous psychologist quoted an experiment to illustrate the truth of this observation. In this experiment, a whole group of projection tests, including the Rorschach, was given to prospective pilots in the United States Air Force. These were followed up over a period of years, and finally two groups were selected, those who had unmistakably broken down with neurotic disorders of one kind or another, and those who had made a spectacularly good adjustment in spite of considerable stress.

In other words, out of a very large group of people, two groups were chosen representing, respectively, those making the best and those making the worst kind of adjustment. Their projective test records were then taken out of their files and given to recognized experts in the field, the instructions being to say which records would predict good adjustment and which would predict poor adjustment. The experts were familiar with the criterion used, had had experience with the type of task on which they were engaged and, on the whole, regarded it as a reasonable experiment in which they could expect to be successful. In actual fact, not one of the experts succeeded in predicting with better than chance success the future performance of these airmen. They failed when using a single test; they failed when using all the tests together; and they failed when their predictions were combined in all possible ways. Only one single result was statistically significant, and that was significant in the wrong direction.

When we write a personality characterization there are a number of factors which are acceptable to the person to whom it is meant to apply, although objectively there may be no connection at all. In the first place, there are a number of traits which most people think they possess, although in reality they may not possess them at all. An example of this has already been given when it was pointed out that 98 per cent of the population consider that they have an above average sense of humor. If, therefore, we want to write a description which will be acceptable to almost anybody, we would merely have to introduce a sentence like ‘ You have a very good sense of humor’; 98 per cent of the population, at least, will agree with us that this correctly describes them and will marvel at the accuracy with which we have been able to diagnose their handwriting, or read their Rorschach, or analyse their Thematic Apperception test. Similarly, most people at times have feelings of insecurity ; most people feel that their real worth is not always being appreciated and that they have sometimes been pepped at the post by people less able than they. Just fill your whole personality description with universally acceptable statements of this kind, and everyone will recognize his own picture in them.

This truth  has been experimentally demonstrated on several occasions. The experimenter gives his students an outline, say, of the beliefs of graphologists or of Rorschach experts; he then asks them to submit a sample of their hand- writing, or actually to undergo the Rorschach test. He takes the records away with him and after a few days hands out to each member of the class a typed statement of what the Rorschach or the graphology specimen has revealed about each student’s character. The students are given a few minutes to read through their characterizations and are then asked whether they consider these to be accurate descriptions of their own personalities. Usually ninety to ninety five out of one hundred raise their hands. The experimenter then asks one of them to read out his own characterization. All the others then realize that each one of them has been given the same personality description and that what they all agreed to as being representative of themselves was, in fact, an overall set of traits applicable to practically everyone.

Another factor working in favour of the analysis is the vagueness and ambiguity of the terms used. The persons whose characters are being analysed almost inevitably pick out that meaning of a term or phrase which they consider applicable to themselves, forgetting all the other meanings which might not be so applicable.

These two factors work particularly strongly in the case of neurotic and psychotic patients, where the Rorschach is most frequently applied. It is perfectly safe to say in every case that the patient is anxious or depressed ; if he is not overtly so, then it can al- ways be argued that some other symptom acts as a defence against his anxiety which thus remains unconscious. This policy of ‘heads I win, tails you lose’, which is so characteristic of psychoanalysis as a whole, has been triumphantly applied by the Rorschach experts, and serves to make any experimental examination of their tenets difficult.

Therefore we must rule out entirely the personality description as being in any way an acceptable proof of the accuracy of the projective type of technique. We can see why graphologists, palmists, and other self-styled scientists are so successful in bamboozling the public, and why astrologers can still persuade the more gullible members of the public of their occult powers. The fact that clinical psychologists and psychiatrists have fallen for a similar type of trick does not argue too well for their critical acumen and scientific outlook. Frequently another method is used which has become known as the matching method. In this an attempt is made to rule out the many sources of error inherent in a simple assessment of personality description. What is done instead is this. Five patients, say, are given the Rorschach test; their records are then analysed and the personality descriptions resulting there from are handed over to another expert who is also given the case records of the same five people. His task, then, is to match the case records and the personality descriptions. If he succeeds in doing so, then it is argued there must be some truth in the personality description, because otherwise how could a correct matching be obtained?

Bur this method also is subject to so many sources of error as to be practically useless. It is very fre- quently possible to get from the record indices of a person’s background, intelligence, and upbringing which may serve to identify him, but which are completely independent of the purpose of the test. Thus, in one experiment dealing with graphology, which I carried out myself, the subject was asked to copy the questions of a questionnaire which he also had to answer ; the answers were then cut off and the hand- writing specimen supplied to an expert. One subject in numbering the questions left out number 13 and put 12a instead. No wonder he was called ‘superstitious’ by the expert and recognized and correctly matched because of this single adjective.

Another person in a similar study of the Rorschach gave many anatomical responses and was correctly identified as a medical student, the only one in the sample of five.

What is required in studies of this kind is to have the matching done, not only by the expert in graphology, or the Rorschach,, but also by a very intelligent person who is quite ignorant of the rule of interpretation of these various tests. I have found in a number of investigations that by relying entirely on external cues of the kind mentioned, such an independent observer was actually more successful in performing correct matching than Rorschach and graphology experts. Without control experiments of this kind matching is not a safe method to use as evidence.

 

 

 

 

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Ivan Pavlov was a noted Russian physiologist who went on to win the 1904 Nobel Prize for his work studying digestive processes. It was while studying digestion in dogs that Pavlov noted an interesting occurrence – his canine subjects would begin to salivate whenever an assistant entered the room.

In his digestive research, Pavlov and his assistants would introduce a variety of edible and non-edible items and measure the saliva production that the items produced. Salivation, he noted, is a reflexive process. It occurs automatically in response to a specific stimulus and is not under conscious control. However, Pavlov noted that the dogs would often begin salivating in the absence of food and smell. He quickly realized that this salivary response was not due to an automatic, physiological process.

While studying the role of saliva in dogs’ digestive processes, Pavlov stumbled upon a phenomenon he labelled “psychic reflexes.” While an accidental discovery, he had the foresight to see the importance of it. Pavlov’s dogs, restrained in an experimental chamber, were presented with meat powder and they had their saliva collected via a surgically implanted tube in their saliva glands. Over time, he noticed that his dogs who begin salivation before the meat powder was even presented. Fascinated by this finding, Pavlov paired the meat powder with various stimuli such as the ringing of a bell. After the meat powder and bell (auditory stimulus) were presented together several times, the bell was used alone. Pavlov’s dogs, as predicted, responded by salivating to the sound of the bell (without the food). The bell began as a neutral stimulus (i.e. the bell itself did not produce the dogs’ salivation). However, by pairing the bell with the stimulus that did produce the salivation response, the bell was able to acquire the ability to trigger the salivation response. Pavlov therefore demonstrated how stimulus-response bonds (which some consider as the basic building blocks of learning) are formed. He dedicated much of the rest of his career further exploring this finding.

In the later period of his life, Pavlov became interested in mental abnormality. He was struck with the apparent similarity of some of these symptoms to the behaviour difficulties of his dogs ( on whom he conducted his experiments of conditioning learning theory ) and tried to account for them in terms of his concepts of inhibition and excitation

Pavlov followed Janet, a famous French psychiatrist, and classify neurotic patients into two  groups. In one group , are the hysterics, people characterized by a histrionic personality, a certain lack of moral scruple, an overt interest in sexual matters, and considerable liking for the society of other people. Symptoms appearing in the more extreme forms of hysteria are paralyses, perceptual dysfunctions such as blindness or deafness, and amnesia.

The second group of disorders are labelled as ‘ dysthymic’. People in this group are shy and unsociable in their behavior, have strong emotions, are given to anxiety and depression, and may even develop obsession and compulsive habits. Whereas the hysteric’s symptoms find an expression which is easily observable, those of the dysthymic are readily available only to his own introspection. Anybody can observe the paralyzed limb or the functional blindness of the hysteric, but the guilt-ridden anxiety and deep depression felt by the dysthymic may often escape notice.

Interestingly the majority of  neurotics would  be found in a mixed group containing symptoms characteristic of both hysterics and dysthymics. However, it is possible in a rough-and-ready manner to arrange patients in a continuum all the way from almost pure hysteria through various mixtures to the other pole of almost pure dysthymia.

Pavlov was amazed to observe the fact that the symptoms of the hysterics were always of an inhibitory nature. Paralysis involved an inhibition of the motor-affector system. Anesthesia and other perceptual dysfunctions involved an inhibition of the affector-perceptual mechanism.

Amnesia involve the inhibition of part of the cortical systems sub serving memory. Conversely, the symptoms of a dysthymic seemed to him to show evidence of an excess of excitatory potential and a failure to develop sufficient inhibitory potential.  He concludes that hysterical symptoms are developed by individuals in whom the excitation-inhibition balance is tilted in the direction of excessive inhibition. Dysthymic symptoms develop in individuals in whom the excitation-inhibition balance is tilted in the direction of excessive excitation. It follows from his theory that hysterics should be difficult to condition in view of the excess of inhibitory over excitatory potential, whereas dysthymics should be very easy to condition in view of their excess of over-excitative inhibitory potential. Several attempts have been made to test this deduction and results have always tended to support Pavlov’s view.

Conditioning experiments can also be performed on human beings. While it is possible to use the salivary reflex, this is a little messy, and other reflexes have usually been preferred.One method frequently used involves the psycho-galvanic reflex, i.e. the sudden drop in the resistance of the skin to an electric current which follows any sudden stimulus .

In the experiment the subject may be shown a series of words on a screen. Every time one particular word is shown to him an electric shock is administered. Very soon the psycho-galvanic reflex which always accompanies the shock becomes associated with the word itself, which thus becomes a conditioned stimulus.

The relation between ease of conditionability and neurotic symptomatology does not seem to find any easy application to normal personalities. However,  a well-known psychiatrist – C.G.Jung. postulated the existence of a continuum from extroversion to introversion on which all human beings could be placed. From his account, the extrovert emerges as a person who values the outer world both in its material and in its immaterial aspects,  he is sociable, makes friends easily, and trusts other people. He shows outward physical activities, while the introvert’s activity is mainly in the mental, intellectual sphere. He is changeable, likes new things, new people, new impressions. His emotions are easily aroused, but never very deeply. He is relatively insensitive, impersonal, experimental, materialistic, and tough- minded.

Both extroverts and introverts can be bright or dull, stable or unstable, normal or mad. In saying that two people are extroverted there is no implication that they are alike with respect to all the various personality traits which psychologists have discovered. They are alike only with respect to those traits which form the syndrome or constellation of traits which constitutes extroversion-introversion.

It would be wrong to credit Jung with the discovery of this personality dimension. The very terms extroversion and introversion can be found as far back as the sixteenth century, and in more modern times the English psychologist Jordan and the Austrian psychiatrist Gross both anticipated Jung in putting forward theories very similar to his.

