21. How Hindu Schooling Came To America (II): The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

How Hindu Schooling Came To America (II) 

Andrew Bell, the gentleman in question, used to be described in old editions of the 
Britannica as "cold, shrewd, self-seeking." He might not have been the most pious cleric. 
Perhaps like his contemporary, Parson Malthus, he didn't really believe in God at all, but 
as a young man following the flag he had an eye out for the main chance. Bell found his 
opportunity when he studied the structure Hindus arranged for training the lower castes, 
about 95 percent of the Indian population. It might well serve a Britain which had driven 
its peasantry into ruin in order to create an industrial proletariat for coal-driven industry. 

Bell was fascinated by the purposeful nature of Hindu schooling. It seemed eminently 
compatible with the goals of the English state church. So as many another ambitious 
young man has done throughout history when he stumbles upon a little-known novelty, 
he swiped it. Before we turn to details of the Hindu method, and how Bell himself was 
upstaged by an ambitious young Quaker who beat him into the school market with a 
working version of Bell's idea, you should understand a little about Hindu religion. 

After the British military conquest of India (in reality a merchant conquest) nothing 
excited the popular mind and the well-bred mind alike more than Hindu religion with its 
weird (to Western eyes) idols and rituals. Close analysis of Sanskrit literature seemed to 
prove that some kind of biological and social link had existed between the all-conquering 
Aryans, from whom the Hindus had descended, and Anglo-Saxons, which might explain 
theological similarities between Hinduism and Anglicanism. The possibilities suggested 
by this connection eventually provided a powerful psychic stimulus for creation of class- 
based schooling in the United States. Of course such a development then lay far in the 
future. 

The caste system of Hinduism or Brahminism is the Anglican class system pushed to its 
imaginative limits. A five-category ranking (each category further subdivided) apportions 
people into a system similar to that found in modern schools. Prestige and authority are 
reserved for the three highest castes, although they only comprise 5 percent of the total; 
inescapable servility is assigned the lowest caste, a pariah group outside serious 
consideration. In the Hindu system one may fall into a lower caste, but one cannot rise. 

When the British began to administer India, Hindus represented 70 percent of a 
population well over a hundred million. Contrast this with an America of perhaps three 
million. In the northern region, British hero Robert Clive was president of Bengal where 
people were conspicuously lighter-skinned than the other major Indian group, having 
features not unlike those of the British. 

Hindu castes looked like this: 



The upper 5 percent was divided into three "twice-born" groups. 

1 . Brahmins — Priests and those trained for law, medicine, teaching, and other 
professional occupations. 

2. The warrior and administrative caste. 

3. The industrial caste, which would include land cultivators and mercantile groups. 

The lower 95 percent was divided into: 

1. The menial caste. 

2. Pariahs, called "untouchables." 

The entire purpose of Hindu schooling was to preserve the caste system. Only the lucky 5 
percent received an education which gave perspective on the whole, a key to 
understanding. In actual practice, warriors, administrators, and most of the other leaders 
were given much diluted insight into the driving engines of the culture, so that policy 
could be kept in the hands of Brahmins. But what of the others, the "masses" as Western 
socialist tradition would come to call them in an echoing tribute to the Hindu class idea? 
The answer to that vital question launched factory schooling in the West. 

Which brings us back to Andrew Bell. Bell noticed that in some places Hinduism had 
created a mass schooling institution for children of the ordinary, one inculcating a 
curriculum of self-abnegation and willing servility. In these places hundreds of children 
were gathered in a single gigantic room, divided into phalanxes often under the direction 
of student leaders with the whole ensemble directed by a Brahmin. In the Roman manner, 
paid pedagogues drilled underlings in the memorization and imitation of desired attitudes 
and these underlings drilled the rest. Here was a social technology made in heaven for the 
factories and mines of Britain, still uncomfortably saturated in older yeoman legends of 
liberty and dignity, one not yet possessing the perfect proletarian attitudes mass 
production must have for maximum efficiency. Nobody in the early years of British rule 
had made a connection between this Hindu practice and the pressing requirements of an 
industrial future. Nobody, that is, until a thirty-four- year-old Scotsman arrived in India as 
military chaplain. 

How Hindu Schooling Came To America (III)