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)
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