He did, however, popularize this particular typology and he made one important contribution to it. He pointed out that hysterical disorders tend to develop in extraverted persons, whereas introverts are more liable to symptoms of the dysthymic type. This link-up of extroversion and hysteria on the one hand and introversion and dysthymia on the other has received ample experimental support.

We can, therefore, extend Pavlov’s hypothesis and say that where the excitation-inhibition balance is tilted in the direction of an excess of excitation we are likely to find introverted individuals, whereas when the balance is tilted in the opposite direction we are liable to find extroverted individuals. According to this theory, then, we would expect extraverts to be difficult to condition and introverts to be easy to condition. This deduction also has received experimental support.

In extending Pavlov’s theory, however, we have lost the connecting link between excitation and inhibition on the one hand and personality on the other. While his hunch that hysteria and excessive cortical inhibition were related was merely based on reasoning by analogy, at least it did provide a link between these concepts. There appears to be no direct link between inhibition and extroversion or between excitation and introversion. In order to do so, however, we must go on a slight theoretical detour.

Actually there are two different kinds of activities which the young child has to learn. The acquisition of the first kind of activity is  accounted for in terms of the law of effect. The young baby has to learn for instance to suck at the mother’s breast . Random movements of the head and mouth, perhaps guided to some extent by the mother, produce milk and a reduction in hunger, A few repetitions enable the infant to learn this series of events and to make use of this instrumental conditioning for the satisfaction of his bodily wants. This may serve as a prototype for the very many different kinds of activities in which what the individual learns benefits him directly and immediately. The law of effect ensures the success of this type of instrumental conditioning.

However, there are many activities which would be pleasurable and rewarding in themselves, but which society cannot permit. In the young child indiscriminate urination and emptying of the bowels may serve as an example. In older children and adults, we might use as an example the uncontrolled release of aggressive and sexual urges. The difficulty of controlling what is often called one’s ‘animal nature’ is proverbial; the miracle is that it can be done at all. Instrumental conditioning and the law of effect do not help us here; quite on the contrary, they would suggest that the highly pleasant and stimulating consequences of satisfying one’s aggressive and sexual urges immediately and without regard for the consequences should be learnt very firmly indeed.

Pavlovian conditioning is required as an additional variable. Unpleasant autonomic responses such as pain and fear become conditioned in the process of training to anti-social activities, and the individual, by not indulging in these anti-social activities, secures the immediate reward of a reduction in these painful autonomic responses. This may be a difficult idea to digest at first, and an example may make the conception more readily intelligible.

Let us take the little brown bear. Like the human infant, he also has to learn two types of activities : those which are immediately beneficial to himself, and those on which society has to insist as a condition of survival. As an example of the first type of activity let us take the provision of food. The mother bear has to teach him that blueberries are good to eat. She has little difficulty in doing this; she simply picks him up by the scruff of his neck, carries him to the nearest blueberry bush, and dumps him into it. In the course of his somewhat uncoordinated efforts to get out of the bush, he accidentally squashes a few of the berries with his paws and then reflexly licks his paws. The reward provided by the taste of the blueberry juice ensures that through the agency of instrumental conditioning he will from now on assiduously hunt for blueberries.

But the mother bear has another much more difficult job. The father bear, being somewhat cannibalistically inclined, would like nothing better than to make a meal of his son. The only way in which the mother can protect him is by teaching him to climb up the nearest tree whenever she gives him the signal that father is coming. She also has to teach him to stay on the tree until she gives a signal that all is clear. Now she can hardly explain these things to the little bear, and she encounters the additional difficulty that he finds life on the ground much more amusing than going up a tree and staying there, very bored and very much against his will.

However, being, like most animals, a good psychologist, she sets about her task very much according to the dictates of Pavlovian conditioning. Picking up the little brown bear by the scruff of his neck, she takes him to the nearest tree, honks very loudly, and then gives him a painful bite on his undercarriage. The little brown bear, surprised and hurt, seeks to escape from his suddenly aggressive mother and shins up the tree. After a while he tries to come down again, but the mother rears up and gives him another painful nip to send him upwards again. Finally, she gives two honks to indicate that the trial is over and that the little bear may come down again. The whole procedure is repeated a number of times, until finally the little bear has learnt his lesson and the vigilance of the mother can protect him from the baser instincts of his father. In fact, so well has he learnt his lesson that when the mother bear finally decides that he is old enough to fend for himself, she simply sends him up the tree by giving the warning signal and then goes away and leaves him for good. He is so well conditioned not to come down without her permission that he will stay on the tree for hours, even days, until hunger pains finally drive him down. What has happened? By pairing the warning signal (the conditioned stimulus) with the painful bite on his backside (the unconditioned stimulus), the mother has set up a conditioned reflex in which the warning signal produces a powerful fear reaction on the part of the little bear ; a fear reaction which can be relieved only by the action to which he has become conditioned, namely that of shinning up the tree. Thus the conditioned autonomic response becomes, as it were, an intermediary in the law of effect; the reward which the young bear gets for obeying the social laws of his clan is a reduction in anxiety rather than any external re- ward. Much the same happens when he is on top of the tree and wants to come down before having received the all- clear. As he begins to go down the tree, the stimuli he encounters have become conditioned in his past experience to the powerful and painful bite received from his mother ; consequently, the conditioned response, i.e. fear or anxiety, be- come stronger and stronger until finally he climbs upwards again in order to relieve his anxiety.

We thus arrive at the point where we consider conditioning the essential substratum of the socialization process. Where the religious person talks about conscience as restraining the evil-doer, the psychologist would point to the conditioning process as the agent responsible for the presence of the conscience in the mind of the evil-doer.

The psychologist would consider Pavlovian conditioning as the method by means of which this goal is reached. There is, in principle, no issue between the religious, and the Pavlovian approaches. The main difference is that neither the Freudian nor the religious approach provides an experimentally testable hypothesis to tell us the precise method by means of which the final result of socialization is brought about.

We are now in a position to link up, as we promised to do, the conditioning process on the one hand and extroversion- introversion on the other. We start out with the known fact that there are marked individual differences in the excitation-inhibition balance, differences which manifest themselves in different degrees of conditionability. Given that some individuals are easier to condition than others, and assuming for the moment that all individuals are subjected to a similar process of socialization, it would follow from our general theory that those who are most difficult to condition should be relatively under-socialized, while those who are relatively easy to condition would be, comparatively speaking, over-socialized. Over-socialization and introversion should therefore, in terms of our theory, go together, as should under-socialization and extroversion.  The experimental evidence is not as extensive as one might wish, but as far as it goes it definitely supports this view. Let us look again at our neurotic extroverts and introverts, the hysterical and dysthymic groups respectively, be- cause in them we see to an exaggerated extent certain qualities characteristic of extroverts and introverts altogether.

Hysterics also tend to share the lack of a strong ‘inner light’, as it were, which serves them as a guide to action. They are easily swayed by momentary passions, by bad companions, or by the standards of any small group of which they happen to be members; while less extreme than psychopaths, they also may rightly be considered under- socialized.

Similar to the hysterics, but even more extremely extroverted according to their test performances, are the so-called psychopaths: these are people characterized by an almost complete absence of social responsibility. Many of them are pathological liars who tell lies almost by preference and re- gardless of the certainty of being found out. Others commit thefts without regard for the inevitable consequences; others again go absent without leave or contravene other rules and regulations pointlessly and in spite of the certainty of being found out and punished. Psychopaths generally seem almost completely lacking in this conscience or super- ego, which is so essential in making civilized life possible. Typically enough they also as a group are the most difficult of all to condition and the most strongly extroverted in terms of experimental tests.

Dysthymic groups show precisely opposite characteristics. Where hysterics and psychopaths try to ‘get away with it’ on every conceivable occasion, and even often under conditions where detection is inevitable, the typical dysthymic not only does not indulge in anti-social activities, but tends to worry excessively over the very slightest infringement of the social code which most people would dismiss with a shrug of the shoulders. Even mild peccadilloes may lead him to quite excessive methods of atonement, such as com- pulsive hand-washing a hundred times a day to cleanse him- self of some relatively unimportant misdoing. Small wonder, then, that what characterizes the extrovert most is to prefer action to thought, whereas to the typical introvert, thought is preferable to action. The stress of the socialization process is largely on the inhibition of action; the abandoning of aggressive or sexual activities of one kind or another. Consequently, the introvert – the over-socialized person, who has learnt his lesson too well – tends to generalize this rule to all activity and prefers to seek salvation in his own thinking. Conversely, the typical extrovert, not having heeded the lesson of the socialization process, prefers the immediate satisfaction of his impulses through action.

This is the general picture emerging from Pavlovian theory and modern research. There are many z’s to dot and fs to cross before we can feel certain about the exact relationships described here in broad detail, but it does not seem likely that the main outline of the picture will require any major revision. In any case, the substance of the chapter will serve to show how personality measurement can be geared to fundamental psychological theories which may be far away from the more obvious type of personality test  . It is in the further advance of such more fundamental measurement that the greatest promise for an increase in our knowledge of personality would seem to lie.

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Ralph W. Tyler’s(1902–1994)   illustrious career in education resulted in major contributions to the policy and practice of American schooling. His influence was especially felt in the field of testing, where he transformed the idea of measurement into a grander concept that he called evaluation; in the field of curriculum, where he designed a rationale for curriculum planning  in the realm of educational policy.

Ralph Winfred Tyler was born April 22, 1902, in Chicago, Illinois, and soon thereafter (1904) moved to Nebraska. In 1921, at the age of 19, Tyler received the A.B. degree from Doane College in Crete, Nebraska, and began teaching high school in Pierre, South Dakota. He obtained the A.M. degree from the University of Nebraska (1923) while working there as assistant supervisor of sciences (1922-1927). In 1927 Tyler received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago.

After starting his career in education as a science teacher in South Dakota, Tyler went to the University of Chicago to pursue a doctorate in educational psychology. His training with Charles Judd and W.W. Charters at Chicago led to a research focus on teaching and testing. Upon graduation in 1927, Tyler took an appointment at the University of North Carolina, where he worked with teachers in the state on improving curricula. In 1929 Tyler followed W. W. Charters to the Ohio State University (OSU). He joined a team of scholars directed by Charters at the university’s Bureau of Educational Research, taking the position of director of accomplishment testing in the bureau. He was hired to assist OSU faculty with the task of improving their teaching and increasing student retention at the university. In this capacity, he designed a number of path-breaking service studies. Tyler first coined the term evaluation as it pertained to schooling. Because of his early insistence on looking at evaluation as a matter of evidence tied to fundamental school purposes, Tyler could very well be considered one of the first proponents of what is now popularly known as portfolio assessment.

After serving as associate professor of education at the University of North Carolina (1927-1929), Tyler went to Ohio State University where he attained the rank of professor of education (1929-1938). It was around 1938 that he became nationally prominent due to his involvement in the Progressive Education related Eight Year Study (1933-1941), an investigation into secondary school curriculum requirements and their relationship to subsequent college success. In 1938 Tyler continued work on the Eight Year Study at the University of Chicago, where he was employed as chairman of the Department of Education (1938-1948), dean of social sciences (1948-1953), and university examiner (1938-1953). In 1953 Tyler became the first director of the Stanford, California-based Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences, a position he held until his retirement in 1966.

Tyler’s reputation as an education expert grew with the publication of Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. Because of the value Tyler placed on linking objectives to experience (instruction) and evaluation, he became known as the father of behavioural objectives. Often called the grandfather of curriculum design, Ralph W. Tyler was heavily influenced by Edward Thorndike, John Dewey, and the Progressive Education movement of the 1920s. Thorndike turned curriculum inquiry away from the relative values of different subjects to empirical studies of contemporary life .Dewey promoted the idea of incorporating student interests when designing learning objectives and activities. Tyler targeted the student’s emotions, feelings and beliefs as well as the intellect.

Tyler also exercised enormous influence as an educational adviser. Tyler also started his career as an education adviser in the White House. In 1952 he offered U.S. President Harry Truman advice on reforming the curriculum at the service academies. Under Eisenhower, he chaired the President’s Conference on Children and Youth. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration used Tyler to help shape its education bills, most notably the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, in which he was given the responsibility of writing the section on the development of regional educational research laboratories. In the late 1960s Tyler took on the job of designing the assessment measures for the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), which are federally mandated criterion-reference tests used to gauge national achievement in various disciplines and skill domains. He formally retired in 1967, taking on the position of director emeritus and trustee to the centre and itinerant educational consultant. Tyler also played a significant role in the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) and its “Fundamental Curriculum Decisions.” (1983).

The curriculum rationale

Ralph Tyler’s most useful works is Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, a course syllabus used by generations of college students as a basic reference for curriculum and instruction development.

Tyler stated his curriculum rationale in terms of four questions published in 1949 Tyler his curriculum rationale in terms of four questions that, he argued, must be answered in developing any curriculum plan of instruction

1. What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?

2. What educational experiences can be provided that will likely attain these purposes?

3. How can these educational experiences be effectively organized?

4. How can we determine whether the purposes are being attained?

These questions may be reformulated into a four-step process: stating objectives, selecting learning experiences, organizing learning experiences, and evaluating the curriculum. The Tyler rationale is essentially an explication of these steps.

The rationale also highlighted an important set of factors to be weighed against the questions. Tyler believed that the structure of the school curriculum also had to be responsive to three central factors that represent the main elements of an educative experience:

(1) the nature of the learner (developmental factors, learner interests and needs, life experiences, etc.);

(2) the values and aims of society (democratizing principles, values and attitudes); and

(3) knowledge of subject matter (what is believed to be worthy and usable knowledge).

In answering the four questions and in designing school experience for children, curriculum developers had to screen their judgments through the three factors.

This reasoning reveals the cryptic distinction between learning specific bits and pieces of information and understanding the unifying concepts that underlie the information. . Tyler asserted that this is the process through which meaningful education occurs, his caveat being that one should not confuse “being educated” with simply “knowing facts. Indeed, learning involves not just talking about subjects but a demonstration of what one can do with those subjects. A truly educated person, Tyler seems to say, has not only acquired certain factual information but has also modified his/her behaviour patterns as a result. (Thus, many educators identify him with the concept of behavioural objectives.) These behaviour patterns enable the educated person to adequately cope with many situations, not just those under which the learning took place.

Tyler’s rationale has been criticized for being overtly managerial and linear in its position on the school curriculum. Some critics have characterized it as outdated and a theoretical, suitable only to administrators keen on controlling the school curriculum in ways that are unresponsive to teachers and learners. The most well-known criticism of the rationale makes the argument that the rationale is historically wedded to social efficiency traditions.

Tylor’s Curriculum Development Model

Ralph W. Tyler: Behavioural Model Probably the most frequently quoted theoretical formulation in the field of curriculum has been that published by Ralph Tyler in 1949.Tyler  model is deductive; it proceed from the general (e.g., examining the needs of society) to the specific (e.g., specifying instructional objectives). Furthermore, the model is linear; it involve a certain order or sequence of steps from beginning to end. Linear models need not be immutable sequences of steps, however. Curriculum makers can exercise judgment as to entry points and interrelationships of components of the model. Moreover, the model is prescriptive; it suggest what ought to be done and what is done by many curriculum developers.

It is also unlike the curriculum of social reconstruction, it is more “society cantered.” This model positioned the school curriculum as a tool for improving community life. Therefore, the needs and problems of the social-issue is the source of the main curriculum. Tyler (1990) holds that there are three forms of resources that can be used to formulate the purpose of education, i.e. individuals (children as students), contemporary life, and expert consideration of field of study.

This development curriculum model means more of how to design a curriculum in accordance with the goals and the mission of an educational institution. According to Taylor (1990) there are four fundamental things that are considered to develop a curriculum, which is the purpose of education who wants to be achieved, learning experience to achieve the goals, learning organizing experiences, and evaluation.

Defining Objectives of the Learning Experience

Tyler remarks, “The progressive emphasizes the importance of studying the child to find out what kinds of interests he has, what problems he encounters, what purposes he has in mind. The progressive sees this information as providing the basic source for selecting objectives” . Tyler was interested in how learning related to the issues of society, and believed studies of contemporary life provided information for learning objectives. He defines the learning objectives in terms of knowledge, communication skills, social and ethical perspective, quantitative and analytical skills, and cognitive/taxonomy. He proposes that educational objectives originate from three sources: studies of society, studies of learners, and subject-matter specialists. These data systematically collected and analyzed form the basis of initial objectives to be tested for their attainability and their efforts in real curriculum situations. The tentative objectives from the three sources are filtered through two screens: the school’s educational philosophy and knowledge of the psychology of learning, which results in a final set of educational objectives

Defining learning experience.

Once the first step of stating and refining objectives is accomplished, the rationale proceeds through the steps of selection and organization of learning experiences as the means for achieving outcomes, and, finally, evaluating in terms of those learning outcomes. The term “learning experience” refers to the interaction between the learner and the external conditions in the environment to which he can react. Tyler argues that the term “learning experience” is not the same as the content with a course which deals nor activities performed by the teacher.  Learning takes place through the active behaviour of the student; it is what he does that he learns not what the teacher does. So, the learning experience of students refers to activities in the learning process. What should be asked in this experience is “what will be done and have been done by the students” not “what will be done and have been done by teachers.”

Tyler recognizes a problem in connection with the selection of learning experiences by a teacher . The problem is that by definition a learning experience is the interaction between a student and her environment. That is, a learning experience is to some degree a function of the perceptions, interests, and previous experiences of the student. Thus, a learning experience is not totally within the power of the teacher to select. Nevertheless, Tyler maintains that the teacher can control the learning experience through the manipulation of the environment, resulting in stimulating situations sufficient to evoke the desired kind of learning outcomes.

There are several principles in determining student learning experiences, which are: (a) students experience must be appropriate to the goals you want to achieve, (b) each learning experience must satisfy the students, (c) each design of student learning experience should involve students, and (d) in one learning experience, students can reach different objectives.

“The most difficult problem is setting up learning experiences to try to make interesting a type of activity which has become boring or distasteful to the student” . He stresses, “Students learn through exploration”. Tyler’s mentor, John Dewey, also advocated that teachers should encourage children to become actively engaged in discovering what the world is like . “No single learning experience has a very profound influence upon the learner,” remarks Tyler .

Organizing of Learning Activities for Attaining the Defined Objectives.

“Organization is seen as an important problem in curriculum development because it greatly influences the efficiency of instruction and the degree to which major educational changes are brought about in the learners,” asserts Tyler. He believes three major criteria are required in building organized learning experiences: Continuity, sequence, and integration. Students need concrete experiences to which the readings are meaningfully connected

Tyler maintains that there are two types of organizing learning experiences, which is organizing it vertically and horizontally. Organizing vertically, when the learning experience in a similar study in a different level. There are three criteria, according to Tyler  in organizing learning experiences, which are: continuity, sequence, and integration. The principle of continuity means that the learning experience given should have continuity and it is needed to learning experience in advance.

Principles of content sequence means that the learning experience provided to students should pay attention to the level of student’s development. Learning experience given in class five should be different with learning experiences in the next class.

The principle of integration means that the learning experience provided to students must have a function and useful to obtain learning experience in other sectors. For example, learning experience in Arabic language must be able to get help learning experience in the field of other studies.

Evaluation and Assessment of the Learning Experiences

Evaluation is the process of determining to what extent the educational objectives are being realized by the curriculum. Stated another way, the statement of objectives not only serves as the basis for selecting and organizing the learning experiences, but also serves as a standard against which the program of curriculum and instruction is appraised. Thus, according to Tyler, curriculum evaluation is the process of matching initial expectations in the form of behavioural objectives with outcomes achieved by the learner.

There are two functions of evaluation. First, the evaluation used to obtain data on the educational goals achievement by the students (called the summative function). Second, the evaluation used to measure the effectiveness of the learning process (called the formative function).

The process of assessment is critical to Tyler’s Model and begins with the objectives of the educational program. . Curriculum evaluation is the process of matching initial expectations in the form of behavioural objectives with outcomes achieved by the learner. There are two aspects that need to be concerned with evaluation, namely: the evaluation should assess whether there have been changes in student behaviour in accordance with the goals of education which have been formulated, and evaluation ideally use more than one assessment tool in a certain time.

Tyler asserts, “The process of evaluation is essentially the process of determining to what extent the educational objectives are actually being realized by the program of curriculum and instruction” . Furthermore, he states, “Curriculum planning is a continuous process and that as materials and procedures are developed they are tried out, their results are appraised, their inadequacies identified, and suggested improvements indicated” . With his emphasis on the individual student Tyler believes that all evaluation must be guided by a purpose and be sensitive to the uniqueness of the individual being assessed.

Tyler  largely determine what he attends to, and frequently what he does . Tyler states, “Education is a process of changing the behaviour patterns of people” . He values the individual learner.

 

 

 

 

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Connectionism was based on the concept, that elements or ideas become associated with one another through experience and that complex ideas can be explained through a set of simple rules.

Connectionism, today defined as an approach in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, cognitive science and philosophy of mind which models mental or behavioural phenomena with networks of simple units, is not a theory in frames of behaviourism, but it preceded and influenced behaviourist school of thought. Connectionism represents psychology’s first comprehensive theory of learning. It was introduced by Thorndike, the most commonly cited connectionist.

Fundamental concepts:

Connectionism is the theory that all mental processes can be described as the operation of inherited or acquired bonds between stimulus and response. A theory that  proposes that all learning consists primarily of the strengthening of the relationship between the stimulus and the response.

Type of learning- The trial and error learning

Connection- Stimulus-response connection, the basic unit of learning, according to behaviourist learning theory.

Stimulus- Stimulus can be an object affecting the senses or an idea/ thought.

 

• Its nature is purely individualistic that means it  differ from organism to organism from time to time  from situation to situation and from place to place.

 

• Stimulus is something causing or regarded as causing a response.

 

• An agent, action, or condition that elicits or accelerates a physiological or psychological activity or a response.

 

• Something that incites or rouses to action, an incentive.

 

Response - The Response is always in the form of attraction or repulsion.

 

• It is an act of responding.

 

• It is a reply or an answer.

 

• It is a reaction, as that of an organism or a mechanism to a specific stimulus.

 

• It can be positive or negative, weak or strong, overt or hidden, right or wrong.

Bond- Bond represents the connection in between the stimulus and response. It is denoted by (–).

Strength of connection- The strength of the connection depends upon the reaction time. (The time taken by an organism in giving response after receiving the stimulus) the strength of the bond/ connection is inversely proportional to the reaction time. The less the reaction time the more will be the strength of the bond/ connection or vice-versa.

Fundamental Experiment Conducted by Thorndike

Figure 1

E. L. Thorndike had a powerful impact on both psychology and education. Thorndike experimented on a variety of animals like cats, fishes, chicks and monkeys. His classic experiment used a hungry cat as the subject, a piece of fish as the reward, and a puzzle box as the instrument for studying trial-and-error learning

Thorndike (1898) studied learning in animals (usually cats).  He devised a classic experiment in which he used a puzzle box (see fig. 1) to empirically test the laws of learning

Thorndike also conducted some of the first laboratory investigations of animal intelligence. A cat has been placed in a “puzzle-box.” The door of the box is held fast by a simple latch. Just outside the cage is a piece of salmon on a dish. The cat moves around the cage, sniffing at its corners. Suddenly, it sees the salmon, moves to the part of the cage closest to it, and begins extending its paws through the bars toward the fish. The fish is just out of its reach. The cat reaches more and more vigorously, and begins scratching at the bars. After a while these responses cease, and the cat begins to actively move around the cage. A few minutes later, it bumps against the latch. The door opens and the cat scampers out and eats the fish. The cat is placed back in the box and a new piece of fish is placed on the dish. The cat goes through the same responses as before and eventually, bumps into the latch once more.

This is repeated again and again. Gradually the cat stops extending its paws through the bars and spends more and more of its time near the latch. Next, the cat begins to direct almost all of its activity near the latch. Ultimately, the cat develops a quick and efficient series of movements for opening the latch.

Thorndike theorized that the cat learned to escape the “puzzle-box” by trial and error. That is, it performed various responses in a blind mechanical way until some action was effect in freeing it from the box. Thorndike postulated the Trial and Error learning to account for the behaviour of the cats.

Components/ stages in the process of learning-

By analyzing the above referred experiment the following components/ stages are evident-

Need:

Every need has a quantum of energy, which force an organism to act for its fulfilment. Need leads an organism to the state of drive (the state of restlessness).Here the hunger in cat represent the stage of need.

Goal:

The object supposes to satisfy the need .Here the piece of fish meat was acting as goal.

Block:

A hindrances in between the organism and the goal, is an essentiality for intensive efforts by the organism to reach the goal. These efforts can also be termed as wrong response. Here the close doors of the puzzle box acts as hindrance.

Random movements:

Various responses in a blind mechanical way until some action were effect in reaching the goal.

Chance success:

Out of blind mechanical responses the success is achieved by-chance. This effort can also be termed as right response. , Here the cat bumps against the latch. The door opens and the cat scampers out and eats the fish.

Gradual reduction in wrong response:

Here the cat stops extending its paws through the bars and spends more and more of its time nears the latch.

Selection of the right response:

Here the cat begins to direct almost all of its activity near the latch. Ultimately, the cat develops a quick and efficient series of movements for opening the latch.

Fixation in the nervous system:

At this stage the cat develops a quick and efficient series of movements for opening the latch.

On the basis of above analysis it can be concluded that-

• The most basic form of learning is trial and error learning.
• Learning is incremental not insightful.
• Learning is not mediated by ideas.
• All mammals learn in the same manner.

Primary/ Basic Laws of Learning

Thorndike first presented his theory in his book ‘Animal Learning’ published in 1968. Connectionism Theory or simply S-R or Stimulus-Response Theory by Thorndike is actually one of the most applied theories of learning. It gave three laws of learning in which is, most widely used theory in education. This theory states that learning is the outcome of the relationships or bonds between stimuli and responses. These relationships become habits and may be strengthened or weakened depending on the nature and the frequency of stimuli and responses themselves.  Learning or a behaviour is formed when  a certain meaningful stimulus to us or have the strong “connection” that we respond to them. These connections become strong and can be further explained by Thorndike’s Three Laws of Learning.

Writing on the subject of the importance of his laws in the action of learning Thorndike says, “Both theory and practice need emphatic and frequent reminders that man’s learning is frequently the action of the laws of readiness, exercise and effect.” Accordingly, in Thorndike’s opinion, learning takes place according of these laws.

1.  Law of Exercise.

2. Law of Readiness.

3. Law of Effect.

Law of Exercise

Practice makes perfect. This is the cliché that could best describe this law. This means that the more the repetition of certain behaviour, more it will be strengthened. Those things most often repeated are the best learned. This is the basis for practice and drill. The mind rarely retains, evaluates, and applies new concepts or practices after only one exposure. A student learns by applying what he has been taught. Every time he practices, his learning continues. There are many types of repetitions. These include student recall, review and summary and manual drill and physical applications. All of these serve to create learning habits.

Connections become strengthened with practice, and weaken when practice is discontinued

Laws of exercise are mainly those of respective habits, as in rote memorizing or the acquiring of muscular skills.

Law of exercise has two sublaws:

(a) Law of use and

(b) Law of disuse.

Law of use

“Whenever a modifiable connection between a situation and a response is exercised, keeping other things being equal, the strength of that connection is gradually increased”.

Connections between a stimulus and a response are strengthened if they are used.

(b) Law of disuse

“Whenever a modifiable connection between a situation and a response is not exercised , for any length of time the strength of that connection is gradually decreased”.

Connections between a stimulus and a response are weakened if they are not used.

Law of Readiness

Proper mind set is the key word in this law. This law states that the more “ready” an individual to respond to a stimulus, the stronger will be the bond between them. And, if an individual is ready to respond but is not made to respond, it becomes frustrating and annoying to that person.

In Thorndike words “When a bond is ready to act, to act gives satisfaction and not to act gives annoyance and when a bond is not ready to act and is made to act annoyance is caused”.

In Thorndike’s the view law of readiness is active in three following conditions:

1. When a conducting unit is prepared to go into action, its work is quite satisfactory because nothing is done to alter its working.

2. When a conduction unit is forced to act while it is not prepared to do so its behaviour is of a nature calculated to excite anger.

3. The inactivity of a conduction unit which is ready to behave, may be unsatisfactory and any reaction may arise is connection with that deficiency.

Thus a series of responses can be chained together to satisfy some goal which will result in annoyance if blocked. Interference with goal directed behaviour causes frustration and causing someone to do something he do not want to do. It is also frustrating. It means that;

a. When someone is ready to perform some act, to do so is satisfying.

b. When someone is ready to perform some act, not to do so is annoying.

c. When someone is not ready to perform some act and is forced to do so, it is annoying.

Law of Effect

Law of effect means that the learning takes place properly when it results in satisfaction and the learner derives pleasure out of it . On the other hand, if the learner faces failure or gets dissatisfaction, the progress on the path of learning is hampered. For example: When a child solves questions correctly he feels encouraged to do more. But if he fails repeatedly, he is unwilling to make subsequent attempts.

This law is based on the feelings of the learner. Learning is stronger when joined with a pleasing or satisfying feeling. It is weakened when linked with an unpleasant feeling. An experience that produces feelings of defeat, anger, frustration, futility, or confusion in a student is unpleasant for him. This will decrease his learning capabilities.

According to Thorndike “Those acts which gives us satisfaction are tends to be repeated and set and fixed in our nervous system and those acts which gives us annoyance are not repeated and so do not fixed.”

Connections are strengthened if the consequence or the effect is positive. In short, behaviour or learning will take place or be repeated if the result of such action is pleasant.. On the other hand, connection between the stimulus and response weakens when the effect is negative. However, Thorndike reiterated that negative consequences do not necessarily weaken the connections; same is true that positive consequences do not always guarantee the recurrence of behaviour.

In Thorndike words “—[to] a modifiable connection being  made —-between an S and an R and being accompanied or followed by a satisfying state of affairs man responds, other things being equal by an increase in the strength of that connection. To a connection similar, save that an annoying state of affairs goes with or follows it, man responds, other things being equal, by a decrease in the strength of the connection”.

Thus the Law of Effect states that:

• Responses to a situation that are followed by satisfaction are strengthened

• Responses that are followed by discomfort are weakened.

Secondary laws of Thorndike’s learning theory:

Law of multiple responses

In any given situation, the organism will respond in a variety of ways if the first response does not immediately lead to a more satisfying state of affairs. Problem solving is through trial and error.  A learner would keep trying multiple responses to solve a problem before it is actually solved.

Law of Set or Attitude:

What the learner already possesses, like prior learning experiences, present state of the learner, etc., while it begins learning a new task. There are predisposition’s to behave or react in a particular way. These are unique for species or groups of related species, and may be culturally determined in humans.

Law of Pre-potency of Elements

Thorndike observed that a learner could filter out irrelevant aspects of a situation and response only to significant (proponent) elements in a problem situation.  Different responses to the same environment would be evoked by different perceptions of the environment which act as the stimulus to the responses. Different perceptions would be subject to the pre-potency of different elements for different perceivers.

Law of Response by Analogy

New problems are solved by using solution techniques employed to solve analogous problems in a new context, responses from related or similar contexts may be transferred to the new context. This is sometimes referred to as the theory of identical elements.

Law of Associative shifting

Let stimulus S be paired with response R. Now, if stimulus Q is presented simultaneously with stimulus S repeatedly, then stimulus Q is likely to get paired with response R. It is possible to shift any response from one stimulus to another.

Law of Belongingness

If there is a natural relationship between the need state of an organism and the effect caused by a response, learning is more effective than if the relationship is unnatural.

Law of Polarity

Polarity deals with those connections which occur more easily in the direction in which they were originally formed than the opposite.

Connectionism‘s Position on Problems of Education.-

Thorndike discussed on six typical problems-

• Capacity-Learning capacity depends upon the number of bonds and their availability. The difference in between bright and dull is quantitative rather than qualitative.
• Practice-Repetition of situations does not itself modify connections. Repetition of connections leads to a negligible increase in strength, unless the connections are rewarded. Practice is important because it permits rewards to act upon connections.
• Motivation- Rewards acts directly on neighbouring connections to strengthen them; punishment has no corresponding direct weakening effect. Punishment may work indirectly, however, through making the learner do something else which may confront him with a reward.
• Understanding- The role of understanding is minimized, not because it is indemonstrable, but because it grows out of earlier habits. The best way to get understanding is to build a body of connections appropriate to that understanding. When situations are understood at once, it is a matter of transfer or assimilation, that is, there are enough elements in common with old situations to permit old habits to be used appropriately.
• Transfer-The theory of identical elements is espoused. Reaction to new situations benefits by the identity of these new situations, in part with old situations, and also by a principle of analogy described as assimilation.
• Forgetting- The original law of disuse assumed forgetting to take place in the absence of practice with accordance with the empirical findings.

Educational Implications of  Connectionism

Connectionism was meant to be a general theory of learning for animals and humans. Thorndike was especially interested in the application of his theory to education including mathematics (Thorndike, 1922), spelling and reading (Thorndike, 1921), measurement of intelligence (Thorndike et al., 1927) and adult learning (Thorndike at al., 1928).

Law of Readiness: Educational Implication

The teacher should make proper use of this law. Whenever we are physically sick or mentally disturbed and at that time if something is taught to us, we cannot pay attention to it and as a result do not learn it.

A person learns best when he has the necessary background, a good aptitude, and is ready to learn.   A clear objective and a good reason for learning sometimes help to motivate students to learn. A student who is usually ready to learn meets the instructor halfway. Outside responsibilities, overcrowded schedules, health, finances, or family affairs can take away a student’s desire to learn.

Law of Exercise: Educational Implication

Educational Implications of the law of exercise is great. It lays importance on the value of repetition, drill and practice for memorizing and mastering of any learnt material. It emphasizes that there should not be a long gap between one practice and the next one because long time disuse may lead to forgetting. Frequent test should be taken to make the students practice the subject learnt.

Those things most often repeated are the best learned. This is the basis for practice and drill. The mind rarely retains, evaluates, and applies new concepts or practices after only one exposure.. There are many types of repetitions. These include student recall, review and summary and manual drill and physical applications. All of these serve to create learning habits.

Law of effect: Educational Implications-

This law is based on the feelings of the learner. Learning is stronger when joined with a pleasing or satisfying feeling. It is weakened when linked with an unpleasant feeling. An experience that produces feelings of defeat, anger, frustration, futility, or confusion in a student is unpleasant for him. This will decrease his learning capabilities. A student’s chance of success is definitely increased if the learning experience is a pleasant one. This law has great educational importance. The teacher can apply it in the classroom situation by introducing the principles of pleasure and pain, reward and punishment. When the student does something wrong and he is punished for it, he will not do the work again because punishment gives him pain. On the other hand, if the student is rewarded for his success or any good work, it gives him pleasure and he wants to repeat the work, making it permanent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V. (P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Spirituality is indeed the master key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinitive is native to it.

Sri Aurobindo

Just to have a proper understanding of ancient Indian education it is desirable to get a clear picture of the educational conditions as a whole in the successive periods of ancient Indian history, as also of the contribution which the Buddhism made to educational theory and practice.

In order to take a bird’s eye view of the general condition of education in the different periods of ancient Indian history,  can be divide it into four periods for the purpose of survey.

1. THE VEDIC PERIOD. (up to c. 1,000 B.C.)

2. THE UPANISHAD-S0TRA PERIOD. (c. 1000 B.C. to o. 200 B.C.)

3. THE AGE OF THE DHARMASASTRA. ( 200 B. C. to c. 500 A. D,)

4. THE AGE OF THE PURANAS AND NIBANDHAS. ( 500 A. D. 1200 A. D)

THE VEDIC PERIOD: (up to c. 1,000 B.C.)

This age marked the beginning of Indian culture literature and not much progress was made in the area of literary and scientific knowledge. Its achievements were naturally less dazzling and comprehensive than those of the succeeding age. People of this period however  make progress in the realm of knowledge. They has “realized that it is the intellectual efficiency and equipment which are “”most essential for “progress in culture” and knowledge.  It was emphasized that gods would be friends of only those who are wise and learned, only those only  regarded as learned who could not only recite the texts but also understand and interpret them. [No distinction was made in this connection between boys and girls; the education of both received the same attention at least up to the higher stage. Ordinarily the guardian discharged his duty to teach his wards so regularly and successfully that no necessity was felt for a long time either for the professional teacher or for the public school. Secular literature was yet to be developed and so the literary course was pre-dominantly religious. People however had an open, free and inquiring mind and were eager to explore the realms of knowledge. Great emphasis was laid on the proper development of debating powers ; boys and girls who were successful in debates were highly honored. Education however did not produce mere “talkers”but transformed its recipients into man of conviction as well.

This would become quite clear from the successful manner in which the Aryans of the age spread their culture and extended their political influence. The Aryan community was a compact and homogeneous, and there was no difference in the educational level of the different classes. Priests however generally used to have specialties in literary and religious education. Warriors and agriculturists also received some literary education but it was not so deep or wide as that of priests or the poets.  They used to devote the great part of their educational course in mastering the art of war and processes of agriculture or of arts and crafts. The educational system of the age was successful in forming character, developing personality, promoting the progress of different of knowledge and achieving social efficiency.

THE UPANISHAD-SOTRA PERIOD. (c. 1000 B.C. to o. 200 B.C.)

This period, can be regarded as the most creative period of Hindu culture, literature and arts and sciences. The foundations of whatever is the best in Hindu culture” and glorious In Hindu achievements were laid down during this period. Metaphysics_made remarkable progress, as is evidenced by Upanishadic, Jain and Buddhist works ; Speculations in the sphere of political thought were original and fruitful.” Astronomy and mathematics, medicine and surgery, mining and metatallurgy began to be cultivated and sculpture and architecture recorded remarkable progress, especially towards the end of the period. Effort was also made to popularize culture and knowledge by transforming the epic of the Maha-Bharata war into an encyclopedia of religion and ethics.

These manifold achievements in different spheres became possible because Indians had still a free open and inquiring attitude. Upanayana ritual was made obligatory for the whole Aryan community at about the beginning of this period This gave a great impetus to the Spread both of literacy in higher education. Learning became more and more extensive in course of time, education in the family became impracticable, and society began to encourage distin-guished scholars to become regular teachers. They used to organise private schools , for “higher studies, relying mainly on the voluntary contributions of students taking their advantage. Brahmacharya discipline was still rigorous. During the earlier part of” this” period,however, there was no dearth of women philosophers and scholars, some of whom used to organise schools and hostels for girls. Co-education was however not unknown.

The present age made its own contribution to the march of knowledge by further developing astronomy, astrology, poetics, classical Sanskrit literature, Dharma Sastra (sacred and secular law), logic, and the different systems of orthodox and heterodox philosophy.

The study of the different branches of knowledge that were flourishing in this age was preceded by a preliminary course in Sanskrit. After the Upanayana ceremony at about the the age of 8, all students used to memorise a few important Vedic hymns necessary for their daily or ceremonial needs. Then they used to devote four or five years to the study of elementary Sanskrit grammar and literature. At about the age of 13 or 14, the student used to be able to understand Sanskrit works on subjects like logic, philosophy, poetic, astronomy and mathematics

In order to get a general knowledge of the culture of the race, they were also required to study the epics, the Puranas and traditional stories. They were further trained to be good debaters ; the ability to defend one’s own position in learned assemblies and the capacity to compose a good poem in a very short time were regarded as the most important criteria of good scholarship.

Among the subjects cultivated during this period, the courses of advanced grammar and astronomy-cum-astrology were very popular. Every school for higher education had to engage several grammarians in order to give the necessary instructions in Sanskrit language, which was the key subject. The age believed in astrology and astrologers were in great demand throughout the country for preparing and interpreting almanacs and prognosticating future events.

THE AGE OF THE DHARMASASTRA ( 200 B. C. to c. 500 A. D,)

This period can be considered as the age of critical reflection and specialisation. The achievements. of the, preceding creative period were critically examined and special systems like the Samhkhya and the Yoga, the Nyaya and the Vaisesika, the Vedanta and the Yana in Buddhists were evolved ; this undoubtedly, marked considerable progress in critical thought. The creative vein however was still active, though in a less marked degree than before. Its activity was particularly noteworthy in the field of classical literature and sacred law, painting and sculpture, mathematics and astronomy. A considerable part of the religious literature was now canonized, but Hindus Still had an inquiring mind. Philosophical heterodox systems like the Jainism and the Buddhism were studied by the Hindus.This led to considerable progress in logic and meta-physics. Greeks were no doubt regarded as unholy foreigners (Mechchhas), but nevertheless their achievements in the realm of sculpture, coinage and astronomy were carefully studied and assimilated, which led to considerable progress in all these sciences.

There was a distinctive setback to the cause of education as a whole during this period. Child marriages became the order of the day. women education suffered very considerably. Only daughters of high^ class families used to receive education during this period. The lowering of the marriageable age of girls naturally involved the corresponding lowering of the marriageable age of boys. Brahmacharya discipline consequently became slack and nominal  towards the end of this period ; the educational system could produce only a limited number of young men possessing a developed personality, characterised by self-confidence and sell reliance. During this period Upanayana of Kshatriyas and Vaishyas first became a mere formality. This development gave a severe blow to the general and cultural education of the warrior and the farmer, the trader and the artisan, and  reduced their general efficiency. Their education gradually become too much specialized and narrow .There was too much of specialization in logic and philosophy, astronomy and mathematics ; there was no broad-based secondary course of education. The “educational system was still able to promote social efficiency and happiness and secure the preservation and spread of national culture; it-enabled society to absorb and assimilate a number of foreign tribes whom it could not drive out by military force. Towards the end of this period the higher education of the cultured classes received a great impetus and encouragement.

On account of the liberal support which these Institutions received from the state and society, they “were able to impart free education. Several colleges for higher education became famous centers of education, which in the course of time began to attract students from abroad as well. The training in practical sciences like sculpture and  architecture, medicine and metallurgy was still very efficient.

THE AGE OF THE PURANAS AND NIBANDHAS ( 500 A. D. 1200 A. D)

India continued to enjoy the reputation of an international centre of education during this period also. Tibetan and Chinese students continued to flock in her eastern Universities, Her doctors used to be summoned in Western Asia for curing royal patients and organising state hospitals. Education had not become mere book learning; Indian teachers receive admiration of foreign students by their remarkable powers of explanation and exposition. Graduates of this period were remarkable for their logical acumen and mastery.

Facilities for free higher education continued to be ample ; if with the decline of Buddhism the number of monastic colleges decreased, the loss was more than compensated by the rise of numerous temple colleges.  Brahmacharya discipline no doubt became nominal owing to early marriages ; even married students, however,’ showed commendable per severance in pursuing protracted courses of studies. Poor students continued to maintain themselves by begging. Society’s earnestness for education was  remarkable.

The Vedic studies fell into background during this period. The number of the Vedic scholars, devoting themselves to the task of interpreting and expounding Vedic hymns, dwindled down very considerably during this period. Only a small number of Brahmanas  were available to preserve and transmit the Vedic literature to the generations yet to come.. Though thus higher education continued to prosper, the education of the masses suffered during this period. Upanayana now completely disappeared from Kshatriyas_and Vaishya castes gave a serious blow to their cultural and literary education, reduced the percentage of literacy among them and made their education very narrow. Useful arts and professions began to be regarded as plebeian and were boycotted by the higher sections of Brahmanas ; as the services of the best intellect in society were no longer available for the development of arts and crafts, they ceased to make any progress worth the’ name. Growing orthodoxy of the age disapproved of dissection and condemned the pursuit of agriculture on the ground that it involved killing of insects at the time of ploughing. Medical education in the course of time became less efficient; surgery went out of vogue and agriculture became a neglected profession.

The marriageable age of girls was further lowered during this period; girls were ordinarily married at the age of 10 or 11. This naturally gave a death blow to the female education. A few ladies no doubt appear as poetesses during this period; they were however exceptions rather than the rule. Education could not reach the masses as the medium of higher instruction was Sanskrit, which was no longer the spoken tongue. No serious or concerted effort was made to develop literature in vernaculars in order to facilitate the infiltration of knowledge to the masses. The preservation of ancient literature and culture was the main concern of the education system. The creative vein in the Hindu intelligence could still be seen in the realm of poetic, and to a less extent, in those of philosophy, literature and astronomy. The situation deteriorated further by the growing self-conceitedness of the scholars of the age and their refusal to benefit by the knowledge and experience of outsiders. They had no longer a free, open and inquiring mind ; they would refuse to accept what was not in consonance with the views “of sacred scriptures. This stood in the way of progress in sciences like astronomy and medicine, history and geography.

BUDDHISM AND ANCIENT INDIAN EDUCATION

In ancient India in 600 B.C. and a new doctrine or system developed which is called Buddhist doctrine or Buddhist philosophy. It is to be said that on the foundation of Buddhism a new and special Education System originated in ancient India. Buddhism made a tremendous movement which played a valuable role in the development of Education System in ancient India or ancient Buddhist world. It is well-known that with the rise of Buddhism in India there dawned the golden age of India’s culture and civilisation. There was progress in all aspects of Indian civilisation under the impact of Buddhism. As far as the general educational theory or practice was concerned there was no difference between Hindus and Buddhists . its educational system did not present any important points of difference from those of Hinduism. Both systems had similar ideals and followed similar methods. Buddhism believes that the world is full of sorrow and that the salvation can be obtained only by renouncing it.In the beginning  it concerned itself only with the education of novices and monks. However in the course of time it took up the education of the laity also.

Two ceremonies were laid down for those who desired to enter the Order, the Pabbajja and the Upsampada.The Pabbajja(Like (Upanayana. it has been compared to a spiritual birth)  marked the beginning of the noviciate period and could be given when a person was not less than eight years old. The permission of the guardian was necessary.

The Upsampada was given after the end of the noviciate period, and the recipient had to be not less than twenty years old. If he was a debtor, an invalid or a government servant, he was refused admission. The ordination could take place only with the consent of the whole chapter. There were no caste restrictions for admission. The novice had to affirm his faith in the Buddha, his Dharhma (gospel) and Samgha (the Order), and select a learned person as his preceptor. He was to follow strictly the rules and discipline of the Order ;if he was guilty of any serious breach of discipline, he could be expelled by a meeting of the chapter. He was to do all manual and menial work connected with the monastic life, e. g. cleansing its floor and utensils, bringing water, supervising its stores, etc. Like the Hindu Brahmachari (student), he was expected to beg his daily food ; but he was permitted to accept invitations for meals from laymen.

Buddhist teachers led a very simple life and cost next to nothing to society. They were lifelong students of their different subjects ; for marriage did not intervene to put an end to or an obstacle in their studies. The needs of the teacher were minimum ; the famous teachers at Nalanda used to receive an allowance only three times larger than the amount given to an ordinary student. The teacher was to teach the student the rules of etiquette and discipline, draw his attention to the vow of chastity, poverty and abstinence from pleasures and help him in his intellectual and spiritual progress by suitable discourses and lessons in the morning and afternoon. He was also to help him in getting food and robes, and even to nurse him if he was sick. His own life was to be exemplary and the novice was permitted to act as a check on him if he was wavering in his faith or about to commit a breach of monastic discipline.

The Relation between the Novice and his Teacher were filial in character ; they were united together by mutual reverence, confidence and affection. Like the Hindu Brahmacharin, the Buddhist novice was to help his teacher by doing a variety of manual work for him ; he was to carry his seat and robes, supply him water and tooth stick, cleanse his begging bowl and utensils and accompany him as an attendant when he proceeded to the town or village for begging or preaching.

The Education of the Laity in the beginning Buddhist education was purely monastic and was intended only for those who entered, or intended to enter, the Order. Buddhism held that the worldly life was full of sorrow and that the salvation could be possible only by renouncing it. It could therefore naturally evince no interest in the education of those who intended to follow secular life and pursuits. In the course of time however it was realized that it was necessary to win public sympathy and support for the spread of the gospel ; this could be more successfully done if the Buddhist monk could help the cause of education. It was also realized that the best way to spread the gospel was to undertake the education of the rising generation. This calculated to enable the Order to mold and influence the minds of the younger section of the society.

This provide a better chance of both recruiting proper types of persons for the Order and of getting a larger number of lay sympathizers, if the educational effort was not confined to novices but was also extended to the whole community. Buddhism therefore threw itself heart and soul into the cause of the general education of the whole community.

Education was imparted by individual teachers in ancient India on their own private initiative and responsibility. The rise of organised public educational institutions may be justly attributed to the influence of Buddhism. Buddhist monasteries already existed as corporate bodies : when they developed into educational centres, they naturally became corporate educational institutions. Temple colleges of Hinduism probably owed their inspiration to the monastic colleges of Buddhism. In the heyday of Buddhism India was studded with monasteries, and about 10 per cent of them at least used to impart higher education. Some of these monastic like those of Nalanda, Valabhi and Vikramasila became international centres of learning and spread the fame of Indian education in Central and Eastern Asia. Nalanda used to give not only free tuition but also free food and clothing, certainly to monks and probably to lay students also. Buddhist monasteries were either independent and self-sufficient townships or situated on the outskirts of towns and villages. They therefore enjoyed the advantage of a quiet atmosphere.

Buddhists, monastic colleges were neither sectarian in their outlook nor purely theological in their courses. Buddhist philosophy played an significant part in their scheme of education, but adequate attention was also given to the study of the religion and philosophy of the different sects in Hinduism and Jainism. Education was not confined only to theology, philosophy and logic. Sanskrit literature, astronomy-cum-astrology, medicine and works on law, polity and administration were also taught for the benefit of lay students in order to enable them to get government service or follow useful and learned professions in society.  Books being fragile and costly,students were naturally encouraged to commit important texts to memory ; this stood them in good stead in debates and controversies. But Buddhist education  cannot be delimited to mere cramming of texts.

Reasoning and analysis formed an important part in the method of teaching ; what critical foreign students like Yuan Chwang and I-tsing admired in their Indian teachers was not their keen memory, which stored numberless texts, but their remarkable powers of explanation and exposition. Individual attention was paid to students.

Female Education : Buddhist At the time when Buddhist monasteries had developed into colleges of international reputation, women were not receiving any advantages of the education imparted in them. Their marriages were at that time taking place very early. In the early history of Buddhism however, the permission given to women to enter the Order gave a fairly good impetus to the cause of female education, especially in aristocratic and commercial sections of society. A large number of ladies from these circles joined the Order and became life-long students of religion and philosophy. Their example must have given an indirect encouragement to the spread of education among lay women as well.

In primary education reading, writing and arithmetic were taught and in higher education religion philosophy Ayurveda, military training was included. Everyone was free to choose his subject without any restriction.

At the initial stage medium of education was mother tongue, later it included Pali and Prakrit and in the following days Sanskrit also included as a medium of instruction. Specially the Mahayana Teachers achieved distinction in practicing Buddhism in Sanskrit. A special Sanskrit Buddhist literature developed. Mention may be made here that at the hands of Nagarjun, Asanga, Basubandhu, Santideva, Aryadeva and Candrakisti Buddhist philosophy and literature made tremendous progress through Sanskrit.

In later period according to the demand of the society and professional education, art, sculpture, architecture, medicine also included in the syllabus. Buddhist Education came out from the religious arena and went out for the benefit of the mankind.

Vocation education was not ignored during the Buddhist system of education. The monks of Vihar were taught spinning, weaving and sewing in order that they meet their clothing requirement. They were taught architecture as well. Education in architecture enabled them to build up new Vihars or repair the old ones. Similarly the householders following Buddhism but living outside Vihar were given training in different type of and also earn their livelihood.

It will thus be seen that Buddhism may well be proud of its contribution to the cause education in ancient In dial Its colleges threw their doors open to all.It raised the international status of India by the efficiency of its higher education, which attracted students from distant countries .The cultural sympathy which the countries in eastern Asia feel for India even today is entirely due to the work of the famous Buddhist colleges of ancient India. If some of the important lost texts can be reconstructed with the help of their Chinese translations, the credit must be given to Buddhist colleges, which enabled Chinese students to get their copies. Buddhist education also helped the development of Hindu logic and philosophy by initiating and encouraging comparative study. In the period of its early history, it championed the cause of education through the mother tongue ; later on it could not resist the charm and influence of Sanskrit and began to impart education through that language.

With the invasion of Muslim conquerors majority of centres of higher learning of the Hindus and Buddhists were destroyed. Temples and educational institutions and libraries were put to destruction and they were replaced by mosques.  Nalanda was burnt to the ground and all its monks were slaughtered. Kanauj and Kashi were looted and plundered.  In spite of such merciless and extensive destruction, Hindu educational institutions remained a living reality. They sustained strength from its inherent vitality and vigour and maintained the Hindu education system. Even during the reigns of terror and turmoil, merciless persecution and wanton destruction, the Hindu culture and scholarship continued to survive,. While the Buddhist system of education was extinguished, the Vedic system of education found patronage in the southern peninsula in places like Hampi, Sringeri and Kanchi. .

 

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V. (P.G) College, Roorkee, India

The ancient Indian education is spread over several centuries and therefore considerable changes taking place in the curricula in the course of millennia. As the curriculum is intimately connected with the achievements, aspirations, and people outlook on life changes and new areas of knowledge are developed, changes become inevitable in the curriculum.

EARLY VEDIC AGE (C. upto 1500 B. C.)

Vedic studies usually began at about the age of nine or ten and Initiation Ceremony known as Upanayana was performed at their commencement .Students were required to master the principles of prosody and encouraged to develop the powers of versification. Those who intended to follow the priestly profession had to study the details of the rituals associated with the hymns they had committed to memory. Besides the sacred hymns, there were also some historical poems, ballads and hero-songs  in existence, which were also committed to memory by the young scholars, of the day, as they often helped the elucidation of many references contained in the Vedic hymns. The Vedic literature naturally formed the main topic of study in this period The study of elementary geometry, the knowledge of which was necessary for the proper construction of sacrificial altars, was also included in the Vedic course. A knowledge of astronomy,, which had enabled the age to find out the difference between the lunar and solar months, was also imparted. Grammar and etymology did not trouble the students of this age because they were yet to be developed.

The Method of Study :

Vedic hymns were studied in this period as specimens of literature to be understood, appreciated, imitated and even excelled. New hymns were being composed .It is interesting to note that some of the poems of the later poets were selected for inclusion in the Vedic collection when it was made in a subsequent age. As new hymns were being composed by contemporary authors, they were not yet regarded as revealed. It was therefore not at all felt necessary that they should be committed to memory so meticulously. Professional priests must of course have committed the hymns very thoroughly to memory in order to ensure facility in their use during the performance of the different rituals. More effort was made to understand the meaning of the hymns than to remember their exact wording. But the mass of people consisting of the warriors, agriculturists and artisans used to learn by heart only some select Vedic hymns, and these too in the same way in which the songs of medieval saints are memorized by the Hindu masses today.

LATER VEDIC AGE (C. 1500 to 1000 B. C.)

A large number of the Vedic hymns was classified in this period and as a result, the Rigveda, the Yajurveda, the Samaveda and the Atharvaveda came into existence. This led to specialisation in Vedic studies and facilitated the growth of a new type of literature, known as Brahmana literature. Sacrificial rituals became very complex and complicated in this period and the professional priests had to devote several years in mastering their details and intricacies. The study of astronomy, geometry and prosody continued to progress in this period. The development of the sciences of grammar and etymology started in this age and manuals on these subjects were included in the curriculum.

The Method of Study:

Learned discussions were a normal and important feature of the student life and young scholars were very anxious to come out successful in them.   Scholars of this period began to insist that Vedic hymns should be carefully committed to memory in their precise traditional intonation and accents. The Vedic hymns were being gradually differentiated from the Vedic language and it was felt that the sacred literature should be preserved in its pristine form and purity, and should not be allowed to change with the spoken idiom.

Students were not at liberty to change a difficult archaic word for a simple current one. The differentiation of the spoken dialect from the Vedic language raised new problems of interpretation and the age sought to solve them by preparing a list of difficult Vedic words and expressions, which were carefully expounded to students. Vedic students were expected not only to memorizethe Vedic hymns, but also to explain their meaning.

THE AGE OF THE UPANISHADS AND THE SUTRAS (First millennium B. C.)

The Vedic literature began to be universally regarded as revealed in this period and that honour was gradually extended to the Brahmanas and the Upanishads also.( The prose literature devoted to the task of explaining the rituals, legends and knotty points about the sacrifices enjoined in the Vedic hymns was known by this name. It should not be mistaken with the members of the Brahmanan caste.). Vedic schools had to perform the onerous task of preserving this great and growing literature. The art of writing was known by this time, but its aid was not taken for this purpose, as it was believed that it would be irreligious to do so. It was believed that the slightest mistake in the recitation of the Vedic hymns would not only prevent the realisation of the expected reward, but would also bring about a disaster on the student who recites  , gained ground in this period and necessitated the devotion of a large part of the energy .Extraordinary precautions were taken to prevent the corruption of the Vedic text by devising the pada-patha, krama-patha, jaat-patha and ghana-patha, and all these had to be committed to memory by those who desired to be regarded as experts in the Vedic lore. This further increased the burden on the memory. As centuries rolled on, it became more and more difficult for the Vedic expert to memorize this extensive and growing literature and also to understand its meaning ; for the spoken dialect was becoming more and more differentiated from the Vedic language. It was therefore decided towards the end of this period that some Vedic scholars should devote their energies to the mechanical memorizing of this extensive literature with a view to prevent its loss, while others should address themselves to the problem of its interpretation by studying commentaries, etymology, lexicography, etc.

The current language had now become very widely differentiated from the Vedic idiom and thus created a new difficulty in the Vedic studies. As a combined effect of all these factors, Vedic studies fell into background towards the end of this period and greater attention began to be paid to the cultivation of the new branches of learning.

The period was the most creative era in the history of the Indian intellect; it recorded remarkable achievements in the realm of philosophy, sacred law, epic literature, philology, grammar, astronomy and several fine and useful arts like sculpture, medicine and shipbuilding. On the one hand the development of these branches naturally created a new fascination for the students of the age, and on the other, the rise of the protestant movements led by the Upanishadic, Jain and Buddhist thinkers told on the popularity of the Vedic religion and literature.

Graduates of this age are usually described as well versed in the Vedas as well as in practical arts and sciences. Several references in the contemporary literature indicate that an attempt was made in this period to combine liberal with professional or useful education. These  included archery, military art, medicine, magic, snake charming, conveyance, administrative training, music, dancing, painting, engineering, etc. It is of course clear that no graduate could get mastery in all the Vedas. It is however clear from some references in Jatakas that literary education was combined with one of the useful professions referred to above in the famous centres of education like Taxila.

THE AGE OF THE SMRITIS, PURANAS AND NIBANDHAS. (1st century A. D. to c. 1200 A. D.)

The Vedic studies fell into background during this period. The number of the Vedic scholars, devoting themselves to the task of interpreting and expounding Vedic hymns, dwindled down very considerably during this period. Only a small number of Brahmanas  were available to preserve and transmit the Vedic literature to the generations yet to come. They used to do their work very thoroughly, for the experts among them would memorise not only the Vedic hymns, but also their pada-patha, krama-patha, and jaat-patha . Some of them used to study two, three or even four Vedas and were therefore known as Dvivedins, Trivedins, and Chaturvedins respectively. Vedic studies therefore usually meant the mere cramming of the sacred texts and were often commented upon very adversely by some thinkers of the age, some of whom went to the extent of declaring that the intellect is deadened and rendered useless by the parrot-like cramming of the Vedic hymns. Kings of this age were more disposed to extend their patronage to poets, who could compliment them by composing neat poems in their honour,  than to Vedic Brahmanas, who could recite hymns, which neither they themselves nor their hearers could understand. New branches of learning like philosophy and belles letters also appealed more powerfully to the intellect and emotions of the rising generation. In spite of these adverse and discouraging factors Vaidika Brahmanas continued to address themselves to the almost thankless task of memorising the vast Vedic literature, which could not have been preserved but for their devotion to duty. They used to master the details connected with the numerous Vedic sacrifices also.

The period of Specialisation:

As the help of paper, printing and cheap books was not available for the preservation and propagation of knowledge, the age naturally emphasised on specialisation, which gave a great impetus to the development of the different branches of knowledge.

The present age made its own contribution to the march of knowledge by further developing astronomy, astrology, poetics, classical Sanskrit literature, Dharma Sastra (sacred and secular law), logic, and the different systems of orthodox and heterodox philosophy.

The revival of Sanskrit:

During the earlier centuries of this period, upto  300 A. D., some kings like the Satavahanas, the Ikshwakus and the Pallavas had championed the cause of Prakrit and directed that vernaculars alone should be used even in their official and public documents. But later on Sanskrit became so irresistible that some kings like the Guptas went to the extent of ordering the use of that language even in their harems . Prakrits ceased to be used for public documents and even the Buddhists and the Jains disregarded the advice of the founders of their religions and began to compose works in Sanskrit. All the attention of the educated classes was devoted to the cultivation of Sanskrit. This led to the neglect of vernaculars through which alone the masses could be approached, resulting the confinement of education only to higher classes.

The study of the different branches of knowledge that were flourishing in this age was preceded by a preliminary course in Sanskrit. After the Upanayana ceremony at about the the age of 8, all students used to memorise a few important Vedic hymns necessary for their daily or ceremonial needs. Then they used to devote four or five years to the study of elementary Sanskrit grammar and literature. At about the age of 13 or 14, the student used to be able to understand Sanskrit works on subjects like logic, philosophy, poetic, astronomy and mathematics. He then used to select one of these subjects for specialization and devote about ten years to its study.

Importance to Grammar and Astrology:

The students of this subject were naturally required first to complete their course in grammar and kosha (vocabulary) and then enjoined a study of some famous authors like Kalidasa, Bhartrihari or Bana. Particular attention was paid to prosody and poetics, and students were expected not only to understand the classical authors, but also to compose fairly good poems imitating their style. In order to get a general knowledge of the culture of the race, they were also required to study the epics, the Puranas and traditional stories. They were further trained to be good debaters ; the ability to defend one’s own position in learned assemblies and the capacity to compose a good poem in a very short time were regarded as the most important criteria of good scholarship.

Among the subjects cultivated during this period, the courses of advanced grammar and astronomy-cum-astrology were very popular. Every school for higher education had to engage several grammarians in order to give the necessary instructions in Sanskrit language, which was the key subject. The age believed in astrology and astrologers were in great demand throughout the country for preparing and interpreting almanacs and prognosticating future events. The royal courts also used to engage the services of several astrologers.

There was no prejudice against utilising the art of writing for preserving them.

Almost as popular as the courses in grammar and astrology were the courses in Puranas and Smritis whose hold over the popular mind during this age. Popular Hindu religion had greatly changed its complexion during this period and its theories and practices could be ascertained only from Smritis and Puranas, which therefore had to be mastered even by the village priest. The courses in these subjects prescribed a good mastery of Sanskrit grammar and classical Sanskrit literature and a special study of select Satras, Smritis and Puranas. More emphasis was laid on understanding the meaning of the works concerned than on committing them to memory. Usually the students of Smritis and Puranas took the help of a manuscript when expounding their contents.

This period was reverberating with controversies among the followers of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Within the fold of Hinduism itself, the followers of Sankhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Mimansa and Vedanta were contending for supremacy, resulting an impetus to the study of metaphysics, epistemology and logic. After getting a preliminary grounding in grammar and literature, the students of the subject used to select one of the systems of philosophy for specialisation and master its most advanced and difficult works. The study of philosophy presupposed a study of logic during this period ; students of philosophy used to devote considerable time to the study of logic also. The young graduate in philosophy was expected not only to expound and defend his own system but also to refute those of his opponents. The course therefore included a comparative study of the contending systems of metaphysics. Hindu philosophers like Gaudapada and Sankaracharya and Buddhist scholars like Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu used to master the systems of their opponents as well. In a famous philosophical college situated in a sylvan retreat in the Vindhya mountain presided over by Divakarasena, a Brahmana convert to Buddhism,the students of Hinduism, Buddhism and Svetambara and Digambara Jainism studied together side by side under the same principal.  Such an arrangement presupposes a comparative study of the rival systems leading to the broadening of the outlook and the deepening of the scholarship of the average student of the institution.

The curriculum prescribed for the monk scholar was naturally somewhat different. It did not include any special study of secular sciences like poetics, literature or astrology, but was concerned principally with theological subjects. For ten years after his admission as a novice, the monk-student was under the direct guidance and control of his preceptor, who used to initiate him in the study of Pali and Sanskrit. When these languages were properly mastered, a thorough study of the sacred texts, (the Tripltakas,) was started. Hindu systems of religion, logic and philosophy were then carefully studied in order to meet the Hindu opponent on his own ground. The education of the novice did not terminate with his admission to the Order as a full-fledged monk. For, the Buddhist monk was expected to be a lifelong student like the Hindu Naishthika Brahmacharin.

The selection of text books was usually governed by considerations of merit alone. An author had to submit his work to a synod of scholars at a famous centre of learning like Patallputra or Benares (Panini is reported to have come all the way to Pataliputra from Salatura(situated in  N. W. F. P in India), in order to get his famous grammar approved by the synod at that famous capital, Sankaracharya came to Benares from Malabar in order to seek the imprimatur of the Pandits of that place over his philosophical works.) , and if it was found to be a work of merit by that body, it received its imprimatur, which helped its acceptance and spread in provincial towns. No pecuniary gain was likely to accrue to an author by his book being prescribed in several institutions ; for there was no press and copyright in ancient India. The adoption of a work as a text book in the schools of a province however increased the reputation of its author, and we sometimes come across writers adopting rather questionable means to get their books accepted. Ugrabhuti, the teacher of king Anangapala of the Punjab (c. 1010-1020) is said to have induced his royal pupil to distribute two lakhs of dirham (the local currency of that time ) among the Pandits of Kashmir in order to overcome successfully their reluctance to accept his new work on grammar. Called. Such cases however were probably few. Usually books prescribed in a particular school were those in vogue at the center where the principal and teachers of the school were educated. Hindus, Buddhists and Jains would often prefer works written by authors of their own persuasion in the case of a subject like logic, which was cultivated by all schools.

INSTRUCTIONAL METHODOLOGY

In the beginning the art of writing was unknown, and even when it was invented, it was not utilized for preserving and transmitting the Vedic literature, which for several centuries was the main course of study. It was further held as imperatively necessary that the canonical literature should be memorized in the most meticulous way ; there should be no possibility of the mistake even of a single accent. The service of the art of writing was no doubt utilized for preserving and teaching non-Vedic literature, but owing to the absence of paper and printing, books could be within the reach of the rich only. Being written on biroh leaves, they were fragile as well as costly. The average student could therefore not have his own copy of the text-book ; even the desire to possess one was regarded as a symptom of indolence.  Under such circumstances, extensive use of a library was altogether impracticable, nor could the help of visual instruction through the help of charts and pictures be possible. Oral instruction was the only available method of teaching and it was the cheapest and the most accurate.

Education was for a long time imparted through the oral lesson, without the medium of a book. This method persisted in the Vedic schools even today. The method of teaching was direct and personal and not even a text-book intervened between the teacher and the student.  The teacher used to pronounce only two words of the Vedic stanza at a time, which the student was asked to recite with exact intonation and accent. The number of words was reduced to one, if the expression happened to be a compound one. If the student had any difficulty in the matter, it was explained to him. When a whole verse was thus taught to one student, he was dismissed and the same process was repeated with the next one. Necessarily every student used to receive individual attention under this system.

The above method of teaching was extensively followed in other branches of learning also, no doubt with suitable modifications, when it was deemed necessary that certain texts should be memorized by the student. Small portions of the text were recited and explained by the teacher to the students ; when they had understood them, each one was required to commit them to memory. Books being both costly and fragile, there was no other efficient alternative method of study, if it was desired that students should acquire a mastery in their subjects,. which should stand them in good stead throughout their lives. Learning in ancient times had to be at the tip of the tongue ; a scholar asking for time to consult his notes or books could carry no prestige.

The highest ambition of an author of even the 12th century A. D. was, not that his work may adorn the shelves of the libraries of the learned, but that it may shine as an ornament on their neck.

Recitation and recapitulation formed an important part in the daily routine of the student life. The home-work, which the student did in his spare time, did not consist of written exercises ; it merely amounted to the recitation and recapitulation of lessons learnt already. Every day students were required to spend a part of their time in the school in jointly reciting a portion of the work they had committed to memory. As a result of this training, the memory of the average student in ancient India was very highly developed ; he could perform feats of memorizing which now we may regard as impossible.There were certain interesting aids to memory owing to which, after the practice of ten or fifteen days, the student felt ‘his thoughts rising like a fountain and could commit to memory whatever he had but once heard. ‘This is far from a myth,’ says the Chinese traveler, ‘for I have myself met such men. In an age when books were very rare, it was but meet that great emphasis should have been laid on the development of memory.

Though the memory of the average student was much better trained and developed than is the case now, the authors and educationalists left no stone upturned to lighten its burden. Ancient Indian educationalists had realized that rhyme makes an appeal to aesthetic sensibility and facilitates the task of memorizing. They therefore decided to utilise its help in the teaching, work by composing text books in verse. Even dictionaries and elementary books on grammar were composed in verse. The development of the Sotra style, where conclusions are stated in short and pithy sentences, is also due to the exigencies of the schools and colleges, the students of which had to rely more on their memory than on books and notes for recalling the contents of the works once studied by them.

It is no doubt true that some Sutra works like those on grammar and philosophy, which were committed to memory, are so cryptic as to be mostly unintelligible by themselves. They were written in that style merely to lighten the burden on the student’s memory. Their teaching was accompanied by extensive lectures, some of which used to be later embodied in commentaries.

Since early times, debates and discussions have always played an important part in the literary training of students. The Vedic literature refers to such literary combats and describes how the victors were suitably honoured.

This Vedic tradition continued throughout the later history. Sastrarthas or learned debates were constantly held in colleges where students of literature, poetic, philosophy and logic were called upon to defend their own propositions and attack those of their opponents.The training in debates made students ready-witted and developed their powers of speech.

The teaching of the important works on philosophy, logic and poetic was done through exhaustive discussions.

In these discussions there was an unravelling of the subject matter, distinctions and contra-distinctions were drawn, and an effort was made to show the reasonableness of one’s position and the errors of the opponent. The students of the various schools of orthodox and heterodox systems of religion and philosophy reading under Divakarasena used to listen to the exposition of their respective systems, deliberate on their natures, discuss their features, raise doubts on obscure themes, determine for themselves the main outlines and enter into discussion with the opponents . The same procedure have been followed in other colleges of philosophy. Reasoning and analysis formed the crux of the method of study and teaching.

Indian teachers were past masters in the art of explanation and exposition ; students from distant countries like Korea and China used to brave the dangers of the perilous journey to India, not because they wanted to learn by rote the scriptures of their religion, but because they were anxious to hear the exposition of obscure metaphysical passages which could be heard nowhere else. What Yuan Chwang valued in his Indian’ teachers was not their capacity to recite the sacred texts, but their remarkable ability in explaining obscure passages and offering illuminating suggestions on doubtful points.

The dialogue method was followed by many a philosopher, as would appear from the evidence of the Upanishads and the Buddhist Satras. It enabled the teacher to ascertain the reactions in the student’s mind to his own observations.  The use of parables was often made in expounding obscure principles, as would appear from the plot of the Hitopadesa and the Patichatantra, where principles of politics are taught under the guise of telling stories about animals. The value of comparison and observation was also realized by many teachers who used to develop the power of understanding of dull students by asking them to carefully observe new facts and compare them with those already known.

Many of the commentaries are in the form of a dialogue between the teacher and the student. The earlier part advances a view such as a student may be expected to hold as plausible, the later part contains its correction or refutation, as may be done by a teacher in his lecture. Clever students were not compelled to mark time for their dull companions as under the modern system of education. The educational system ministered to the needs and individual capacity of each student. If a student was intelligent and industrious, he could finish his education much earlier than is possible in modern times. The idle and careless student had not as pleasant a prospect of a merry college life as he has in the present age.

In order to make personal supervision effective, the cooperation and help of advanced students were enlisted in the cause of education. They used to guide the studies of the juniors under the general supervision of their teachers. About the Valabhi college students, This system also obtained at Taxila ; for instance, the Kuru prince Sutasoma, who aquired proficiency earlier, was entrusted with the teaching of his brother prince, the heir apparent of Benares.  Senior students at Taxila were often put in charge of their schools during the temporary absence of their teachers. This method of entrusting teaching work to brilliant students had a great educational value,

It placed a high incentive before the student world. It afforded opportunities to intelligent students to learn the art of teaching, and thus indirectly performed the same function as the Teachers  Training Colleges discharge today. It increased the efficiency and decreased the cost of the school by affording intelligent and free assistance to the teacher.

EXAMINATIONS

Students could not afford to go to the class room without thorough preparation. There was a daily examination of every student and no new lesson was given until the old one was thoroughly mastered. There were no annual examinations and mass promotions at fixed intervals.

New lessons were given to students only when the teacher was satisfied after a searching oral examination that the old one was thoroughly mastered. The end of the education course was not marked by any lengthy and exhaustive examination, but by the pupil reciting and explaining the last lesson. At the end of his education the scholar was presented to the local learned assembly, where occasionally some questions were asked.  This presentation took place when the Samavartana (convocation) ceremony was over.  It is therefore clear that the eligibility of a student for Samavartana or receiving the degree did not depend upon the opinion of the assembly, but upon the opinion of his teacher.

RajaSekhara describes the examinations held in the royal court, and Charaka refers to heated discussions held in learned assemblies to test the relative merits of the contending physicians. Each participant in these literary affrays was anxious to prove, not that he possessed certain minimum qualifications, but that he was the best poet or physician in the land, entitled to precedence, honour and annuities from the royal court. What Charaka or Rajasekhara have in contemplation is not a routine examination, but an intellectual combat among the distinguished physicians and scholars of the age.

Passing examinations and getting degrees, which dominate the present system of education, played hardly any part in ancient India. It was not the allurement of the degrees or the prizes but the thirst of knowledge or the desire to preserve the national heritage which was the main spring of the educational effort and activity.

The absence of annual examinations with prizes and scholarships for the top boys naturally kept the element of competition within proper limits Bright and promising students were however selected as monitors and entrusted with the teaching of lower classes. So they also got their reward.

Students in ancient India had not to pass through the fiery ordeal of examinations; their lot, however, was by no means more enviable than that of the modern students. Armed with his irrevocable degree, the modern graduate can afford to forget all that he had learnt, and no one can question his competence. The scholar in ancient India could not take shelter behind the buttress of a degree. He had to keep his scholarship fresh and up-to-date, ior he was liable to be challenged at any moment for a literary affray (Sastrartha), and society used to judge his merit by the way in which he acquitted himself in such discussions. All that he had learnt, he had to keep ready at the tip of his tongue; he could neither point to his diploma nor ask for time to refer to his note-books.

It will be seen from the above discussion that the method of teaching followed in ancient India was on the whole the best suited for an age, which did not enjoy the advantages of paper and printing. It developed the powers of memory, a faculty which is being sadly neglected in modern times. It did not however encourage cramming, because the texts that were memorised were well understood by students. Reflection and analysis was also encouraged especially in the case of those students who had taken logic, philosophy, poetics or

literature. Lucid exposition was a forte of Indian teachers, for which they were well known all over Asia during the first millennium of the Christian era.